Answer five questions to fill in the blanks:
- Who do you want to engage?
- Where will you find them?
- How will you engage them?
- What will happen as a result of your engagement?
- How will you know you succeeded?
The first two questions establish a solid foundation for your entire approach.
Clarify who you want to engage
Social marketing messages delivered without defining your target audience and accounting for differences within that audience are destined to fail. Clarify which target audience you want to engage, what stage of the buying journey they are in and what they need.
Examine your customer personas to understand who uses social engagement in their customer journey. Connect personas with moments in the buying journey where social interactions can play a meaningful role. Where is your audience most likely to have the desired dialogue with you? Does this mean establishing a new presence on a new social network, or increasing investment in engagement tactics or paid advertising to make a connection with your existing social audience?
Find your audience
Locate the sites and tactics your audience uses most and where it is actively engaged to determine where to focus your efforts. Use social listening and analytics to uncover where the brand and category dialogue happens, where influencers drive the conversation and where engagement is high. Determine where you can cost-effectively and efficiently target your audience with paid social advertising.
“Form your tactics, content, tools, metrics, resource selection and investments by grounding them in the business objectives you seek to support,” said Mr. Wilson.