How to write a social media plan

Yes, there's a plan for everything! If you create a marketing plan it's likely that you'll include a section on Internet marketing anyway, but social media as an area of internet marketing is big enough to warrant its own strategy.

We're defining "social media" here as online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, social bookmarking websites such as Delicious and Technorati, YouTube and other video sharing networks, picture sharing sites such as Flickr, also blogs and podcasts.

One of the reasons for writing a social media plan is that it's so easy to start using these media, because they're quick to set up and before you know it you've lost momentum or direction. Social media is like any other marketing, a set of marketing tools to help you achieve your objectives but there's a lot of choice so a strategy is advisable. This becomes critical when more than one of your team is using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to promote your brand.

A social media plan will also enable you to establish how you will measure the effectiveness of your social marketing activity. Measuring social networking is quite possible but using different sets of criteria to traditional marketing, such as "engagement".

Here are our tips on how to put together a social media plan (our version, so please feel free to add your thoughts and experiences by commenting):

1. Where you are now, a brief analysis of what you're already doing (if anything) with social media, and successes/failures using stats if you have them. This not only helps to set the scene for anyone using the plan but makes it clearer in your mind where to start from.
2. Social media objectives. This is valuable and helps to define why you're using social media as a marketing tool. Typical objectives can include: Engaging with your customers, reaching potential customers (raising awareness), positioning your business as expert in an area, enabling customers to talk to each other, a platform for enabling or encouraging reviews, building brand awareness and credibility.
3. The approach. How will you adopt social media, what will the tone of voice be, core messages and policies?
4. Positioning. Define how your online social marketing activity will sit compared to competitors. The key here is to differentiate yourself if you can. For example, the business arm of Dell chose to set up a social media forum on Facebook for small businesses to help each other rather than use it as a direct selling platform. And the Compare the Market "Meerkat" social media campaign engaged a phenomenal number of followers. Sometimes a bit of lateral thinking will provide a much richer method of engaging with your customers.
5. Specify the social media that you will use. By this point you'll have a fair idea of what's available that will fit with your objectives, approach and positioning. Here is where you can define the list of media such as a blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel and so on. Under each medium, outline how you will use it such as the theme, topics, direction.
6. Listening. I make a point of including this because engaging with social media properly means you have to listen as well as post. How will you monitor what others are saying about your brand in the social networks? Also listen to find out what's trending as this could provide good foundations for your next blog, and think about commenting on other blogs and social networks - engagement should always be a two-way process.
7. Dealing with comments and feedback. Outline a procedure for doing this, especially important if there are several people in the business involved with social media. Drafting a policy is useful if this is the case so that you can be consistent and avoid PR disasters. Above all, do plan to respond to comments and questions on your own social pages as they should never be left unanswered as that sends out the wrong customer service message.
   
8. Timing and regularity. Now that you know which media you will adopt, it's time to decide how often and who. Using Twitter for example should be at least daily, preferably several times a day whereas blogging might be once a week.
   
9. Measurement and evaluation. Include the methods you will use to track the success of your social media activity. There are a variety of ways to do this such as engagement - how many followers/fans/comments; traffic statistics using Google Analytics on the blog so you can see where traffic is coming from (referrals); tracking mentions using feedback from Google Alerts can also provide a picture of the reach of your activity.
   
10. To Do List. I find this useful at the end of any marketing plan. After you have decided on the strategy, what are the priorities, who is doing them and when by? You can add costs here too if appropriate.

You can find more tips on putting together internet marketing plans on one of our previous blogs, "10 reasons to put together an Internet marketing plan".

Happy planning!

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz and BusinessPlanWiz

Marketing lessons as BusinessPlanWiz launches in the UK

It's taken far longer than we expected - 2 and half years longer to be precise, but we're relieved to say that BusinessPlanWiz.com is now live. When we began with the concept of being able to create business plans and marketing plans online, it seemed quite straightforward. It still is really, certainly for the user, but developing software to do what's in your head is not for the faint hearted!

I shan't dwell on that one, because our website team (Edward Robertson) did work hard and the end result demonstrates their commitment to the project.

Anyway, as a marketer, and co-owner of a small business, it's been a fascinating journey and the new website has included all of the things we learned from launching MarketingPlanWiz 3 years ago. Internet marketing has steamed ahead during this time and this dictated the look and feel of the front end of the website, also our insistence that we could content manage as much as possible. These are a few of the more significant marketing approaches that we adopted:

• BusinessPlanWiz Video - you'll see it on our home page. We know now that Google loves video and the benefit of doing something on YouTube and embedding it means that it's found in 2 places - YouTube and on your website. I have to say that it was one of the hardest things we've done - have you tried talking to a camera about your business?! We could do this ourselves, making it a very cost effective medium. We used Camtasia to edit the video with screen shots and slides. Here are some good tips from UTalkMarketing about using video to optimise your website.
• Blogging is an integral part of the website. This time we had a business blog built into the site so that we could update blog type content quickly and easily, with links to articles on the home page making it nice and easy to find. Blog content is still excellent content for SEO as search engines like the fact that they're updated regularly.
  
