Over the last few days, I’ve had a lot of time to think. Between talking with recruiters, networking, and doing freelance work, I’ve still found a big chunk of time where I’ve been alone with my thoughts. And when that happens, I tend to get ideas for blog posts. This one came to me while driving, so I had to write down my thoughts on the back of an envelope which still sits in my passenger seat.
While trying to figure out my next move, I’ve been asked the following obvious, yet terrifying question many times: “What do you want to do?” It’s usually followed by “Either way, you still want to stay in social media, right?” And of course my answer leads me to an unstructured, yet passionate diatribe about social media marketing and what that actually means. This post is my attempt to explain my answer in written form. You’ll have to just imagine me flailing my hands wildly to try to convey my enthusiasm.
When it comes to the role of marketing at any company, there are four words that pop into my head:
- Goals
- Strategies
- Tools
- Execution
These are, in order, the four things needed to accomplish anything in marketing, whether you’re a startup, a chimney sweep, a presidential candidate, or a shower curtain hook salesman.
Goals
We begin here, as without goals, what’s the point? If you don’t know what you’re trying to do, you certainly can’t come up with a strategy to accomplish it, you can’t decide on the right tools to do it, and you can’t put it all together to execute. It’s just not going to happen.
So, what are you trying to do? Are you interested in selling 1000 units? Are you trying to bring your userbase from 10 to 10,000? Are you trying to position your firm as an expert in wild badger capture and removal in the Northwestern Maine market? Good. Write it down. That’s your goal. You’ve completed step one. You’re on your way, sports fan.
Strategies
Now you’ve got your goals and you’re ready to get moving. It’s time to come up with a strategy. You’ve determined that you need to increase your user base (or any of the other examples above). So how are you going to do that?
Let’s put a strategy together. Going with the user acquisition example, let’s ask some questions:
- Why don’t we have the number of users we want right now?
- Is it because people don’t know about us?
- Is our offering compelling enough?
- Are we doing a good job at describing our benefit?
- Have we done a good job at cultivating passionate users?
- What are we lousy at?
- Have we asked our current users about our pain points?
- Have we implemented sufficient feedback mechanisms to address what our current users have said about us?
Once you’ve addressed those and about three dozen other questions, it’s time to devise a strategy to both address what you haven’t done and take advantage of opportunites you haven’t tried yet.
Again, running with the “we don’t have enough users” theme, let’s say we’ve decided that we don’t have enough users because no one knows we exist. So our strategy is this:
We’re going to do an awareness and promotion campaign to let the world know we’ve got a great service. We’re going to leverage our current user base and we’re also going to reach out to people that write about services similar to ours to let them know we’re out here. We’ll be clear and specific, and we’re not going to overburden them with marketing buzzwords. The goal of this campaign is to increase traffic to our sign in page, increase conversion, and finally turn casual users into active members.
Tools
Would you look at that? You’ve got a strategy (btw, I’m greatly simplifying the process here, as it is a blog post. this post is getting long even for me). Great. Now it’s time to see what tools are out there that will help you satisfy the objective.
To me, this is where social media comes in. Because when you really think about it, the collective “social media” is really just a series of communications tools that- when used properly – can help you engage with the people you need to reach to satisfy your goal.
So, in the above example, is facebook a good idea? Maybe. Twitter? Could be. StumbleUpon, diigo, digg, reddit, Zemanta, wikis, friendfeed, flickr, vimeo, YouTube…..? Whoa, killer. I’m not a frog, you’re not a bunny rabbit. Let’s not jump ahead.
Look at all of the tools available, and evaluate them to see if they’re right for what you’re trying to do. There is nothing more sad and drepressing than a blog that hasn’t been updated since the first post. Figure out what you’re willing to do, what fits your strategy, and what just doesn’t feel right. Then…..
Execution
Armed with your goals, strategies and tools, get out there and do it. Find out what works. Find out where your audience is, and talk to people. Look at what produces results and figure out how to make the most of it. Figure out what is a terrible idea and learn from it.
And one thing I should absolutely mention is this: measure everything. Become a google analytics addict. Use something like NuConomy or a paid service like omniture to supplement your top level analysis of how the campaign is going. Figure out who’s talking about you using things like Google Alerts and Twitter Search. Get all the information you possibly can, and dive into the data to find out why people come to your site, where they bail, what pages succeed and where your gut is wrong. Numbers don’t lie. Get in there and get under the hood.
So, that’s my 15 minute diatribe that serves as this week’s glaring oversimplification of marketing using social media tools. Hope you have a great weekend, and if you’re a company looking to use this advice, let me know. I may just know a guy that has recently been dropped on the job market.
