Brand strategy in social media. How to create an SMM strategy that will explode social media

Today there is no longer any need to explain how important its presence on social media is for a business. Paradigm competition for the client today has shifted from one-way sending a message to many recipients, as was the case in outbound marketing, towards personalized, interactive communications that attract the target audience to the brand.

TO key factors The success of a business's marketing strategy now also includes how deeply it is integrated into modern communication channels. Finding new clients, increasing the loyalty of existing ones, becoming an expert in the industry whose opinion is listened to and trusted - all this can be achieved by choosing the right social media promotion strategy.

Simply creating fan pages on popular social media is no longer enough. Without a clear SMM strategy you will not achieve required level engaging the audience to increase sales.

To get the most out of inbound marketing, your SMM strategy should go through the following stages:

● Define key goals in the SMM strategy

● Conduct a SWOT analysis of social media

● Develop a content strategy as part of the SMM strategy

● Prepare a content plan as part of the SMM strategy

● Analyze and adjust SMM strategy

Step 1. Determine the key goals in the SMM strategy

Any long-term project begins with planning. Social media is no exception. Without a clear idea and defining clear and achievable goals, nothing will work.

Different goals require different approaches to achieving them. For example, if your goal is to increase customer trust, then this requires a completely different approach than if your goal was to get a 30% conversion rate among subscribers.

Start by describing three key goals you plan to achieve using social media.

Particularly important last parameter- measurability. Without it, you will not be able to track progress in achieving the global and intermediate goals of your business, which are indicated in the SMM strategy. To determine how measurable a goal is, ask yourself the question “Is the goal achieved partially or completely?” If you are immersed in many hours of thought, but still cannot answer specifically, then this means the goal cannot be accurately measured.

It is also very important that the goals in the SMM strategy are related to your strategic business goals. They must overlap in the areas of sales and marketing.

Three global goals of your SMM strategy:

Step 2: Conduct a SWOT analysis of social media.

At this stage, you need to understand who is currently interacting with your brand on social media and how this audience corresponds to your target market, in which social media your brand is present target audience what social networks your competitors use. You must analyze and objectively evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and compare them with opportunities and threats from competitors.

Wherever you want to go, you first need to understand where you are now

Conduct an audit. You need to start by checking the official and unofficial representations of your brand on social media. These could be fan pages, pages with reviews of former employees, malicious sites that pretend to be official. Check out these pages to see how many followers you have, how active they are, and the tone of your messaging regarding your brand.

Conduct a survey. If your business is not yet present on social media, then the first thing you should do is analyze and determine the criteria for selection social networks. Conduct a survey among your clients and you will find out which social media they prefer.

It is important to use the information obtained in conjunction with socio-demographic data.

Monitor the presence of your main competitors on social media. Rate yours strengths and compare them with competitors.

Step 3. Develop a content strategy as part of your SMM strategy

Now that you have collected necessary information, you will be able to answer the questions “How?”, “To whom” and “Where?”. It remains to answer the question “What?” This key element your communication with your audience.

Understanding your brand identity is also key to understanding the type of content your brand should source. Content marketing should help shape and promote a unique, individual brand image.

Step 4. Prepare a content plan as part of the SMM strategy

Your task is to create and publish content that, firstly, will be of interest to the reader, and secondly, will contribute to achieving the goals of the SMM strategy. The content you publish should reflect the interests of the audience you are publishing it for. And also habits, behavior and motivation.

Inbound marketing is an endless experiment. Only through experience is it possible to create what the consumer needs, and not the departments in your company

The entire content marketing production process is based on a predetermined content plan. By now you should have an editorial calendar in which you have outlined your goals, topics, and keywords.

Now it is necessary from general idea go to specifics. The topic and keywords will indicate to you the conditional direction of movement, within the framework of which you need to move towards the goal. This approach narrows the space for creativity, but at the same time directs your thinking.

