By now, you have heard the term social media marketing if not engaged in it a little. Social media is the cornerstone of a business’s marketing plan. Being on social media is the easy part, but using social media properly to further your business can be difficult. There are usually two paths which you can take: do it yourself or hire a third party agency. Both require a social media marketing strategy to be in place before starting. For an agency, a marketing brief is usually preferred. This will allow them to understand a little bit about your company and what you want to be done. Even if you do not wish to pursue an agency, creating a social media marketing brief is a good exercise. The easiest way to start is by asking yourself the following questions:
Who are you?
This covers the background of your organization. Provide detailed information on your company. This can cover anywhere from your businesses activities to your company history. Be sure to include your company’s competitive advantages. What makes your organization different from the competitors? In this section, you should also include a list of consumers, organizations, and other businesses your company intends to serve or work with. This will give the agency a full depiction of your business model.
After a brief company description, paint a picture of your organization’s brand identity. Use personal attributes you would associate with your brand. Sometimes this is done by creating one-word adjectives that you feel describe your company. For example, a computer company might use the words modern, electric, and fast to describe itself. Once you have a couple of words, expand these ideas into sentences. Another easy way to convey your brand identity is to create a mission statement. This should be a statement or sentence that describes your company’s goals.
Following the brand identity, write about the vision of your company. This should be a mental image of where you want your business to be in the future. If you have the knowledge, include how you plan to achieve this vision. Showing your future steps to the agency can translate well into your social media marketing. It will allow the agency, or yourself, to create a better strategy around a clear vision.
Who is your audience?
This question should cover your target audience. Defining your target market can be difficult. Many businesses will say that everyone is within their target market, but this is simply not true. Think of the group of people who will be receiving your product and/or service. This is the group of people you believe will want and use your product and service the most. Provide research to back up your claims.
After your target audience is defined, provide information on that demographic. This can include marital status, disposable income, or education levels. Apart from demographic information, it is also important to show their behavioral patterns. How does this group of people interact with other businesses? Are they loyal? Does this group of people critique more than average? This is important for your social media. Understanding your target demographic and their behaviors can allow you to create better content that engages your audience.
Lastly, define your customer relationship. Describe how you want to interact with your audience around their behaviors. These can be principles, practices or even guidelines that your organization should follow when interacting with customers. Specifically, for social media, this can include how you interact with an angry customer. Many people use social media as an outlet to review products and leave negative feedback on services. How will your company handle this?
What do you want to accomplish?
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This will be the largest section in your social media marketing brief. This should cover your social media objectives and define your overall goal. Here are just a couple social media marketing objectives you can use:
- Increase brand awareness. A study looked at key objectives and what senior marketers thought were important. 94% of respondents chose increasing brand awareness was a key objective. This marketing technique allows you to expose your product, service, and company to people in your target demographic. This may also include attracting new customers to drive online sales. A future goal would be to increase brand awareness outside your target demographic leading to more publicity.
- Educate on brand updates and promotions. This can be a tool for updating customers on important company information, including new product lines or company milestones. Promotions can include discounts or special offers that can increase customer traffic to your website.
- Build up brand identity. This can show your audience what defines your company. It may include advertising values that you find important or showing your company culture. This will allow customers to get a better idea about your entire company.
- Feedback and support. As stated above, social media can be used as an outlet for angry customers. An objective could be to analyze the feedback and to provide customer support. Interacting with customers is important and is one of many ways to successfully market your company.
- Attract employees. One way to utilize social media is to attract new employees. Showing a comfortable company work environment or simply posting job openings can increase the awareness of company opportunities.
After defining your objectives, the next step is to break down how these will be accomplished. Define the content that can be created specifically for each of the objectives you have named. An easy way to create a successful social media plan is to follow the SMART acronym. Be Specific, make sure the plan is Measurable, it should be Accurate, Realistic, and it can be done in a Timely manner. For example, explaining the maintenance of your social media pages. This may include maintenance of media pages, content, design, photos, videos, etc. Another example is to define your brand voice that will be used to build brand identity.
Lastly, you must answer how will you measure the success of your objectives. This includes creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are measures that evaluate the success of the objective, usually quantifiable. For example, increasing brand awareness can have KPIs of new followers, a number of subscriber growth, average likes per post, etc.
Other Specifications
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Although the previous question covers the majority of a social media marketing brief, it is important to have a couple other specifications. The first is IT specifications. You want to make sure your technical side is covered as you venture into new social media.
Next, define how you want to be presented with social media reports. If you are doing your marketing plan yourself, this may include searching for programs that give you reports. The data should be broken down easily and show the success of each social media campaign. Sprout Social is a great example of a social media reporting tool. If you are going to an agency, this is the part of the brief where you will state which ways you want to see your data. This includes the duration of reports (monthly, weekly, quarterly), format, and information.
Lastly, conclude with any additional information you deem important. This may include legal contracts between you and the agency such as intellectual property or a non-disclosure clause. Naturally, you want the brief to be tailored to your social media marketing needs.
Although we have gone through a lot of information, this only serves as an introduction into the world of social media. What can you think of that is important for social media briefs? What are other objectives that are important? Let us know your thoughts.
Guest Contributor: Lori Wade is the content writer and a career specialist for college students. She is a content marketer, sharing experience on writing, education, and self-development in her publications, for example, https://eliteessaywriters.com/blog/essay-topics-for-middle-school/. Connect with her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.
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