The Mostly Complete Guide to Social Media Strategy and Tactics
Table of Contents
đź‘‹ Hi, there!
welcome to my 15,000 word blog post about social media strategy and tactics
From 2008-2019, I worked exclusively as a social media and content marketing strategist.
Over that time, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. For all the talk about how much things change, not all that much has actually changed from a strategy standpoint.
But, if that is true, and the web is so full of blog posts about social media strategy, why do we need one more?
Well, I thought I might be able to offer some useful insights in the midst of the vast sea of listicle posts brimming with helpful gems like “share great content” or “add sharing buttons to make your content go viral.”
So, maybe I can help someone with this post. And if I can do that, this will have been a worthwhile effort.
Social Media Strategies vs Tactics
After a decade in this business I’ve come to realize that few people truly understand the difference between a social media strategy and a tactic.
In truth, there are only a few real social media strategies that work… mostly everything else that people tell you is just a tactic.
There are only 5 social media strategies that businesses really use, and that work consistently.
The reason is that most businesses are have the same set of objectives: build awareness, generate leads, close sales.
Most businesses think of social media as something exclusively for marketing and sales. So, while there are other strategies that can be used in specific circumstances, nearly every businesses will use one or all of the five following in their social media strategy.
THESE ARE THE 5 MOST COMMON AND EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES FOR MOST BUSINESSES:
- Create Content. Amplify with ads.
- Engage people directly. #Conversations
- Reach new audiences through intermediaries (influencers and media channels).
- Analyze some aspect of social media data, quantitatively, to make better business decisions.
- Use social media to conduct qualitative research to make better business decisions.
Like I said, while the list above does not represent every single social media strategy, it is applicable for nearly all of the situations I’ve encountered.
Social Media Strategy Basics
Keep in mind that a social media strategy cannot exist in isolation. You’ll need several other supporting factors such as a solid company culture, and the appropriate technology.
Many of the following tactics require your pre-existing understanding of the organization’s brand and its visual identity. You’ll have to have considered your pricing strategy, website conversion funnels, email marketing strategy, search strategy, your sales process, and more.
You need to know who your audience is, where they spend time online, what their pain points are, and how your product or service is the ideal solution.
The collection of tactics in this post is also not a substitute for a content strategy, so you’ll need to understand your topic categories, your voice, your publishing cadence, and much more. Perhaps I’ll write another post for that (if you’d like me to, say so in the comments).
It’s important that you know that you won’t be able to just write down these steps, check them off a list, and expect to get results. To win online, with other human beings, requires the expenditure of emotional energy, the use of empathy, and the diligence to follow up on your promises.
There is no one single way to win in social. Some will say to post at a specific time of day, or day of week. Some will suggest your use lots of color, or to be controversial, or to jump on trends, or ask lots of questions, or invest heavily in video. None of that is bad advice on the surface and none of it is good advice without more information.
- Yes, visual content tends to outperform text.
- Yes, you should probably have captions on your video so people can watch with the sound off. It’s also helpful for people with hearing disabilities.
- Yes, more people use social media during the day than the middle of the night.
But the most important thing is that you remember what your goals are, what time horizon you have to accomplish those goals, and what budget you have available. Once you know that, you can begin to make other decisions about what you should do.
Most social media marketing is brand marketing. There is no direct and measurable next action but rather consistent and ongoing messaging and actions to solidify brand positioning. However, there are direct response marketing strategies you can employ in social media. You just need to know when it is appropriate.
Profiles
The Profile is your homepage on each site. This is where people will go to learn about you, often before they even visit your website.
You need to consider how these profiles should look.
Who is it for? Should it be for customers? For investors? For employees and partners?
What do they link to? Normally, you’ll get one link in the bio to use. What should you do with it.
How is the bio written? It is casual or buttoned-up professional? Are you selling or using a softer approach?
Websites
A lot of your social media strategy is going to rely on having a well designed properly put together website to drive through traffic too. Even if you were entire social media campaign keeps people on Facebook, or Twitter, there’s a good chance that anyone who is sufficiently interested will come and check out your website.
