Adapting your marketing strategy for social media

For a great marketing strategy to work across social media, it needs to be adapted to fit different channels.

That takes planning and preparation before embarking on proactive engagement. Which conversations do you want to involve yourself in, and which ones do you want to leave well alone? How will your tone of voice and messages resonate with social media users?

It’s easy to think that a brand’s marketing strategy will automatically work on social media, but that’s not usually the case. A social media campaign needs careful planning so that it fits the overall strategy, but is relevant for social media.

My advice to clients is to:

1. Think social when you’re building your overall marketing strategy. Specifically, consider which networks your audiences are on, and how you can adapt your strategy to appeal to them on different platforms
2. Create goals and KPIs for social media as well as for marketing. For example, raising brand awareness might be your purpose for marketing as a whole. But what does that look like on social? Think about what you’re measuring – is it simply the number of engagements or is it more complicated than that? Think about how you’ll measure how social media users respond to your campaign and how they react to individual pieces of content. And finally, plan how you’ll analyse that data and use the insight from it to continuously improve your approach
3. Create clear guidelines for content creators and community managers on what you’re trying to achieve on social media
4. Work on how to adapt your tone of voice guidelines for social media. Many brands assume their tone of voice should be exactly the same whether it’s on a billboard or on social. There’s a difference. You probably speak differently to your boss than you do to children, but you’ll still have an overarching tone of voice – something that makes the way you speak, you. And it’s no different when it comes to the various strands of marketing. Social’s much more intimate and conversational (the clue’s in the name) so you can generally afford to be a bit more informal on social.
5. Plan to deal with dissenters. Think about how you’ll manage complaints on social media and remember that your dealings are public – not the case on any other channel.

You may be adapting an existing marketing strategy for social media, or creating one from scratch. Following these guidelines will help your campaign be adapted for social and therefore more effective in connecting with your audience.