The Social Media mix
As I highlighted before, social media are very important for today’s marketer. Our consumer base is generally tired of emails (because they get so many of them), and direct marketing needs to be more and more a part of a highly targeted strategy that combines online and direct marketing.
The challenge is to figure out what is the right mix for you. Which medium to use, for which audience. So I thought I’d share some of the knowledge we gathered over the last 18 months in terms of how to configure your mix.
1. Start with defining your strategic goals. Generally speaking, there are about 5 of them:
- Increased revenue
- Lead generation
- Branding
- Improving business processes
- Improving your rankings in the search engines
2. Set your budget, and keep in mind these components:
- Internal resources – even if you weren’t required to budget down to this level, always keep in mind that using inhouse resources means they can’t work on something else. Therefore, there is a cost associated with their time, and you should know that cost
- Outside contractors you may need, such as developers, copy writers, video production people, photographers,…
- Advertising
You might find out there are some things you just can’t do because of budget restraints. Think about creative solutions then: a web cam is $20 – a video production team can easily run $20,000 for a day.
3. Work out what your objectives are for your strategy, and by campaign. Examples are:
- Increased web site traffic by X% within Y months
- X leads (by channel) a week
- A lead to sale conversion ration of X% within Y months
- An increase in sales of X% in Y months
These goals are not static. You might find out you were overly ambitious, in which case you need to reconfigure without spending more money, or you might be blowing your numbers out of the water, in which case you still reconfigure to chase incremental revenue, after the party of course.
4. Figure out your key ratio’s from a budgeted perspective: budgeted ROI, budgeted promo break even, budgeted promo profit, budgeted cost per lead, budgeted sales conversion ratio etc. Measure against these ratio’s. A good plan is one that gets reviewed and evaluated on a weekly basis. Otherwise you can’t be flexible and adapt to whatever new opportunity or challenge that arises.
5. Pull out your creative brief template and your Brand promise document. Figure out which demographics you are going after, and set up different campaigns for each target group. Don’t try and span all of them with the same campaign – things can get very confusing that way. Then look at what your core messaging should be, what your value proposition is, and your competitive differentiators. Find out what your competition does, and be better.