Successful social media marketing resembles a marathon more than a sprint. Winning a marathon requires different tactics than sprints. Marathons don’t require a quick start; they do require strategic preparation, pacing, perseverance and ongoing-assessment of your position throughout the race.

Photo credit: Marathon Rotterdam 1

Here are tips from experts on winning the social media marketing marathon.

Develop Business Goals:  The strategies and tactics you develop and implement for social media marketing will depend on the goals you establish.  Know well exactly what your organization wants to achieve before you launch, re-launch or reposition your social media campaign. The goals should be BUSINESS goals, not social media goals. There may be multiple goals: providing more timely customer service; creating more and better qualified sales leads; building organization or brand reputation; teaching customer how to use a product; educating consumers; creating greater customer loyalty. By setting priorities for those goals, you’ll be better able to develop effective strategies and tactics. Most experts recommend setting numerical goals: increase sales leads by 15% within 6 months or increase website traffic by 5% per month. Such specific goals are best reserved for more mature social media campaigns. Goals for inaugural social media marketing programs can be more general.

Create Audience Profiles:  The goals will almost certainly identify your audiences. Targeted audiences could include current customers; prospects; consumers; influencers in your business niche; employees; financial analysts; or others. Targeted profiles (sometimes called “personas”) of each audience will help you make better decisions about strategies, tactics and subject matter of content.

Pick Your Preferred Social Media Platforms:  Audiences differ on each of the major social media platforms. Putting your resources into a social media platform doesn’t make sense if your target audience isn’t already there. While Facebook’s 300 million users may be enticing, other social networks may be more appropriate – especially for B2B businesses.  Investigate if there are any smaller social media networks that cater to niche audiences you want to target. Also consider how the type of information you want to disseminate suits the particular network. For instance, some networks such as Pinterest and Instagram are oriented to graphics and photos. Some networks such as YouTube make it easy to distribute videos. By studying the audiences of each platform, you’ll be able to determine your preferred or primary platform. The preferred platform may differ for the different goals and audiences you are targeting.

Develop Strategies & Tactics:  Goals and audiences determine specific strategies and tactics. Effective social media methods are now well-established for most every business goal — but the tactics do differ for the different business goals. Social media customer service requires a different set of resources and interactions than a social media program to develop sales leads. Online searches on the keywords describing your goal will produce a plethora of articles on effective techniques. Searching “social media customer service” produces articles that describe effective online methods and examples.  In this process, it’s also helpful to research the social media activities of competitors – and determine how you can distinguish your social media efforts from theirs. Mirroring competitors is a valid social media tactic – but doing social media better is, well, better. Goals, audiences, strategies and tactics should be documented in a written social media marketing plan. After it’s approved, consult it regularly.

Assemble Resources:  An effective social media program requires investment of time and money.  Though it may be possible to launch a low-key social media program with current staff and a small capital investment, running the social media marathon usually requires additional staff and budget. Examples:  social media customer service requires more attention than most companies can provide with current staff; creating a blog to attract traffic to your website requires on-going creation of original content by staff writers or freelancers.

Commence Social Media Implementation: It’s usually best not to sprint out of the blocks, but to establish a comfortable early pace that puts you in good position as you run the social media marathon.  Usually it’s best to focus first on only one goal – and getting that right. Start with social media activities that your research has shown are most effective to achieve your primary goal. Stay with your original strategy and tactic for at least a month, preferably a few months, maintaining a steady tempo of activity or picking up the pace gradually.

Promote Your Social Media Content: Creating and disseminating your social media content only gets you to the midpoint of the social media marathon.  Even an amazing piece of content won’t succeed if it isn’t shared and promoted effectively.  Using proven methods to boost content distribution is just as important as content creation.  Content promotion requires almost as much time and resources as content creation.  Budget for it.

Assess the Situation:  On-going social media assessment helps assure social media success. Measurement of reach, engagement and actions provides feedback on early success and, just as importantly, helps guide decisions on tactics for the next phase of the race. While measurement experts deride “vanity metrics,” it’s worthwhile to keep track of the number of followers you have acquired in your initial efforts and the level of their engagement including likes, comments, retweets and other metrics.  Those numbers indicate if you are gaining traction in social media. Later, the analytics will tell you if your popularity is increasing or decreasing.  As in any race, it’s also advisable to watch your competitors so that you can evaluate your position, pacing and tactics. The Social Media Measurement Handbook provides in-depth insights into analytics for social media.

Assess Effect on Company Revenues: The “vanity metrics” tell little to nothing about the effect of your social media activities on your business. To determine business impact, you need to use metrics that align with your goals. Each business goal should have its own distinct metric or set of measurements.  Impact on revenue and reduction in expenses are undoubtedly the two best justifications for continued investment in social media. Establishing the link between social media activities and revenue/cost savings is not as difficult as it may seem. Attributing sales leads to social media is fairly simple if your social media content uses unique URL links to sign-up pages and contact forms.  The call center can also ask “where did you hear about us?” If your goal is to increase website traffic or to increase the number of form completions on your website, Google Analytics or your webmaster will give you the answers you need. Each social media platform has its own analytics program that provides data on users who visited your page and other metrics.

Measurement can be time-consuming and it reduces the staff time available to create and implement social media activities. Instead of using multiple analytics reports from individual social networks, you might want to consider using one of the fully-integrated social media measurement services with more sophisticated data and analysis. The media measurement services are available for reasonable monthly fees from a number of providers including Glean.info (which offers a 14-day free trial).

Expand Social Media Activities:  Initially, stick with the plan. Change strategies and tactics with caution. Ramp up activities only after the organization has reviewed key analytics and gained confidence that the social launch or repositioning is accomplishing its purpose. Then it’s time to implement the next steps in the strategic and tactical social media plan – and maybe request additional budget and staff.

Rinse and Repeat:  At regular intervals (quarterly?) throughout the race, reevaluate and modify virtually all elements of the social media campaign(s) – goals, platforms, strategies, tactics, content, and measurement methodologies. Add social media platforms and activities as appropriate. Document the changes and work off the revised plan for the next segment of the race.

Doing rigorous preparation and adopting a systematic approach to implementing and updating a social media marketing program almost always produces greater success.

Bottom Line:  Developing and implementing a successful social media campaign requires the preparation and perseverance of a marathoner. Success requires focused business (not social media) goals, thoughtful selection of social media platforms based on audience demographics, a strategic and tactical plan for social media activities and their promotion, and measurement of success with well-chosen metrics.     

Other Articles

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing
Entrepreneur

9 Step Social Media Audit for Improving LinkedIn Business Page Results
Toprankblog

The Social-Media Measurement Marathon
Exhibitor

Social Media Marketing: Marathon vs. Sprint
Yoursocialorder

Glean.info grants permission to republish this article provided that the republished version contains a link to the original article on the Glean.info Blog.

William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.