Introduction
We wanted to provide you with a high-level overview of how we both access and approach business challenges. We go through numerous processes and models, which largely depend on the type of business and its current situation, although many fundamentals usually remain true regardless.
Table of Contents:
- Business Review
- Competitive Analysis
- Asset Review
- Growth Strategies
- Campaign Development
- Measuring What Matters
- Recommendations
- Summary
Business Review
Most of our projects start with a business review, where we seek to understand your business dynamics. We access the current environment by breakdown numerous key factors.
Business review: What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your business. We look at this short, medium, and long. Why is your formula working? Or not working?
Primary Business Goal: We define your primary goal and business objectives if you do not have any. Alternatively, we generate new goals and objectives through the business review process.
Brand Review: Sterling Steps, evaluates your brand identity. What does your brand stand for? What are your unique selling points? How can you differentiate yourself from your competition?
Audience Review: We assess and optimize your audience personas and define new ones if required!
Audience Target: Defining personas, what are their goals & challenges, interest & fears? What motivates them, and what is their behaviour both online and offline? Which channels do they use, and how do we find them?
Audience Personas
| Factor | Description |
|---|---|
| Gender | Who do you predominantly target and who do you want to target? |
| Life stage | Which life stage or age range do you want to target as your core? |
| Location | Which markets are important to you? Where can you expand? |
| Language | Does your business offer alternative languages? Is language a barrier? |
| Spending | Income & spending ability, who do you want to primarily target? |
| Education Status | What education or professional level is your key target group? |
| Interests | What does your target group like doing? |
| Summary | How would you summarize your audience? |
Brand Identity: Sterling Steps, assesses your brand identity, and defines a new one if required!
Brand Story: Brand Stories are one of the most effective and powerful tools which are often untold. There is more that divides us than unites us, but stories are universal and forever! What is your brand voice or brand aesthetics?
Customer Experience: What is the current Customer Experience? We conduct a full virtual or physical assessment depending on your market. We also, evaluate competitor CX, in addition to evaluating best practices and concepts, both Nationally and Globally!
CX goes hand in hand with your social media strategy, these should be complementary and completely cohesive. 71% of consumers who have a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to a friend or relative.
Competitive Analysis
We look at the competitive landscape and evaluate the current state of play. We can then conduct a deep dive into the top three competitors. Where are they? Why are they performing? What differentiates them? What are your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in their business?
How can you supersede your competition, or should your new strategy include them? From a competitive standpoint, sometimes, it is better the devil you know. The universe doesn’t like vacuums and if a competitor fails you could have an influx of more aggressive competitors.
Asset Review
Web: we evaluate your current web hub and evaluate it against numerous factors. Does your site have an objective or objectives and are these being met? What are your CTA and are these being achieved in an efficient and effective manner? What is the efficiency of your funnel, throughout the site?
In addition, we focus on a model called Core & Path, which pertains to both the inward path and the outward path of your website. The inward path details how we get people to the ‘core’ or hub and would include the social media strategy.
Inward Path summary: Google search, Other search engines, social media (Instagram, Facebook), networks, partnerships, links from other sites, internal search.
Outward Path summary: Customer Reviews, Testimonials, bookmarks, send to a friend, request more information, submit a referral, inquiry form completed, etc.
Next, we evaluate your current web score for both mobile and desktop, along with running numerous diagnostic tools. All of this culminates in the development of a comprehensive web strategy.
Social Media:
Every day, people spend on average 3 hours on social media and messaging.
What’s your overall Social Media Strategy? What do you have? How does it operate? How can it be optimized?
What’s your social Media Strategy for different platforms? Facebook Strategy, Instagram Strategy
Is your content resonating with your desired audience and meeting or exceeding predetermined targets?
| Platform | Your Business | Direct competitor A | Direct competitor B |
|---|---|---|---|
| FB reach | 386 followers | 546 followers | 2,186 followers |
| IG reach | 836 followers | 1,823 followers | 181 followers |
| Twitter reach | NA | 121 | 1,232 followers |
| Other reaches | YouTube NA / Linked-in 15 followers | YouTube 1 video 440 views | YouTube 761 subscribers |
PART TWO:
- Growth Strategies
- Campaign Development
- Measuring What Matters
- Recommendations
- Summary
Growth Strategies
When we develop growth strategies at Sterling Steps, we’re looking at holistic solutions across social, web, and customer experience.
Social:
After accessing any social media activity, followers, and evaluating competitors’ social media, we design and create a comprehensive bespoke strategy. This not only encompasses immediate plans but creates a runway of activity, ensuring consistent and quality posts. We quantify the cost and ROI of activity for owned and paid and estimate the return for earnt media activity.
We deliver a comprehensive social media editorial calendar where we plot all planned activity and ensure campaign synergy. The calendar includes: activity, platform, campaign theme/target, topic, the owner (responsible for content/posting), publish date and duration along with a URL to the final content, once signed-off.