Furthermore, if you get involved in any lead generation or sales activity, you’re most likely going to need to drive that traffic back to the website to convert rather than trying to close the sale on social media. Your website serves a variety of different purposes including facilitating conversions, providing social proof and other sales resources, and reinforcing your brand positioning. The website is where you should be able to send people to get additional information in context about who you are, what you offer, and what sets you apart.
Friction
It should come as no surprise that if you make it easier to buy from you, then you will get more sales than if you make it an arduous process. The same is true when collecting information from prospective clients. Typically, the less information you ask for, the higher your conversion rate will likely be (though quality may suffer). While there is no single rule that is always true in this it is pretty easy to understand that simplifying the process will improve your results. You can also use friction, strategically, when you want to filter out people who are not willing to go thru the effort.
Testing
Have you ever played darts blindfolded? Well, I wouldn’t recommend it. Further have you ever played darts blindfolded using only one dart? Again, I wouldn’t recommend it, and you’d be lucky to actually hit your target. Surprisingly, many marketers go into their job function with exactly this approach.
The truth is in order to be successful in marketing in 2019, you need to always be testing your assumptions. This means constantly A/B testing different audiences, different headlines, different content, etc. coming out of the gate you’d be lucky to hit it right on the head, and even if you did you wouldn’t know it unless you took other shots.
Time and Money
In an ideal world, a client has a lot of time and a lot of money to allocate towards a strategy. However, I know that that’s rarely the case.
A strategy is only as good as the amount of time and money one is able to spend implementing it.
A Social Media Strategy is designed from a pattern that emerges from the way in which three variables intersect:
- Goals
- Timelines
- Budgets
You should also include Audience in that list but for now, let’s stick to these three.
When I design strategies, I recommend the appropriate approach based upon these factors.
This chart illustrates what you should expect based upon your mix of these two variables.
The Five Elements of Social Media Strategy
There are 5 elements of social media which are the building blocks of social media strategy.
Listening
Running searches on social media for keywords, phrases, branded terms, competitors, or key stakeholders is called social listening. This is the part of your social media strategy where you learn what people are saying about your brand, competitors, products/services, and your employees. It’s where you can learn about what questions they have. Use social listening to gain access to all of this is valuable and free information in order to help your achieve business’ goals.
content
The best starting point before developing your content strategy is listening. Said differently, before you start creating and curating content, do your research. When you listen to your audience, see what competitors are talking about, understand the pain points your prospective customers have with your industry, you are in a far better position to create content for them. Your content strategy should include topics, formats and media types, publishing frequency, voice, and a section stating who the audience is and what they need. Content is an essential component of every social media strategy.
engagement
At one point, engagement was the central theme of everyone’s social media strategy, though I’d argue few truly understood what that meant. At its most basic, engagement is simply the interaction between listening and content.
When your audience listens to you by consuming and interacting your content, and you listen to your audience by consuming and interacting with theirs…you have engagement. It is the two-way flow that distinguishes engagement from broadcast.
promotion
If you’re not promoting the content that you spent so much time and effort creating, it’s going to go unnoticed. So, you need to do the work to get your content in front of the right audience.
The days of reaching and influencing your audience with organic social media are long gone. You need to use paid promotion to get in front of  the right people.
measurement
The most crucial part of your social media strategy is how you measure its success. The goals you set  in the beginning of your campaign should determine whether or not it was successful and if you need to make improvements.
The Three Factors of Social Media Strategy Success
We do business with those we know, like, and trust. Therefore, in order to gain any traction, you must understand the interplay between these three attributes.
You must have people’s attention.
If you do not, then nothing you do can gain traction. (Know)
You must be likeable and acquire people’s affinity.
Being likable is the first step to having an engaged audience, it’s what keeps them coming back. It’s what makes them choose you over anyone else. (Like)
You must provide value to people.
If you do not, people will have no reason to follow you and no reason to buy from you. (Trust)
You need these three elements. If you are not succeeding, one of these is out of balance. Find out what it is and, with a little luck, you can succeed.
Three Pillars of Social Business Success
A business will only thrive when its culture and talent, technology, and processes are fully integrated, aligned, and balanced.
