If your Social Media Campaigns aren't working, here's the reason why:

Social Media, at a campaign level, requires more time and resources than you may expect.  It’s a simple process, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

If you want to have social media campaign success you absolutely, positively need to do an social media project plan (work scope).  There is no way around this.

How to do an
Social Media Campaign Project Plan.

There are four basic steps you should do first.

First, a get a good grip on your customer groups.  

• What and how many different customer groups do you have?  Where do they live.  What social media do they use frequently.  What are the reasons they use a  particular social media?  You’re probably going to need some geocoding and “psychographic” coding of your customers.
• What social media programs have you seen that you admire?  Dig into those as see what makes them work.

Next, resources

• What tools do you have?  Simple accounts with the media you choose aren’t enough.  You’ll need HubSpot, HootSuite and others.
• Do you have social media automation? How about email automation?  Have you considered it?  Have  you measured the costs vs benefits?
• What kind of social campaigns are you doing now?  List them by type and time of year.  Do you have formal tracking and monitoring tools?
• Do you have a budget for each campaign and each medium? Is it adequate?  Or, is it just a number with no research behind it?
• Do you have dedicated people resources to create, produce, monitor, measure and report the campaign? Or is this a part-time responsibility for a company employee? Or, is this a “get to it when I have a free minute” kind of thing?
• Do you have a third-party (agency or vendor) who is responsible for creating content on a systematic basis?  Are you pleased with the results?  Or, are unhappy, but not enough to switch to a better alternative?  Is this a budget issue?
• Do  you have a means to realistically prepare budgets and ROI forecasts?

Do you know what success looks like?

• There are “typical social media interaction success rates,” by industry, which are helpful places to start.  They are not workable in specific cases, but at a campaign level they do provide some realistic expectations.  Do you have these measurements in-hand?
• Do you have your own goals and objectives, in writing?  Are they specific:
  • 5 email campaigns per month
  • 5 posts in each media, each month
  • Does each campaign incorporate unique website landing page?
  • Cost to produce each
  • Cost to send
  • Expected customer reactions i.e., views of your landing page or inquires to your company
  • Planned follow-up posts?
  • How are the above monitored?
  • Who manages customer engagement with your social media?
  • Who is responsible for managing viewer reply posts?
  • What’s your plan for managing the “haters”?

Finally, what’s the reason you want to engage with Social Media?  What will the resulting success look like?

• What is your product or service?  How does it stand up against competitors?  Do customer’s find it easy to sign up?  Do customers find that it is clearly to their advantage?
• What is your bank end product support like?  If customers have problems, how fast is support?  Is support out-sourced to a third party?
• Will your posts be valuable to your viewers?  Really?  Do you plan to entertain them?  Inform them?  Be memorable?  Engage in brand building?

The above is by no means an exhaustive list.  Think of it as the minimum project background you need to get done, before you can expect success.  People who avoid the planning and jump in, willy-nilly, are the same people who don’t believe in consulting a map before they take off for somewhere they’ve never been.  After all, they reason, how hard can it be?  When it comes to email campaigns, the answer is: it can me damned hard and a needless waste of time and treasury.

Find out what Email Campaign success looks like.

We can walk you thru Email Campaign project prep for free. 

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