The content creation process is described in detail in our article “The Content Creation Process. Six steps from idea to publication”

Step 5. Analyze and adjust the SMM strategy

Deep understanding of your audience is critical to achieving your goals with using SMM strategies. Use analytical tools to understand what type of content is most in demand by your subscribers. Study audience behavior and identify insights.

Use analytics tools to understand who is reading, commenting and sharing your content.

Once you've analyzed your current campaign, take stock of what's working and what's not. Make additions and changes to your SMM strategy.

As a result

Analytics, SMM strategy and content marketing are the three pillars of digital communications. The Jedi who understands their power will only move forward - increasing brand awareness, building long-term communication, increasing engagement, increasing customer trust and increasing sales tenfold.

Use this knowledge and may the Force be with you!

Strategic planning in SMM is often given less attention than the content or media component. This is a big mistake that can lead to negative consequences for the entire project. Strategic planning is the basis, thanks to it we can understand what the content should be, for which audience we are producing it, or how to plan media flights so that they are more effective, etc.

1. Goals and objectives

The first thing to do is to clearly formulate global goals, and then determine a list specific tasks, the solution of which will allow these goals to be achieved. It seems that it couldn’t be easier, but this point is often forgotten.

2. Segmentation of target audience

Suppose you know that your audience is women and men from 20 to 45 years old with an average income level, living in large cities of Russia. This is already something, but it is not enough to develop a full-fledged strategy. You need to dig deeper, and for this there is audience segmentation. Its essence is to divide the existing target audience into narrower segments and give them names in accordance with the principle by which we divided them.

For example:

Given: m/f, 20-45, Russia, big cities

Segmentation result:

3. Target audience profile

When the target audience has already been segmented, you can go even further - describe the profile of each user group. This means that you need to highlight any characteristics, interests and character traits inherent in target audience segments.

For example:

This is a simplified example. You can do more detailed descriptions, with breakdowns by territory: home and family, career, travel and leisure.

4. Behavioral trends

The next step for an even more complete understanding of the audience is to describe the bright trends in the behavior of people who fall into the segments of our target audience.

5. Media consumption

Media consumption is one of the non-trivial blocks of strategy, which is often neglected, but knowledge about what information resources consumes the target audience, can be very useful for building successful work. This is especially important in order to correctly identify the sites on which it is necessary to build work with each audience segment.

An example of media consumption might look like this:

6. Drivers and barriers

Drivers are what stimulates the target audience to consume your product, and barriers are what holds them back from this consumption.

To get a clearer picture, you can consider drivers and barriers in terms of both the audience itself and the product.

Here's what such a diagram might look like.

7. Communication plan

The communication plan clearly shows in what periods certain tools and platforms will be used. This makes it possible to plan the chronology of actions and avoid any overlaps.

Plans may vary in detail, but basic version there should be a division into three main blocks: Paid, Owned and Earned, which are located on one scale, and on the other - time periods, the number of which depends on the planning period.

*Paid - Owned - Earned - Purchased - Owned - Acquired media.

8. KPI planning

One of the most pressing questions. Simply putting some nice number and saying that this is a KPI will not be correct, because planning is a more meaningful process.

Here are the main questions to ask yourself during the planning stage:

9. Insight

Insight is a deep consumer need that is difficult to realize due to existing problems or restrictions. It is best to formulate it in one, maximum two sentences.

Insight example:

10. The role of the brand

A meaningful SMM strategy always declares some role the brand/product plays in interacting with users on social media. Simply put, the role of a brand is the role that a brand plays in communicating with its consumer on social media. An example of the role of a brand: a guide to the world high technology, friend and assistant in matters of healthy eating, etc.

Red Keds has historically had strong strategic expertise: the strategy department has a good team of specialists who deal with a wide range of tasks within their profile. In my opinion, very important point successful work on an SMM project is the interaction between strategists and SMM specialists. We managed to build an effective scheme for the work of two departments, formalizing this into a single process, but this is a topic for a separate publication.

