3 things to consider internally before building your social media marketing strategy

Those of you who have fluent with the usual “offline” marketing strategy, will just think of how to allocate a certain marketing budget, and do a one-time campaign only for the social media marketing.  It can be disastrous if this is what you are doing…

Many of you will do marketing this way:

1. Think of a marketing budget.
2. Find some social media channels to work on.
3. Find a meaningless meaning to associate it with your brand.
4. Spend it and see ROI.

While ROI is very important in every company, consumers don’t like to be sold.  They like to be wooed.  Check out some of the dating rules to woo your clients here.  We are all still human beings.  And the social media has brought the brands closer to the consumers.  Consumers like to discuss with brands directly.  Consumers like to be online ambassadors where they can copy and paste your brand logo, and talk about you in their own forum.  And if you as the brand custodian are going to communicate with the consumers, it will simply make them even more excited about it.

1. Build your social media marketing with the “crisis management” in mind

As you build a community on the web, everybody will have a chance to communicate with you and amongst themselves.  This will become a channel for you to communicate when there’s a problem arise that requires you to find a way to announce things to the public as quickly as possible.  It is not easy to build this channel immediately… It requires time and effort… Hence, your ROI should be to build your tribe – a community where they are willing to hear what you want to tell them about.

2. Build your social media marketing talents in your company

There are a lot of brands out there who are using inexperienced social media talents (find out how to hire social media talents here) to build a community.  In fact, it can be really dangerous to have all these “internet-disabled” marketing communication personnels to work out an online marketing communications for their companies.  (Even for myself, I wouldn’t dare to say I am good… I am always learning, and I will keep on improving myself or with the company.)

Just imagine that only those of us who have quite experienced on the social media are probably a minority working for a brand… If the whole team is not very experienced with the social media, it can be inefficient because they will never understand why we need to do it this way or that way.  (Basically, we need a team who have certain understanding of social media so that we can work effectively.)

3. Build your social media marketing with a “termination  clause” in mind

I don’t understand why a lot of brands are not building social media with an end in mind.  Every contract on earth has a termination clause.  But why social media is not having such a clause?  If there isn’t any clause to terminate, the employees will think that they have to maintain this social media site for the rest of their lives.  If not, the sites will just get stagnant.  This is really bad for the brand…

Image Credit: MediaLife2009