Social Media Strategy

Simply put, social media strategy is essential, and it provides us with a mechanism to tell our story! Social Media creates trends, determines common opinions, and can motivate an audience into purchasing your product or service. Since its inception in 1997 social media has morphed into many things. It has even become the vehicle of new-age propaganda, but the targetability of the medium and its continued popularity has continued its evolution. Businesses for the first time in history can talk with their audience, even down to the individual.

At the extreme, it will forever be synonymous with fake news, foreign actors, and for producing echo chambers. Your preferences and likes are leveraged to generate customized content, this is all conducted using sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.

Good or Evil

Technology can be used for good and evil, and technologists, unfortunately, don’t usually concern themselves with ethics. Since becoming mainstream, social media has done good and bad and everything in the middle. It has brought down governments, started riots, and destroyed people’s lives through ‘cancel culture’. But, on the other hand, it has inspired movements, connected communities, and inspired change.

Will profit always be put before people? Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence, and misinformation, and that the company has tried to hide and suppress evidence in which research shows the negative impact Facebook has on its users. Specifically, for female teens. Facebook’s solution they started developing Instagram for kids.

The ever-changing digital landscape is allowing advertisers to rewire our brains, dopamine receptors are being leveraged to increase conversion rates. Social Media gives users a reliable schedule of pleasure delivery, which gets users coming back again and again. Humans have an insatiable appetite for likes. Experience and knowledge collected in data exhaust end up driving user behaviour that you think was your own the whole time.

Mobile

We are never more than an arm’s length away from our phones 24 hours a day. We have minicomputers in our pocket with more capabilities than it took to send a man to the moon.

On average, we check our phones 100 times per day and if your target audience is between 18-24 you can times that by two. If the definition of addiction is compulsive behaviour social media has become a playground for adults. Since its introduction, it has relentlessly Frankensteined out of control, but because it operates on so many psychological levels within the human condition, it is here to stay. Social media gave people a voice.  When we see something which incites emotion, we want to do something, with social media you can act with shares, likes, or comments.

Do you need social media?

Quick answer, yes. It has really become the most effective way to successfully target and interact with customers. Developing a social media strategy is critical. This is especially the case for small and medium-sized businesses, which by nature have limited resources and limited budgets. Social Media allows you to connect with audience personas in ways we have previously not been able to. The fact we can target, analyze, and optimize the message ensures you’re receiving the maximum return on investment.

Social Media is the best way to create a 2-way dialogue, you get to communicate your brands’ story and your brands’ message. This was never really viable prior, and not to the level of targeting which is now available. We can now efficiently connect with customers using a myriad of tactics. We can leverage news about new product launches, exclusives, or giveaways, or garner customer feedback to improve the customer experience.

Simply put, social media is about preparing, creating, analyzing, and governing. Social media is the most powerful way to humanize your brand!

Social Media has really become the most effective way to successfully target & interact with customers.

Audience Personas & Segmentation

In our opinion, this is one of the most important and often neglected areas of business. It provides the foundation for all your communication and business principles. Every individual within your organization should be able to fully understand and articulate who you are targeting and why.

Audience personas basically pertain to how you spice your audience. You determine profiles and group individuals who share similar traits, including interests & likes, social-economic, buyer motivation, and so on. Once your audience is defined you will be better able to target and customize your message resulting in improved conversion.

Different Channel Strategies

Platforms are different and content should therefore be different. Think relevancy and authenticity. What content is your audience responding to and what platforms are your audience personas using.

We evaluate your competition and determine which social media platforms will best target your desired audience personas.

Multiple considerations will affect the scope of your channel strategies, depending on who and how you are targeting. In addition, both resources for content creation/management and analytical support will be factors, along with budgets.

Designing Campaigns

We design all the elements of your campaign and there are a lot of moving parts. From determining the objectives and tactics to defining what we are going to monitor and measure. We can help craft both your message and tone, along with defining the call to action and smart goals.