• Making it easier to buy. We spent a lot of time with MarketingPlanWiz providing all of the reasons that buying was a good idea. With BusinessPlanWiz we let the product speak for itself. By making it free to try, it naturally makes the decision easier for users, so we removed extra pages that prevented people from getting to the buying page. From an e-commerce perspective, we learnt that this works more effectively.
• Google Analytics - we now set up goals so that we can quickly and easily measure specific activities on the website (such as buying) without having to work it out, as it reports automatically. Google's help for setting up goals in analytics is quite good.
• PR - definitely practicing what we preach here. We're working with a PR and marketing agency (Media Matters in Peterborough) which specialises in online PR and search engine content. Apart from saving us enormous amounts of time, their experience and media connections are excellent.

So we begin now with persuading people to link to us, another good thing for search engine optimisation, and because it really is a useful website!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Are "learning styles" relevant to the marketing mix?

Bear with me here, as I have a theory that helps us to understand why there should always be a "mix" of marketing activity rather than focusing on just one method. That "one" method might work of course, but what could you be missing if you don't think about how different members of your target audience react to marketing media?

Children are now taught in school to recognise their 'learning style', usually based on a model proposed by Fleming. Here's a Wikipedia definition of learning styles but you do have to stick with it to get to the bit I'm talking about (you wouldn't believe how many learning styles there are out there). Anyway, Fleming's is based on three main ways in which we respond to stimuli:

1. Visual (seeing, using pictures in your head)
   
2. Auditory (listening, discussing)
   
3. Kinaesthetic (doing, touching/feeling, practising)

That's a very simplistic description, but helps to make my point. If we learn that way, then we probably approach the rest of the world in a similar way. In actual fact, most of us use a mixture of learning styles but you usually mainly relate to one of them (I also learnt).

So, back to marketing, before I wander dangerously into an area I know little else about. If we're putting together a marketing plan then we want to reach as many of our identified target audience as possible. Online we have a number of brilliant ways now of doing this with internet marketing. We can use websites, advertising, blogging, social networking and video (visual) and podcast (auditory) as marketing tools, all of which help us to fulfill different preferences. And branding experts will tell you (read James Hammond, he talks an awful lot of sense on this subject) that engaging with the five different senses is key to developing a connection with your audience.

But we get a bit stuck online with the whole smell, taste, touch thing - so far anyway. Which means that in my view, there's often still a case for offline marketing so your customer can engage with you using a sense other than visual. When you think of how many visual messages we're bombarded with every day, it's no wonder some of us prefer something different. So back to flyers, "try before you buy", giveways and other tangible marketing activity to mop up those who didn't see us online. Ever wondered why so many "e-commerce" retailers who sell mainly online, still send out paper catalogues?

I know I'm a stickler for a tactile object or shiny piece of literature every time. I always thought I was a bit strange, but I'm happily reassured now that I just approach some things kinaesthetically. See - perfectly normal!


Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk



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Ten Reasons to Put Together an Internet Marketing Plan

If you're one of the enlightened and know that a marketing plan is a good idea, it will come as no surprise that an Internet Marketing Plan is also worth doing, or at least a section on Internet Marketing in your overall plan. Taking this a step further, you can include a social media strategy as part of this.

Back to basics first. The main components of an Internet Marketing Plan are:

• How you will use your website as a marketing tool
• Distributing news and press releases online
• Social networking (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, MySpace), YouTube, forums and wikis (such as Wikipedia).
• Online advertising (pay per click, banners)
• Email marketing
• Viral marketing
• Search engine optimisation

Even if you can't address all of these in one go, they should be on your radar for relevance. But knowing that these exist isn't enough - here are my top ten reasons to draft an Internet Marketing Plan:

1. The UK market for email marketing platforms and services was worth £254million in 2008 and was predicted to grow by an estimate 15% to £292 million by the end of 2009, a trend which is continuing - they do this because it works.
   
2. It's very low cost compared to traditional marketing in almost every case
3. All content that you put out onto the internet will still be there next year and the year after and that means it will continued to be found by search engines. Not like a printed advert, here today and gone tomorrow.
4. All Internet marketing is measurable and the stats don't lie. Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic came from your Facebook page or Twitter.
5. Our customers buying behaviour has changed - they use the internet now to research, learn, review and make buying decisions.
6. Google received 299 million search requests globally in just May 2009. In 2009 $58.1 billion was spent on online advertising across the world - that accounts for 13.2% of advertising spend worldwide. If you're going to use paid advertising doing it online is budget controlled, can be stopped at any moment - and very targeted.
7. Your website is your shop window. Even if your customers don't buy from it they will check you out here first. If you do nothing else, this must be up-to-date otherwise your competitors may get the business - can you afford to take that risk?
8. It's not just young people who use the Internet. Facebook's fastest growing demographic is people over 30.
9. The more places you publish information and interact online, the more links there will be back to your website - part of your search engine optimisation!
   
10. Your customers are there already: Of the 36.9 million UK Internet users in May 2009, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking website.

We know a good marketing plan tool if you're looking for a starting point...


Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk