If your social networking goal is to market your business, launch a product, or generate awareness for your cause, you need a plan. But not just any plan will do. You need a plan tailored to the unique nature of social networking.
If you’re a marketing professional or have ever been responsible for marketing or PR duties, you’ve probably worked with marketing plans in the past. To succeed with social networking, however, you need to do more than just tack on a few bullet points dedicated to social networking and forge ahead. You need a comprehensive plan and strategy that analyzes
Your target audience and their preferred social networking sites
Your goals and how to meet them
Your competitor’s presence on social networking sites
The types of content you can include on each potential social networking site, and how this impacts your campaign on each
Your target audience’s technical skill and adoption of social networking features
The best way to increase sales without overt selling
A plan for converting customers into viral marketing evangelists who promote your products for you
To get an idea of this process in action, let’s take a look at Monica, the product marketing manager for an eco-friendly nutrition bar that targets women. One of Monica’s goals is to develop a comprehensive social networking marketing campaign to help launch this new product as the must-have nutrition bar among a sea of competitors. Her target audience is women between the ages of 20 and 50, many of whom are health-conscious, eco-conscious mothers.
To tap the largest audience, women in general between the ages of 20 and 50, Monica decides that MySpace is a good target for reaching this vast, generalized demographic, noting that more than half of MySpace visitors are now age 35 or older. Monica’s social networking marketing plan includes creating a custom MySpace presence filled with engaging content that encourages viral marketing. Her MySpace plans include
A blog with posts of interest to women who are both health-conscious and eco-conscious
Content about and links to two partner nonprofit organizations
Bulletins with health, fitness, and eco tips geared to women
An interactive game that helps women discover the true nutritional value of food they eat
Links to discount coupons for purchasing the nutrition bars at local retailers
Short videos, also available on YouTube, that cover topics of interest to the bar’s target audience
The game Monica develops, What’s In What You Eat, is the focal point of her MySpace campaign. Designed to be fun and informative, the game’s content is updated every month to keep it fresh and “sticky.” The game provides information about the wholesome, organic ingredients found in this new nutrition bar and emphasizes its eco-friendly packaging, but it does so in a way that makes this information an inherent part of the game and not a sales pitch for the product.
One of the powers of social networking is that its collaborative nature makes it a natural for word-of-mouth marketing. Monica makes it easy for the bar’s MySpace friends to forward information to their friends through the strategic use of “send to a friend” links, banners, and buttons.
From there, Monica develops similar plans for creating a presence on YouTube as well as on smaller, niche social networking sites that cater to women, mothers, and the eco-conscious.
Making social networking a viable marketing platform requires a solid knowledge of how social networking works, strategic thinking, and a campaign that focuses on engagement over advertising and interaction over sales. In the end, a solid, well-planned social networking marketing campaign should deliver what it’s capable of—a marketing payoff that’s driven by the collaborative nature of the web.