A great strategy and best-in-class technology cannot make up for a culture that doesn’t buy in, or people without the requisite talent. Without the right people, it’s just a good theory.
A company with a great culture and talented people, with the right technology, is on the right track, but will lack direction and consistency without defined processes and strategies.
Finally, a company with talented people, a great culture, and well designed processes, will be unable to scale without the proper technology.
All of these three elements must work together to find success in any aspect of online marketing.
Picking Your Social Media Goals
Now, let’s go through the different thigns an organization will typically want to accomplish using social media.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Before embarking on a brand awareness campaign, it’s important to ask yourself a very important question… What do we want to make people aware of?
Are we launching a new product? Do we want them to know about her philanthropic activities? Are we trying to get them to see that we are different and better than everyone else? The answer is the last one is probably yes but the question should still be asked. Building brand awareness is not just a matter of being recognized but rather being recognized for something.
So ask yourself a series of different questions before even starting here are a few:
Who are we trying to reach and build awareness with?
Why do we want them to be aware of us and what is the next step?
What do we want people to be aware of?
Which is the best format for communicating this information? Pictures, reports, emails, videos?
How will we measure if our tactics are working?
Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.
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Driving Traffic
Before embarking on any sort of a traffic generation campaign it’s important to ask yourself three very important questions.
Where are we driving traffic to?
What is the purpose of driving traffic there?
What do we want people to do once they get there?
If you’re driving traffic for sales that is different than if you were driving traffic to build a remarketing list, which is different from providing follow up customer service to existing customers.
Not all traffic is created equally, and not all traffic generation should be approached in the same way. It’s important to know the traffic on its own means virtually nothing. If you drive the wrong people to your site and they don’t take any actions, buy anything, learn something, or whatever else you’re trying to accomplish, then the effort was wasted.
There are several primary reasons why you would want to drive traffic to your site. The first, and most obvious, is that you’d like to introduce new customers to your brand and hope that they follow along a path to conversion. The second is that you might want to educate people in the middle of your funnel and build a remarketing audience so that you might keep in touch with potential customers. This can include attempting to get people to opt in on your website so that you may email them later.
When attempting to drive traffic to your website one important thing to keep in mind is that advertising and sales traffic will often come at a higher cost than the traffic generated from giving away free and valuable content.
And, as with all things marketing-related, you must ensure that you have the proper analytics and tracking in place so as to make sure that your efforts are being measured and analyzed.
Now that the context has been set, and you’ve asked yourself some questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.
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Generating Leads
Most people are not in search of more opportunities to buy things. Suffice to say getting onto more sales calls is not on anyone’s agenda unless they are the seller. With that in mind it’s important to understand that getting someone to submit their contact information in order to have a sales call is among the most difficult things you can do in digital marketing. Like all social marketing, you can’t generate any leads if you can’t first capture people’s attention. Similarly, you will find that it is easier and less expensive to get leads from people who already recognize you either because they’ve had prior interactions with your brand, or heard about you through word of mouth.
Before embarking on any lead generation campaign you need to ask yourself a few very important questions.
What are the various criteria that qualifies as a lead?
What information do we need to capture?
What is a reasonable cost per acquisition for new leads?
What is a reasonable net cost per acquisition of new clients/customers?
What is our current close rate on new opportunities?
Where do we think we can best reach potential leads?
What are our next steps once a lead comes in?
Most importantly: Why would somebody give us their contact information?
Your offer needs to be more valuable than the cost of giving away contact information. Your solution needs to be more valuable than the time that they are giving to you.
In general, you can expect that the more expensive your product or service, the more expensive your leads will be. Likewise, the more competitive your market is, the more expensive you can expect your leads to be.
Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.
Selling Services
If you wish to sell services using social media as your method of finding in closing new business, you must first understand social selling at a high-level. In this case we’re discussing services. There are two primary ways that sales can happen on social media.
The first, is by using social media tools in a traditional sales capacity. That is to say it is virtually no different than sending an email to picking up the phone to call someone. Selling directly, one to one is still highly effective method of bringing in new business. In this method of social selling it is about utilizing all of the tools that social media has to offer to put yourself in a better position to have warm sales discussions and higher probability of closing.
