2.4 A 6-Step Social Media Marketing Framework

Walk the Walk; Improve the Talk

This 6-step Social Media Marketing Framework aims to ensure your social media strategy and activities are optimized to convert prospective customers into satisfied, paying customers and brand advocates. As you learn more about digital marketing, you will be presented with various frameworks. Being able to understand what is similar and what is different will be important. Ultimately, you may come up with your own framework, which will likely be a combination of several frameworks. However, using a framework gives you the best chance of implementing the right strategy for your circumstances. This framework will also provide alignment between your chosen strategy and your activities. Let’s take a closer look at each of the following steps:

Step 1: Listen and Learn

Social media allows marketers to listen to what their target audiences are saying and doing. Marketers can now listen to their customers’ needs, wants, and desires without any prompting. We no longer have to guess!

Listening is the first place for marketers to start when developing a social media strategy. Listening is key to understanding your target audience’s perceptions related to:

• Brand, Products, and Services
  Since social media conversations are happening in real time and directly from your community, you no longer need to guess why people are behaving a certain way; they will tell you.
• Competitors’ Brands, Products, or Services
  If you find out what your competitors are good or bad at, you can position your organization to meet some of those customer needs better. Or, perhaps you can identify new products and services you can offer.
• General topics and trends
  If you can find out what’s popular, you may be able to take advantage of emerging opportunities and generate new revenue streams. The seasonality of golf in Canada has long been an obstacle to revenue and club activity.  As any entrepreneur will tell you, “it’s not a problem; it’s an opportunity.” A strategic social media marketing campaign from a golf club will take this into account and showcase a seasonal menu change, seasonal activities, corporate sales, and indoor golf instruction.

Listening and learning from your target audiences is the first important step when implementing a social media strategy.

Step 2: Define Goals, Objectives, and Target Audiences

With a well-defined scope, which includes specific goals, objectives, and target audiences, it is possible to achieve positive outcomes since you know what you are aiming for. If you know what you want, you can put the steps in place to get there. Successful marketers and organizations know what they want to achieve, and a clear focus on goals and objectives is what ultimately guides all their actions.

Identifying goals, objectives, and target audiences is a critical step in getting buy-in from key decision-makers, assigning resources (human, financial, and technological), and planning social media campaigns and ongoing activities. Everyone in an organization should work and plan toward achieving these goals and objectives, so it is important to get this step right.

Ideally, digital marketers should plan to complete this step collaboratively because some of the required information might exist in different areas of the organization. This information should include:

• Lessons learned from the listening step of the framework: what the community is saying about your products, your competitors, and trends
• Customer personas and customer journey maps developed
• Competitive intelligence learned in the listening step or through other research/studies
• Knowledge about the preferences of online communities
• Lessons learned from previous social media campaigns/ongoing activities
• Organizational goals and objectives

Organizations that don’t align their goals, objectives, and strategies will waste money, time, resources, and effort.

Step 3: Choose Channels

While setting goals and objectives is a critical part of planning, how you achieve them has more to do with your implementation plan. Therefore, focusing on achieving those goals and objectives by selecting the appropriate digital marketing channels and platforms is important.

Since there are so many social media options, marketers often struggle to select the appropriate social media platform to use. Instead of trying to pick specific social media sites, organizations should focus on the type of social media marketing that will work best for their target audiences and build a presence on 2 – 3 platforms that support those activities and cater to those audiences.  Remember market segmentation and associate the most appropriate media platform.

Step 4: Create Content

After choosing your channels, the next step in the 6-Step Social Media Marketing Framework is content creation. After selecting the appropriate social media networks, marketers can focus on creating the content that works best for that specific channel and the target audience.  Questions to consider include:

• What do you want the community to do?
• What does the target audience find most engaging?

This is not about creating content for the sake of it. Think strategically about what you are trying to achieve, which should be clear after the listening stage, and then deliver content based on that.  Also, remember to follow the content strategy, content calendar (seasonal activities), and recommendations.

Step 5: Engage the Community

Listening is just one side of the equation. Once you have listened to your community, you will need to go out and build positive relationships that last. This is done by engaging your customers with content they find valuable. However, simply pushing out content and hoping that your community will like, comment, and share the content is somewhat unrealistic and unproductive. To get the best out of content and to develop meaningful relationships and trust, it is necessary to engage with your community.