Future Platform Development: In addition, to developing an editorial calendar, we also, look at future channels or development opportunities. This ensures we have an expansion growth plan as well as being prepared if any platforms go down for an extended period. This is what we experienced with Meta (Facebook) in 2021!
Collaborations & Partnerships: Networks and communities
By partnering with local businesses, you win on multiple fronts, people like supporting local businesses. You share the benefit, local businesses increase their social media in parallel, and you can share the cost of the prizes or incentives offered. It’s a WIN-WIN-WIN!
Web: How will the hub of your business evolve, and what improvements and efficiencies would either improve the CTA or enhance the users’ experience?
Customer Experience: This is often an area that fails to be considered, specifically when it comes to future optimization. We consider all elements of the CX and develop an action plan where we continuously look for improvements.
Campaign Development
Campaign Objectives: Everything needs a SMART objective and a plan, but the most important ways in which we will ensure success is by designing and executing a comprehensive holistic campaign. In addition to developing the plan, we look at A/B testing as well as having contingencies if the campaign is not meeting expectations.
Some examples of campaign objectives:
- Increase website traffic
Measures: # of visitors are coming from your social media channels, the share of traffic from SM, bounce rates from SM traffic
- Increase brand awareness
Measures: reach of social media posts, mentions/shares
- Boost brand engagement
Measures: comments per post, likes, shares, mentions
Overall Business Objectives:
We consider objectives from a business standpoint initially, and then subsequently determine the functional and social media objectives.
| Business Objectives | Social Media metrics | How we measure | Result examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Increase website traffic – inform educate | Acquisitions social | Google Analytics to measure traffic and site engagement | 15% more web traffic versus YAG, 10 % more time spent in educational portal |
| Increase brand awareness, increase customer conversion | Response / comments | IG Social Media dashboards Hootsuite | Increased review engagement / tags / forwards / reach |
| Boost Brand engagement / Drive penetration & trust | Response / comments | FB Social Media dashboards Hootsuite | Increased comments/likes |
Defining Channels:
It is usually not realistic to be on every channel. Businesses don’t have the resources. If you’re selling senior cruises, you can avoid Snapchat and TicTok as an example.
As an example, Facebook and Instagram could consist of your core strategy. We look at each platform to determine how the characteristics would best connect with the target audience personas.
- FACEBOOK: Consideration – traffic
Rationale: Leverage FB community, raise awareness improve efficiencies
- INSTAGRAM: Awareness:
Rationale: Leveraging community partners to reach followers goals, Leveraging giveaways as an incentive
Measuring What Matters
Targets & Benchmarks: Targets are either set using previous campaign results, or industry benchmarks. Each component will in turn support one or more of our social media objectives. This will be tracked and measured against KPIs, which will ensure we are achieving both the desired results and getting good ROI.
We determine specific metrics for each component of the campaign and measure what we are trying to achieve. If these measurements are not being met we have contingencies to put into play, this type of flexibility and adaptability ensures ROI is always the guiding objective.
Stewardship: Determines how we will track target metrics. If goals are not being met, how will we optimize or fast adapt campaigns, depending on the garnered results?
Sterling Steps can also, manage the content on social media ensuring the content follows brand fundamentals and brand story. We can also, manage the interaction with followers and respond to comments or questions, this will ensure a consistent and timely response.
Vanity versus Value Metrics: Measuring a combination of both vanity and value metrics. A greater emphasis will be placed on Value metrics, but both are important:
Examples of what we measure:
- Website traffic measures will include # of visitors, # of visitors who are coming from your social media channels, share of traffic from SM, bounce rates from SM traffic, # of unique visitors, time on site, enquiries completed.
- Brand awareness measures will include, reach of social media posts, mentions/shares, # of followers, friends, tags and likes.
- Boost brand engagement measures will include comments per post, likes, shares, mentions, tags, # of followers.
Budget Schedule/Placement:
Budget: It is important to manage campaign costs. It is all about the cost per click. We will monitor activity against results to determine an ongoing tracking of ROI. Campaigns will be run in different ways depending on their objectives, for example, some campaigns will be set up with a lifetime limit, where some will be managed variably.
Recommendations
All of this cumulates in the development of comprehensive recommendations and next steps. We can also, quantify the ROI and create comprehensive implementations plans, depending on the level of assistance that is required.
Some examples of recommendations:
- Producing Audience Personas
- Enhancing & leveraging brand story
- Elevate posts move away from rudimentary content
- Planned strategic posts, develop editorial social media calendar
- Monitor, evaluate and improve content
- Develop social media dashboard with standardized reporting
- Hashtag optimization
- Test & learn – optimizing messages interaction,
- Facebook – page optimization, closed groups
- YouTube channel development
Summary
Sterling Steps can ultimately support you from idea and concept development to fully-fledged strategic plans, which cover social, web, and customer experience. Our objective is to optimize your business and future-proof it so that not only do you stay ahead of your competition, but you also lead it!