This article is an example of such interaction. I would like to express special gratitude to Red Keds strategist Lena Nenasheva for her help in preparing this material.

The site has already published an article by Burson-Marsteller analysts on similar topics. The article described the degree of involvement in social media top 100 companies from the Fortune Global 500 list. This article contains the view of Alexander Blokhin, a view from Russia.

By the beginning of 2010, most companies had already tasted social media. Many people bought review publications on blogs, some created their own community on some major social network, some even made videos that would later spread virally.

However, this entire presence was disorganized and disorganized; 2010 and 2011 should become a point for many companies to reconsider their communications on social media. Companies will either begin to streamline what is on at the moment, or create everything anew if investments in social media were small and it is more profitable to create everything from the beginning rather than organize existing unsuccessful activities.

Before writing about a social media presence strategy, I would like to show where social media is in a company's business and what can be expected from it.

Hierarchy of strategies

Let's start with the fact that the goal of any commercial organization is to make a profit from its activities. And the company owner comes to the marketing department with a specific goal - “more money is needed.” The marketing department, in turn, knows several basic ways to make money.

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More money can be obtained if:

1. more people will buy the company's goods;
2. each person will buy the company’s product more often;
3. The company will receive more money from each sale.

If marketing decides that more people need to buy a company's product, the goal of marketing communication becomes, for example, increasing awareness. The more people know about the product, the more people will try the product (trial users), the more people will turn into regular customers (monthly users).

When awareness of a company's products is high enough, marketing decides to increase the frequency of use of the product by creating new consumption situations or launching a loyalty program.

When marketing decides to earn more per purchase, then either the marketing and production costs of the product are reduced while maintaining the cost, or the cost of the product is increased while maintaining the production and marketing costs. The last point entails branding (that is, consumers no longer pay only for the product, but also for the brand).

For each of the solutions (increasing awareness, creating loyalty, creating a brand), a communication strategy can be developed, which is also built from audience insights. The communication strategy, through audience insights, research and market trends, includes answers to the questions “what to say,” “when to say it,” and “where to say it” about the product. And with the question “where” there is an understanding that part of the audience is on the Internet. And then a digital strategy is developed for the Internet.

Digital marketing takes care of all interactive interaction with the consumer. Some of this interaction is on social media, and there is another strategy for dealing with it.

Here's what the hierarchy looks like from social media presence strategy to business strategy:

We can also recall the 4P marketing theory, according to which marketing is based on four “coordinates”: product, price, promotion and location (product, price, promotion, place).

Most main conclusion What needs to be concluded from everything that is written above is that social media alone cannot solve the problem of marketing, and therefore business. It is impossible to increase sales through social media, as well as through advertising in general. Through communication you can convey information about the product. Whether they buy this product or not depends on the price, the product itself and distribution. These are the basics of marketing that are taught almost everywhere. Then why do speech topics appear on the topic of selling through social media? I wonder if at these presentations they talk about promoting FMCG in social media? Do they sell shampoos and chocolate bars through communities and social media profiles? It is also important to pay attention to the following rule. Achieving the goal low level should contribute to achieving the goal high level. That is, achieving the goals of presence in social media should contribute to achieving the goals of the digital strategy. And achieving digital goals should help solve communication problems. According to this rule, it is easy to check whether you are doing what or not.

So, the conclusions of the first part:

1. Social media presence should not conflict with digital, communication, marketing and business strategies.
2. A social media presence strategy should help achieve digital marketing goals.
3. Presence on social media (like digital promotion and advertising) does not solve the issue of sales.