Usually, the key to successful engagement is conversation. Engagement can take on other forms, such as sharing, liking and posting and to a certain extent, your community will determine which form is most suitable. However, conversations lie at the heart of social media. It is a central facet: people want to talk to each other. This then leads to the following questions about conversations:

• What is a conversation?
  Simply defined, it is a dialogue between at least two people, possibly more.
• Why are conversations important?
  Conversations communicate who we are, our needs, and our feelings.
• How do conversations impact business?
  Conversations in business are not new; commerce has revolved around conversations for millennia. The rules that applied to good conversation back then also apply to today’s social media business conversations. In 44 BC, Cicero put forward the following rules for good conversation:

1. 1. Speak clearly.
   2. Speak easily, but not too much, and give others their turn.
   3. Do not interrupt.
   4. Be courteous.
   5. Deal seriously with serious matters gracefully with lighter ones.
   6. Never criticize people behind their backs.
   7. Stick to subjects of general interest.
   8. Do not talk about yourself.
   9. Never lose your temper.

All these rules still apply to maintaining good conversations on social media. For example, although you or your organization may want to talk about your brand, it is best to avoid direct marketing and sales via social media as part of a conversation or dialogue. Feel free to bring it up as part of a conversation if it makes sense. But remember, no hard selling!

In addition to Cicero’s rules for conversation, there are three more pertinent social media conversation guidelines to consider:

1. Get to know who you are talking to.
2. Listening is more important than talking.
3. If you’re going to be talking, you have something important to say.

Again, the secret to successful conversation and engagement is to listen to your community and find out what they like to talk about and in what manner. Knowing this, you can have more impact when it is time to say something since you already speak their language and are part of the community. As part of your content strategy, write down what tone of conversation is relevant to your community. For example, do you want to be light and informal, or are you required to be more serious and formal? Develop your conversational style according to your community.

Engagement Pyramid

Marketers should also be aware of the engagement pyramid and the passive majority. Not everyone on social media will engage. According to the engagement pyramid, most of the community will be passive. This means that those individuals doing the talking represent a small percentage of your target audience. The digital marketing team needs to be aware of this as it will affect responses to your content as well as engagement around your posts.

• Passive behaviours represent most people who see, view, and even read, watch, or listen to content but choose not to comment or share it. In fact, in many of the larger social networks, a good engagement level (Facebook uses the term ‘people talking about this’) is usually anything above 10%. Here, engagement refers to liking, sharing, and commenting on posts.

• Active behaviours refer to the types of action most digital marketers seek, e.g., liking, commenting, and sharing. This primarily refers to the endorsers, contributors, and super fans in the pyramid. Advocates are the ones who take engagement to another level. They are the ones creating their own posts about your brand and promoting your brand to their own social networks.

The key takeaway is that 10% may be a rough guide as to the level of engagement to expect for your content. Clearly, this will differ depending on the industry and how inherently social your product is. For example, a social media post about improving slow play on the golf course may not get much engagement in the form of shares or likes. Ensure you allow the most engaged members of your target audience to flourish. Offer them rewards and incentives for their hard work. Tell them you appreciate their efforts and give them something back in return. This could even drive user-generated content and/or competition.

Another key goal of social media is virality, as well as conversations. Most organizations want their content to go viral. Many marketers have studied why a piece of social media content goes viral, and there does not seem to be one definitive answer. However, there are some commonalities. Apparently, most viral content pieces tend to be in one or more of the following four categories:

1. Very helpful/practical
2. Unique/amazing/spectacular
3. Funny
4. Controversial

Viral content can combine any of the above categories, but generally, at least one is involved. However, from a business perspective, before trying to make engaging content, determine what is appropriate for your target audience. For example, while edgy and causing more buzz and reach, does a controversial video fit with your community’s sensibilities/personalities, your content strategy, and your overall brand image and personality? During the engagement stage, marketers need to be aware of how to build and foster trust in their online relationships. To tap into virality and achieve massive reach, marketers will need to understand which content types are most likely to engage their target audiences truly.

Step 6: Measure, Analyze, and Optimize

Measuring is crucial to social media’s impact on an organization. Without measurement, marketers have no yardstick and no means of understanding whether their activities are succeeding or not. Through analytics, surveys, and content analysis, it is now possible to measure the success of your social media activities. Collate and collect all your data so that you can analyze how things went during the current cycle of the framework. In addition to your social media analytics and insights, you will potentially need other information, such as:

• online web analytics
• a timeline of important events or activities that may have affected the organization in the online, social, and offline worlds
• financial data regarding sales
• email clickthrough

Once you have all the data, assess the success of your social media marketing campaigns and ongoing activities by examining how they all fit together. Review any lessons learned and optimize your strategy for the next iteration of the cycle. Once again, start with a listening phase to find out if there is anything new and/or what’s changed for your target audiences. For example, if you found out that one product was less popular in terms of engagement and sharing, you may want to focus your attention on monitoring keywords associated with that product in the next listening phase. Measure, analyze, and optimize your activities so that you can properly evaluate what worked and what didn’t. This is crucial for future planning of your social media activities.

“13. Social Media Marketing” from Foundations in Digital Marketing by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Modifications: split out the content into two sections.