How to Create social media marketing strategy

Strategy is the thinking aspect of planning a change, organizing or planning something. Strategy lays out the goals that need to be accomplished and the ideas for achieving these goals.

The objective here is to create a clear strategy in line with the vision statement created earlier. This is a high level view of what needs to be done to achieve business objectives.

These objectives are part of the general business goals. The question that needs to be answered here is what do you want to accomplish with social media and how?

There are many social media platforms today, such as facebook, Twitter and Youtube and Myspace. The share number of social media sites makes it very important to have a strategy, and not a shot-gun approach in marketing using social media. A good strategy is the only way to avoid wasting time and resources in social media marketing.

Define your goals

Goals are necessary for measurement. You must define what the end result would look like for your company. This will help move the project forward. Expectations will help you stay realistic and focus.

1. Do you want to use social media to drive traffic to your site or solely focus on interaction?
2. Will your goal be best served with using social community or create your own social media environment.

Some of the core goals that could be parts of your strategy are:

1. Build brand awareness
2. Generate more leads
3. Generate more sales
4. Strengthen relationships with clients, prospects, and influencers
5. Build a better understanding of your buyers
6. Increase web site traffic
7. Improve customer service
8. Identify new product ideas
9. Improve search engine rankings
10. Drive targeted traffic to your web property or events

Traditional marketing methods do not necessary work on social media. Social media was created to share unbiased information about anything online. It is dangerous to inject old fashion marketing ideas into social media and hope to make it work.

How do you locate your audience, and what conversation are they carrying out? How do you become part of the conversation?  Other things to be included in the strategy are:

1. How do you inject yourself into the conversation in a positive way?
2. What voice will you use in the conversation with your audience?
3. What added value can you provide to your audience in terms of knowledge, opinion or content?
4. How do you interact with them to earn their trust?
5. After you have earned their trust, how can you ask for their attention for your product or service?
6. How do you create your sales funnel to point people from the conversation toward considering your product?