New strategy

Social media marketing and digital marketing in general have their own characteristics. Mitya Voskresensky from Red Keds wrote well about them (see “A New Approach to Strategic Planning”). These features and the fact that the Internet is not a media channel, but a new environment, force us to come up with a separate strategy for digital (see also “”). And here's why:

1. A communication strategy designed for a “monologue” is not suitable for a “dialogue” This thesis relates to the already boring advice “don’t write press releases on the blog.” The communication developed in ATL is most often not suitable for communicating with an audience on the Internet. ATL communication is designed so that it is not interactive, nor does it imply that the user will be able to “reply.”
2. Mechanics and creativity are limited by the capabilities of the platforms In ATL advertising, creativity extends to all media: a video is made, and a print can be made from the video, which can be placed outdoors and in the press. If desired, make a radio commercial. On the Internet, the creativity, the mechanics of interaction with users that were invented for one platform (for example, VKontakte) most likely will not suit another (YouTube). And what was invented for VKontakte and YouTube will most likely not be suitable for Twitter. All three sites are different; each site needs to come up with its own mechanics.
3. Measurability The Internet and digital provide many more metrics. Much more than needed. And the question is no longer how to measure, but what metrics to use to determine efficiency.
4. Real-time measurability In ATL advertising, everything is measured after the campaign. The company created a video, posted it on certain channels, waits for the campaign to end and only then measures everything, when hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been spent. On the Internet, if the distribution of the same video goes unsuccessfully (the wrong strategy was chosen), we can either simply stop the campaign or change it. And we don't have to keep wasting money. In the case of ATL, we only find out whether we wasted money or not after the campaign.

In addition, in digital there is an opportunity to create platform communications. And this is a definite plus.

Platform communications and activations

Before we talk about platforms and activations, you need to understand that on the Internet there are three main channels for conveying a message from a company to a user - paid, owned and earned media. A similar division of channels is used in large Western advertising agencies(e.g. R/GA, Critical Mass, Sapient, Isobar). Here's a summary table that defines each channel and shows the benefits and challenges of using it.

Owned, paid and earned media

Communications in digital and social media are of two types: platforms and activations.

Platforms are the company’s own channel for distributing information, its own media. There is also a good definition in Mitya Voskresensky’s presentation: Activations are advertising campaigns aimed at solving a specific problem. Activation tasks are tasks advertising campaign. For example: announcing information, supporting the launch of a new product, increasing website traffic. Also, through activations, they attract an audience to the platform, and the platform, with a competent strategy, retains this audience. For activations, platforms are often used first of all, and then, if it was not possible to earn media, the missing contacts with the audience are purchased (paid media are used). In order to avoid confusion, I will give a few examples (otherwise, on one side of the activation they use platforms, and on the other side of the activation they promote the platform).

GMail Art

Google Company in Russia has a YouTube channel ( youtube.com/GoogleRU), which has less than 2,000 subscribers and corporate blog, which is read by 15.5 thousand people. These are all proprietary media companies. The Saatchi&Saatchi Russia agency shot a GMail Art video that has viral potential. If the video had simply been posted somewhere, it would have been seen small number users, or would have to spend resources on seeding.

But the video was posted in their own Google channels Russia, where a little more than 10,000 people saw it. Thus, the company, due to the fact that it has a platform, received 10,000 contacts among loyal users. Further, due to the fact that the video had viral potential, part of the loyal audience either posted the video somewhere on their site (on a blog, on a social network), or transmitted the video via IM to their friends. This created a viral effect and the video collected 530,000 views.

Coca-Cola Happiness Machine

A similar story happened recently with Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Company owns the world's largest platform. On Facebook Coca-Cola drink loved by 5.6 million people. And any brand message is seen by tens and hundreds of thousands of loyal users, which allows American Coca-Cola not to spend money on such things as sowing. The Coca-Cola Happiness Machine video went viral worldwide with 2.3 million views after 70,000 fans of the Facebook page saw it and talked about it further.

Coca-Cola actively uses this platform and each post gives the brand from 400 to 700 thousand contacts. Every person who clicks the Like link or comments on a post shows the message to their friends. On average, each user on Facebook has 140 friends. More details are written about Coca-Cola and its platforms in the article “”.

