Delivering Results with Strategy, Not Social Media

I‘m coordinating the marketing of an event for a client that takes place at the end of the month. My goal is to fill the place.

Now social media is a big part of this: I’m running a digital marketing campaign which includes Facebook, Twitter, a blog and a podcast. Between now and the date of this event there’ll be a lot of online and offline activity.

As a business you may well have an event (or product launch) coming up. The thing is that if you’re a newbie at using social media to promote a key date in your business schedule, there is absolutely no point going out there and just “going for it” online.

From the outset you have to define your goal(s) â€“ in my case, filling the event with qualified leads.

It’s from this starting point that you should outline your content marketing strategy for the campaign. I find it easiest to open up a spreadsheet and plot the dates between the start and climax of the campaign.

Next up, I plot out the content that’s necessary during the campaign: for example, blog posts on certain days, tweets, video, and audio.

There is absolutely no point in starting the campaign by broadcasting. Shouting out “Hey, we’re having a bash. Come along!” won’t generate that much interest. Not unless you have a very loyal bunch of followers.

Plot your success

It’s much better to build your campaign slowly, like a fire that smolders before catching light and blazing away. For example, if you’re, say, opening a Japanese restaurant in Stockholm next month you might start out by sharing a recipe or two on your blog and mentioning it on Twitter. You might create a video of Anu perfecting her miso soup with that secret sauce that makes it so great and sharing it on Facebook and YouTube. The people who follow you and share your love of oriental cuisine might well share it with their friends, who in turn do the same. Especially if it’s really cool, cute or striking in someway positive.

If you jump straight to the “ten percent off if you come in the first week” I don’t think you’re doing enough to get people through the door. Sure, some might be attracted by the opportunity of a good deal, but it’s so frequent that you see this tactic that it’s water off a duck’s back. I hardly ever listen to that kind of promotion.

How often, though, do you get a real sense of the people behind the counter who make the soup, sharing their passion for sushi on video, giving you that secret sauce to make your food stand out? That builds something more.

People don’t remember what you say or do, but they do remember how you make them feel. Let your content make them feel excited, intrigued, entertained and so on.

Start up Excel

In your spreadsheet if you can plot out the campaign, outlining the content you’re going to create and slowly up the ante so that finally you introduce the key value proposition (in the case of the fictional Japanese restaurant “a friendly, small but stylish restaurant that generously shares tips to improve your enjoyment of Japanese food), and deliver in accordance with this, you are more likely to find that your content marketing is persuasive and strikes a chord with your target audience.

For the campaign I’m running, I’ve been laying the foundations on Facebook, a podcast, a blog and Twitter, building a community of interest since August. This week the offline adverts that we’ve created went out to the media as the key value propositions start to be put out there in the wider community. Between now and the end of the month this will become even more intense.

Ultimately, if you’re going to deliver results with social media and online content marketing it needs to be carefully thought out and part of a strategic plan that starts out entertaining, sharing something of interest, something of value before the call-to-action is dropped into the play.

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