The second method of selling is anything to get people’s attention first. This is followed by illustrating that you understand the potential customer’s pain points and problems with an explanation of your service offering as a differentiated solution from the rest of the market. Finally, you’ll need to lead them off social media, likely to your website, where they will submit their information to become a lead and be moved into a one-to-one sales process.
There are, of course, exceptions to these rules. But, services are rarely purchased online as products are, generally requiring a stronger emphasis on relationship skills and interactions.
Before embarking on a social sales campaign on social media miss first ask yourself a few key questions.
Who am I trying to sell to?
Where can I find this ideal prospect?
Have the prospects that I am selling to heard of us or had prior interactions with us?
What is our ideal method of moving people through sales funnel? Automated? One-on-One?
How are we priced relative to our competitors?
Do we have sufficient sales resources to make the case that we are the ideal solution for this prospect?
What problem are we able to solve that our target customer is experiencing?
Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.
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Selling Products
Before embarking on a campaign to try and sell your products through social media there are a number of different things to consider. The first is that the way the people shop on social media is different than the way that they tend to shop otherwise.
If you are attempting to sell products on the Internet, via social media, you must understand the word intent.
The intent of someone using a social media site is not to find something to buy. Yes, it happens. But, it is not the intention of why they are there. By contrast when someone goes to Amazon.com or to Google.com they are typing something into a search box with the hopes of finding an answer to the query.
Therefore, it is silly to compare search and social selling of products on even footing. Simply put, people are in completely different mindsets as it relates to their usage of these utilities. On Social Media, you are often educating or enticing people who are passively engaged in other activities.
Further, among the most important considerations when seeking to sell on social media, is the understanding that content is the primary driver of social sales activity.
As with all things social media, we must understand that the default setting for most human beings on social media is a mindless scroll through their newsfeeds. Ads are often seen as unwelcomed Interruptions. As a result you need to think about your advertising differently. If your content is solely about your products you will have little success interrupting people to talk about yourself. By contrast, if your product can be woven into a compelling piece of media that captures people’s attention, explains the benefit of your product, you then have a better chance to drive people to your website to learn more or make a purchase. Very few products are actually sold on social media channels. In most cases social media is simply the driver of an interested customer to the website where purchased can be made.
Now that you have the proper context, you should be ready to start picking tactics.
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Providing Customer Service
Among the many uses for social media, customer service may be the most natural fit. Social media is the place where we go to complain, to talk about things we’re excited about, to call out brands, and you craft a narrative about who we are.
We have the profound opportunity to listen to our customers when they complain. We have the ability to craft resources that can be shared on social media to educate customers and address problems proactively.
Furthermore, customer service can become some of our best marketing. Everyone has heard of Zappos.com and the reason why is exclusively because of their customer service. You can buy shoes online just about anywhere nowadays, but it was Zappos who put footwear on the web on the map. And they did it by providing the world’s most extraordinary customer service. Those are the stories that spread and become some of your best marketing. But before you embark on a campaign to provide customer service via social media, you should know what you were about to undertake.
The second is to become a call center. When customers come calling either publicly or privately, you must be quick to respond empathetic and your response, and able to resolve the problem quickly and efficiently with the customer experience firmly at the center of your approach.
Neither of these two approaches will be objectively easy. However, both will be worth it. Self-serve resources online can dramatically reduce customer service costs. Additionally they can be used over and over and over again saving countless hours for your team.
The day-to-day, one-to-one customer service on channels like Twitter, Facebook messenger, or other social media channels can be extremely time-consuming, and at times, frustrating. Depending on the organization, this can be one comment per month or one comment every 20 minutes.
Before considering using social media as a customer service tool, simply understand these two approaches and whether or not you are ready to do it correctly.
Now that you’ve asked yourself those questions, you’re ready to start picking tactics.
WE'RE NOT DONE MOVING YET.
The tactics section below is…extensive. Moving it over and making it sort-able is no small task.
Thanks for your patience as we migrate from the old site.
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