IKEA on Facebook

To support the opening of a new IKEA store in Malmo, Sweden, the company used the photo tagging feature (you can tag yourself and your friends in any photo). IKEA uploaded twelve photos of IKEA interiors to Facebook and offered users a game: whoever tags themselves first on an item will receive it for free. When a user tags themselves in a photo on Facebook, all their friends in their feed see it. The user's friends have a photo of an IKEA interior in their update feed, and all the user's friends will know about the opening of a new store.

Old Spice and Clearasil

The site has already written about the Old Spice and Clearasil applications on VKontakte. Companies invest in such platforms to accumulate audiences. Then this audience is informed about the brand’s new activities.

Conclusions

So here are a few takeaways across platforms and activations:

1. The platform is the brand's own media, which means it requires a lot of time on the part of the company, which does not necessarily pay off (see summary table by media type).
2. The stronger the brand platform, the less resources need to be spent on activations.
3. It is more efficient to invest money in the development of platforms, and to receive those contacts that are planned to be received as part of the activation for free through the use of the platforms.

Catalyst topic

Here I will talk about one feature of creating communities. Community is the very first platform that a business thinks about when it comes to social media. If a brand is not a lovemark, then it is impossible to build a community around the brand. We need a catalyst topic that will give participants food for discussion. If there is no such topic, the community will soon dry up, even if there are competitions and sweepstakes. People are not interested in talking about shampoos, TVs, chocolates, carbonated drinks, cigarettes, or the hairdresser. They are interested in communicating about other things that may be close in topic to the brand:

However, everything interesting topics» are already occupied by unbranded communities or other brands. Therefore, you need to think longer and come up with a catalyst topic that will not intersect with existing ones. Of course, there are product categories that are interesting to talk about. Off the top of my head, these are phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung), cameras (Canon, Nikon, Lumix), cars, computer games. That is, those products that require a long time of communication with the consumer (a telephone, a camera take a long time to set up, photography needs to be learned, a car always requires support, computer games require a long playthrough). So if you're promoting a brand that isn't fun to talk about, come up with a catalyst theme. One of them good examples in Russia it is Clearasil. It's not interesting to talk about an acne remedy. It's interesting to be someone who knows what he wants and is not afraid to change.

Conclusions:

1. If you are not a lovemark, come up with a catalyst theme.
2. Communities should not live on competitions and gifts, but on the fact that users exchange content with each other.
3. Platform communications may differ from general marketing communications.
4. Communication on the platform should not contradict the overall brand communication.

Bottom line

At the moment, I am of the opinion that a social media presence strategy should be based on a single platform, which in turn unifies the brand’s presence on various platforms.

Other findings:

1. No money should be spent on activations that do not enhance the platform. Only platform resources should be spent on such communications.
2. Most likely, communication in social media should be different from communication in ATL, but not contradictory to it.
3. Social media presence must be structured, taking into account the company's business goal, platform and competitor activations.
4. Ideally, social media presence should be integrated into your overall advertising strategy.
5. It is necessary to understand the user journey from each element of the online presence to the main web platform.

This material can be used as instructions for use. If you need to promote your page on a social network, just open the text and proceed step by step!

I tell you how to use an integrated approach based on statistics, analysis and involvement in promoting your business effective tools for SMM promotion. I have developed 7 steps that will help you develop your page from scratch and make it interesting for your customers.

Step #1. Defining the concept of community

Your page should convey a certain concept. If this concept has already been formed within your business, this is a significant plus. The concept should represent the leading idea, a set of views of the company’s management on current problems customers, and how your business or product can solve these problems.

For example: there is no effective and fast service for pizza delivery. Our service helps restaurants deliver their goods to the consumer on time, and for the consumer it ensures fast and inexpensive delivery pizza, maintaining its taste, temperature and taste properties.

Remember that the concept determines the strategy of action and influences further methods of promotion on social networks.

Step #2. Setting goals

We set ourselves goals that will increase key business performance indicators. Goals need to be set and based on SMART system, that is, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, controllable.

