Establishing Your Major Social Media Objectives and Key Strategies

Jamie Turner and Dr. Reshma Shah

The Detroit Zoo had been an institution and a tourist destination for more than 80 years, but it now had a problem. Unbeknownst to most visitors, it faced financial hardship caused by circumstances that had begun a few years earlier.

The city of Detroit, which provided a significant portion of the zoo’s operating budget, cut all of its financial support of zoo operations in 2006. As the 2008 peak summer season approached, reality set in: In a matter of months, the money would run out. The zoo was faced with the very real possibility of closing its doors.

Only one option was left. The zoo had to appeal directly to taxpayers. A new tax was proposed to provide the necessary funding to keep the zoo afloat. Zoo management had to convince voters to pass the requested new tax, or the zoo would close. With the looming possibility that there would no longer be a Detroit Zoo and the impact that would have on the children of Detroit, zoo officials had just one objective for an integrated marketing campaign they were planning to launch: Get residents to vote “yes” on a new ten-year property tax to support the zoo.

Zoo management could have simply created an awareness campaign highlighting all the great attractions at the zoo. Or it could have created a promotional campaign appealing to visitors by offering some sort of discount or incentive. Instead, it chose to stay focused on the main issue at hand: raising money to keep the zoo afloat. By taking a step back and thinking through the situation before taking a step forward, they were able to identify three important factors leading to a successful campaign: the key drivers, the primary objectives, and the desired outcomes.

Don’t Just Create an Action—Create a Chain Reaction

Zoo management knew that it needed a message that would provoke not just action, but a chain reaction. They distilled the big idea into a single emotional concept: Our Zoo Is Worth Keeping. They also made it personal—“The Detroit Zoo Is Our Zoo”—and highly emotional, drawing attention to the interaction children have with the animals at the Zoo. By tapping into these key emotional drivers, they were able to set themselves up for success.

Advertising led this initiative, but it involved more than just a traditional advertising message. It relied on a powerful dialogue that used mass media and new media to create a conversation in the news and on the streets. A public relations and grass roots effort to get the “Worth Keeping” message to both residents and influencers kept the conversation front and center in the news for about a month leading up to the election.

When the vote was finally taken, zoo officials were pleased to find that voters had approved the new tax with larger margins than anyone had imagined. Having achieved this, zoo management was in a position to implement some of the strategies required to get people not only to see the zoo in a new light, but also to become re-engaged with the zoo in terms of attendance, volunteering, and finances.

How to Set Objectives That Get You Results

The main point of the Detroit Zoo example is that results such as these are attainable only when you 1) identify the key drivers for success, 2) develop specific campaign objectives, and 3) know exactly which outcomes you are seeking to achieve. The trick is to think through all this first, before you start to develop your approach or your strategy to achieve them.

Setting objectives and developing strategy takes discipline. It takes forming a unified view of the problem, making an assessment about desired outcomes, and having a shared vision within your organization on how to achieve those outcomes.

If you’re thinking that your organization has had trouble articulating just what you hope to achieve by using social media, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, many organizations have difficulty when it comes to setting realistic objectives for a social media program.

The Big Idea

When setting social media objectives, it’s important to be SMART. In other words, you need to set objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, results focused, and time specific. Only then can you determine the best strategy to take and the best customers to target.

Numerous articles and blog posts talk about how to set objectives for a social media campaign. The objectives mentioned range from driving Web site traffic to increasing customer engagement. But no matter what your stated objectives are, only one thing is important: You need to integrate your social media campaign into your marketing campaign so that they can both show a quantifiable return on your investment.

Moving Product

To many managers, the only meaningful objective for their promotional strategies is sales. They take the position that the basic reason to spend money on any kind of communications, including communications via social media, is to sell a product or service. This makes a lot of sense. Ultimately, the goal of any marketing program is to sell more products or services, resulting in more revenue, higher market share, and more profit.

Recently, two of the three largest oral care manufacturers, Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive, joined Procter & Gamble in marketing at-home tooth-whitening kits. In their product launches, Unilever spent about $20 million on Mentadent and Colgate allocated $60 million to Simply White. Colgate’s objective was to get an immediate $100 million in sales in the first year (a third of the total market); Mentadent focused on in-store efforts, sales promotions, ads in beauty magazines and on their Web sites, and professional outreach programs to gain its share of the market.

Sales-oriented objectives such as the ones Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive set for themselves can make a great deal of sense. But focusing only on sales objectives has its challenges. In the real world, poor sales can result from a number of uncontrollable factors, including product design, quality, packaging, distribution, pricing, demographic trends, and competitor actions. Furthermore, social media can make people aware of a brand, but it can’t make them buy it—particularly if something else is fundamentally wrong. For example, in the early 1990s, when Nabisco launched Snackwells, a line of reduced-fat and nonfat cookies, the advertising for Snackwells is what drove consumers to the stores. The advertising was brilliant, but the factories couldn’t meet the rate of the demand, and the store shelves were always short of packages.