All campaigns need to have certain key considerations, for example, the content needs to be relevant and timely along with holding some type of value. In addition, it must be engaging, content needs to stand out and breakthrough. You also, need to develop a schedule of activities to ensure consistency, you don’t’ want to over-communicate, but you definitely don’t want to under-communicate. Think Goldilocks and the three bears it needs to be, just right!

Understanding the Funnel

We design all the elements of your campaign and there are a lot of moving parts. From determining the objectives and tactics to defining what we are going to monitor and measure. We can help craft both your message and tone, along with defining the call to action and smart goals.

The traditional funnel consists of awareness, consideration, and conversion. The era of social media extended that funnel and added loyalty and advocacy. Social Media allows us to foster a relationship with someone who has either purchased our product or service, or at minimum shown consideration. This connection either increases the opportunity for repeat business or triggers the first purchase. Subsequently, we engaged with this audience to advocate and promote, which leads to incremental sales. How and what you communicate with your customers will be dependent on where they are in the buying funnel.

Now we can connect and excite prior, & motivate and engage thereafter.

Building & maintain relationship

One of the most important elements in social media is consistency, as we have discussed you need a plan. There needs to be a strategy in place as to who is your audience, how will you develop your audience and what is the message and action, you wish to convey.  In the past, the relationship ended with the transaction with social media that’s the middle of the relationship. Now we can connect and excite prior and, motivate and engage thereafter.

Different Strategies

Businesses require different social media strategies depending on both the type of business and the maturity of the business. As an example, getting ready for a new product launch you may want to increase awareness, but you will still need to be able to fulfill demand. On the other hand, some businesses need a contestant flood versus the product launch wave. Enterprises with limited resources or in the service industry may require a constant trickle strategy, versus other businesses who can sustain a fire-hose of interest & interaction coming from social media. The quality of the audience always wins over quantity. It is better to be reaching ten legitimate potential customers versus ten thousand bots or scammers.

The quality of the audience always wins over quantity.

Community & Charters / Response

We work with companies to develop and define their community and charters. This largely pertains to how you’re planning to manage your digital space, and more specifically the interaction with your customers. These become the defining factors as to how and when you will respond to customers. 

Online reputation management (ORM)

ORM is more important than ever. Everything is visible and everything lasts forever in the digital space.

Reviews and commentary tend to swing to both extremes it is either a positive customer interaction that leads to comments or reviews, alternatively, a person’s poor experience leads to a negative response. You are much more likely to receive a negative interaction, especially if the experience is poor. Vindictive people are capable of a great deal of damage, and you need a defined plan in place to be prepared. Social Media by nature can magnify and amplify either the positive or the negative. There are ways around dealing with negative comments or reviews, to dilute the issue, but it is tricky.

Reviews can be extremely detrimental, most customers will not even consider using a company that has below 3.5 stars. Ratings can subsequently have an even bigger impact on business. A one-star rating on Amazon Marketplace, as an example, limits that company’s future business potential. These facts are often learned and exploited. Not all reviews are legitimate. In 2020, it is estimated that Trip Advisor received over one million fake reviews.

Paid Boost & Paid Advertising Strategies

Social media and a comprehensive social media strategy also provide us with the opportunity to invest in tactics to amplify the campaign. Either through paid advertising or by promoting a post or communication, we can significantly improve the interaction and subsequent response.

Analytical & Creative

One of the challenges with social media was, it was new. Commerce didn’t have a home for it, so it became largely adopted by marketing. The challenge with many marketers is they lean more creatively and therefore lacked analytical capabilities.  In order to win in the digital world, you must have an analytical mind or at least lean in that direction. We instill a test & learn mentality, whereby we track results and make changes or iteration and remeasure, constantly improving the formula and increasing customer conversion.

Summary

Social Media is no longer a nice to do. Success in social media is completely dependent on two things great strategy and great content.

At Sterling Steps, we evaluate your business to generate comprehensive strategies that stretch from defining your customer audience to targeting them through specific social media platforms. We determine what is important to measure, and we keep measuring. Furthermore, we monitor and report constantly optimizing and making the process more and more efficient and effective.