In our case, we write the following goals:

• Identify our competitors and analyze their activity on social networks.
• Identify and analyze our target audience.
• Optimize our page for the audience.
• Develop a content plan for all segments of our target audience.
• Identify the most effective and profitable tools for page development.
• Test the tools and analyze their effectiveness.
• Start leading a group.

Step #3. Data collection and analytics

This can be done by an individual specialist, an agency, or you yourself. This period includes the following activities:

• Identify all possible competitors and analyze what they do to attract users and how effectively. Based on monitoring key queries(wordstat), the number of users and measurement of user activity can identify the leading market players.
• Selection based SMM tools and statistics of core audiences of competitor groups ( active core, moderately active core, inactive core). What is the core audience? It often happens that in a group or page, 10-15% of users from the total number of subscribers regularly engage in user activity: liking posts, leaving comments, reposting on their pages, or actively leading discussions. If we consider the most active users, it is possible to identify certain patterns in their behavior and preferences.
• Conduct and collect user requirements for each core and develop custom scripts.

For example: Masha Ivanova, 23 years old, works in sales in Moscow, is single, loves smart solutions and life hacks for the home, adores beautiful design interiors, cats on Instagram and short useful texts.

Of course, these scenarios will be conditional, but they will help us develop content in the future that will take into account maximum user preferences.

• Identification of effective times for posting content (daily, weekly, monthly, holidays), using analysis of user activity in similar communities. For example, on Saturday morning you can publish material at 12:00, since only at this time your subscribers wake up.

Step #4. Page optimization

Optimization based on user page scenarios for all audience cores (Wiki markup, design, description, short URL, album titles, discussion titles, etc.). Here you really need to invest in a beautiful and nice design and if you have completed the previous steps, it will be much easier for you to explain to the designer what audience he is working for.

Step #5. Content plan development

The most interesting and the hard part work - developing a content plan for each core audience. You identify the topic and format of the post.

Example: Monday at 18:31 the history of the creation of the gadget should be published.

Now you must find sources of content. These could be RSS feeds, public pages, blogs, news publications, opinion leaders, copywriters, videographers, photographers, artists.

Describe the content requirements based on the text and title of posts. Indicate what media materials should be present in the group’s posts and albums. What topics should be raised by group members? Ideally, you receive a completed grid of post formats in a content plan for example for a month for posting. Based on these requirements, you can draw up requirements for outsourced performers: photographers, designers, etc.

Step #6. Testing and identifying effective tools

At this stage, you begin publishing your content on the page. To determine the effectiveness of the tools, you must not forget about collecting statistics. For example, track the number of transitions, count coverage, attract new users per day, week or other specific period of time.

Here you should focus on the ROI (return of investment) indicator - the ratio of the amount of profit or loss to the amount of investment. This indicator is expressed in % and will show you the most effective and ineffective channels for attracting audiences on the Internet (advertising exchange, banners, affiliate programs, paid publications and posts) for your page. From all these attraction channels, you remove ineffective, time-consuming and expensive ones.

Step #7. Resource development

You have done the almost impossible! You have collected content and systematic approach for its publication on social networks. You know your audience almost by sight and know what they like. Considering that quite a lot of money has been spent on analysis, a reasonable question arises: what more can be done? Using the data from these studies, you can not only improve your website, but also expand your business by offering new product or service.

On initial stage community development and business promotion on social networks, fill the group with content for about 20-30 posts. Coming by invitation or contextual advertising the user will want to scroll through the community feed and if you have 1-2 news, then most likely he will not subscribe to it.

On VKontakte it is better to first create a group (in Facebook is better create a page). VKontakte allows you to convert a group into a page and vice versa. The group will give you the opportunity to invite users for initial content. Invite only those users who may be interested in the group's materials or your business. Don't wait high conversion at the initial stage, create a comprehensive advertising campaign using an advertising exchange or direct placement through administrators of similar communities. Pay special attention to the advertising post, place a “shooting” picture in the context of the community in which you are advertising. Here's an example -