Monday, July 19, 2010

Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan

Image by juhansonin

Business planning is perhaps that single most important action you can take in improving the chances of success in a new venture. The same goes for social media marketing--creating a well researched and carefully thought out plan will lay the foundational cornerstone you can use to build a winning social media campaign. 

A social media marketing plan consists of (1) listening to the social Web to identify your target markets and a baseline of your current Web presence, (2) establishing definitive and measurable goals, (3) designing innovative strategies to achieve these milestones, (4) selecting the appropriate social media to effectively reach your target markets, (5) crafting compelling content to attract and influencing your audiences, (6) making sure your products or services live up to their promise, (7) monitoring and measure your progress on a regular basis, and (8) reevaluating and adjusting your SMM plan to account for the ever changing nature of consumer tastes and the social Web.

The following resources explain how to put these steps into action:
Overview of social media marketing planning:

4 comments:

  1. I agree, in this day and age creating a social media marketing plan is the single most important action you can take to improve chances of success in a new business venture. I also believe it can elevate an already succesfull business if incorporated correctly!

    For example, I have a friend that is running a very successfull dental supply company. His sales are phone, catalog and internet based. currently his advertising is via mail but how often do we look at mail and throw it away. We are often on the internet and with his customers placing orders on line, how easy would it be if he put a link on the site to promote specials and new items? His customers are already online!

    Anthony Pfau

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  2. This article was incredibly useful in my new venture as a media and outreach assistant for the Pickford Film Center. This provided clear and easy steps to get started on what I think will be a highly effective and lucrative social media marketing strategy. The link concerning how to listen to the social web was very enlightening. Figuring out where potential customers are on-line is the foundation of creating an effective marketing plan. The use of Facebook and Twitter for instance only work if there are people using those sites and reading the content. Establishing realistic goals and then evaluating these goals regularly is utterly necessary and will show where to pay more attention and where to pull back some efforts. Additionally the 35 ways to market content in social media had some great ideas an tips that I plan to implement very soon. The idea of before and after video and pictures is great since we are in the process of constructing and moving into a new space with two screens and a lot more seating, as well as a lounge and larger concession area. I can post all kinds of updates and get volunteers more involved if I have a more clear way of showing our progress and what still needs to be done. Another great tip was to ask questions of your target audience. This is a great way of gathering valuable market research and get the real opinions and thoughts of the people that will actually be patronizing the cinema.
    Thank you
    Kelly Davis

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  3. Anthony and Kelly - Thanks so much for the input!

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  4. At least someone is writing clever words... The internet is full of new "experts" on social media marketing, and great tools in other posts too! Thank you!
    socialmediazing

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