Another problem with considering only sales-oriented objectives for social media is that the effects of advertising often occur over an extended period of time. Your social media marketing efforts can have a lag or a carryover effect. In other words, the money and time that you spend on social media efforts don’t necessarily have an immediate effect on sales. That doesn’t mean you should abandon your efforts. If you’re trying to grow your sales, you need to consider that the impact of social media may emerge over time and that, besides sales, social media may help you achieve other important milestones that lead to revenue growth.

Moving People

Marketing communications can have a cumulative effect over time and can result in various intermediate stages of persuasion that eventually lead to sales. Advertising and other forms of promotion, including all forms of social media, are designed to achieve communications such as brand knowledge and interest, favorable attitudes and image, and purchase intentions or leads. With some types of communication, you can’t expect a direct sales response immediately. Instead, marketers realize that they have to provide relevant information and create favorable predispositions toward a brand before customers purchase anything.

The Communications Effect Pyramid (see Figure 1) depicts the way social media helps move people—or trigger some kind of presales response. At the lower level of the pyramid, your brand’s communications first get people to pay attention to and become knowledgeable about the product or service. At the next level, the goal is to get people to develop an interest, a liking, and perhaps even a preference for your product or service. Beyond knowledge, you want people to develop feelings. Finally, at the top of the pyramid comes action. At this top level, people develop strong convictions, form purchase intentions, and finally purchase.

Figure 1 Understanding the consumer thought process is one step involved in setting objectives for your campaign.

Part of driving communications objectives involves encouraging prospective customers to start dialogues with you and with each other about your products and services. You want to get them engaged so that, over time, you can convert them to customers. If you do this correctly, existing customers will not only repurchase from you, but they will become strong advocates for your brand and help you continue the dialogue within and outside your brand community.

Whether you decide to focus on using your social media to drive immediate sales or future sales often depends upon where you sit in an organization. If you’re in the CEO or CFO office, you may be interested in driving immediate sales so that this quarter’s numbers look good to Wall Street. But if you’re in the CMO office or on the agency side, you might believe that building long-term demand is just as important as generating short-term sales blips.

In the end, the path you choose might boil down to whether you consider your social marketing efforts to be an investment that will show returns at some point in the future or whether you consider your social marketing efforts to be an investment that you must quickly recoup. To know how to balance these two major objectives of moving product and moving people, you might have to think about who is sitting in the CEO seat of your organization and understand what drives that person’s business strategy.

Developing Your Social Media Strategy

After you’ve outlined your specific social media objectives, you’re ready to develop a social media strategy. Your social media strategy is a subset of your overall marketing strategy. And your marketing strategy is a subset of your business strategy.

Keep all these factors in mind as you move forward with a social media campaign. After all, one-off marketing campaigns that create short-term blips don’t grow a business in the long run. Only well-thought-out campaigns with an eye toward strategy and execution succeed.

A successful social media campaign isn’t something to merely play around with in between meetings or to give to an intern as a task to complete over the summer. It should be an intentional, thought-provoking extension of your organization that helps you drive your business objectives.

Companies often ask themselves these questions when developing an overall business strategy:

• Should we be first to market and enjoy first-mover advantages, or should we pursue a wait-and-follow approach?

• Should we try to enter with a low-cost position, or should we try to distinguish ourselves from competitors with a differentiated offering?

• Should we approach the market as a whole, or should we focus on a single or a few niche segments?

• Should we grow our business by encouraging more sales of our existing product to our existing customers, by introducing new products, by entering new markets, or all three?

Take a look at these questions and develop answers for your own company. Then take a step back and analyze whether the social media strategy you’re developing fits within the business strategy you’ve outlined from similar questions. You’ll then have taken the first steps toward developing a methodical, strategic approach to a successful social media campaign.

Let’s take a quick look at the key concepts and their action steps.

• Key concept: When developing any marketing campaign, you need to 1) identify the key drivers for success, 2) develop specific campaign objectives, and 3) know exactly which outcomes you are seeking to achieve.

• Action step: Get all members of your marketing team in a room together (along with other interested parties) and map out key drivers, campaign objectives, and outcomes for your social media campaign.

• Key concept: Social media objectives can be categorized into two major buckets. The first objective is to move product to drive immediate sales. The second objective is to move people (that is, drive awareness, interest, and desire) to drive future sales.

• Action step: Find out what your organization expects in terms of return on investment and the time frame for that return. You can then determine whether your social media campaign needs to drive immediate sales or future sales. Remember, they’re not mutually exclusive—if you have a big budget, you can accomplish both.

• Key concept: When using social media, it’s critical for your campaign to tie to your business objectives and for these business objectives to link to your overall business strategy.

• Action step: Make sure you clearly understand your organization’s business objectives and the strategy it’s using to accomplish those objectives. Ask key players within your organization to define the business objectives and strategy or to direct you to the appropriate documentation.

Endnotes

1. See www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_networking_now_more_popular_on_mobile_than_desktop.php.