Social Media Marketing and Sales Strategy

Like all such things, it starts with understanding why you are doing what you are doing and what you expect to get out of it. The better you can define this, the better job we can do to identify and execute on the tactics to achieve your goals.

A note: Not all social media interaction is about marketing and sales. It's all communications of one sort or another, but there are lots of other uses.

Generally, our approach starts with your marketing and sales approach (duh) in the larger sense. Our outline (from our tools that support its development goes like this:

• Elevator Speeches (Tag Line, Short and long descriptions)
• Problem and Solution (Market problem, solution category, specific problem, specific solution)
• Customers and Marketing Approach (Customer type, characteristics, links to benefits and differentiators, how they buy, pricing, placement, promotions, maturity model, branding and reputation, offerings and markets)
• Sales Sieves
• Competition (direct, indirect, and including do nothing with benefits chart)
• Sustainability and Impact
• Sales Capacity and Management (capacity and limitations, channels, supports, training)
• Goto Market Matrix (Promotion, Marketing, Sales, Metrics for Direct, Indirect, Strategic partners, and Joint ventures)
• Data Room (with all the details to back it all up)

With this information in hand (on the screen and in your mind), and all the details that go into it, you can start to build...

The Content Calendar

The content calendar identifies when and how often you are going to communicate about what and to whom. Suppose for example, we have decided to communicate with our target audience weekdays (while they are having a coffee would be nice to target, but unlike radio, the social media outlets are not even at the point where you can target a time of day for them to see it, much less identify their current real-world activity for insertion).

Suppose you choose to bring content to potential (and existing) customers via social media on a daily basis. You will then, likely, want to setup a calendar that has something each (duh) weekday...

• Monday: Something to start their week off liking you?
• Tuesday: In the thick of it - something they need or could use now?
• Wednesday: Over the hump day - get things done before the weekend?
• Thursday: Running out of time for this week - helpful hints?
• Friday: Everybody's working for the weekend - something fun for them to do?

Of course this outline has a lot of assumptions built into it about the psychological perspective of the customer. For a CEO, for example, the list and time frames might be completely different. Most startup CEOs work on the weekends when they can be left alone to do the thoughtful stuff, finish of from last week, and get ready for next week. I think weekly communications if you have something to say is pretty much saturation for something like emails, but on the other hand, social media sites often don't show all of your connections everything you post.

What should be in the messaging?

As a rule of thumb, I view social media marketing and sales as a path to get people to take mutually desired actions. So first you should:

Identify the desired action associated with each communication.

That action should drive the messaging. For example, if you want them to setup a call so you can pitch them, you should provide the content required to generate that response. You determine that by trial and error, unless you have all knowing power to see what people will do. And of course you have to adapt it with time.

Get their attention...

Most folks have a stream of gobs of semi-useless information spewed in front of them in their ever changing and adapting social media "feed". They are being fed eye and ear candy. They won't taste it unless it appeals to them at first glance.

Once they start to look/listen, you want them to start to eat what you are feeding them, engage with them somehow.

Feed them...

It better taste good if you want them to eat it all up. Or at least, if it's a short snack, it should be like a bit of sweet chocolate, or a dash of mental coffee. Get them to like you, engage with them somehow, and then they buy ... right?

It all sounds so easy until you try it and find it doesn't work as often or as well as you might like. Perhaps you are missing something important:

Provide a call to action...

Making them all happy (or mad or whatever emotion you are going for) is fine, and if you are a major brand that might be enough to remind them that they like what you sell and want to put it on their shopping list. But for the rest of us, we need to provide something they can do to get them to take the next step in the buying process (or is it called a journey these days... a good way to sell them on a voyage with you to pay them to help you get others to pay you).

So now that you told them to get up, walk away from their computer, leave their cell phone where it is, take a walk to the local store, and buy from you, we are done, right?

And something they can click on to do it...

Lest we forget, in the current social media environment, action involves touching the screen or clicking on a mouse. I know it's not as hard as actually getting up to do something, but the idea is to make it as easy as possible for them to take the next step (back to the journey thing). Some day will will simply cause them to blink and the blink of their eye will send us money, but for now, this will do.

But that's push only... how about interaction?

This outline was a push-only strategy, not an interaction strategy. For an interaction strategy, you have to create and leverage existing discussions, interject your communications appropriately, and perhaps even have a team that is using strategic influence tactics to implement your strategy. What does that look like?

• Identify targets: Like any marketing approach, you need to identify who you are selling to and who you communicate with to do so. This should be defined under the "Customers" item identified above.
• Identify approaches: As for customers, this should be identified as part of your marketing plan in "Marketing Approach" identified above, but to a greater degree of specificity for the verticals (i.e., social media vs. email vs. in person, etc.), and then for each social media venue. At the detailed level, this will come down to specific sequences of interaction modalities and tactics for individuals and groups, perhaps even down to word sequences. It will also potentially involve multiple parties in cliques, including real and other identities associated with personality characteristics and behaviors.
• Test methodologies: Before deploying at scale, testing at smaller scale is important. And indeed these things must adapt with time, which means an eternal experimentation and measurement process to test changes and alternatives over time. This includes practicing as a group and applying different personae in team efforts to generate movements in targets toward objectives.
• Find or generate targets: In many social media environments, group mechanisms can bring you rapidly to up to hundreds of thousands of targets. For example, LinkedIn groups are now running hundreds of thousands of members even in relatively tight niches. Some lists are in the millions, but they tend to be more restricted. But then there are also other ways you get involved with people and groups,. through getting connected to connectors, following folks with lots of followers, and so forth.
• Create or watch for events: I will distinguish an event in this context as a sequence of exchanges between people. Because of the way much of social media works, when you communicate with someone and they respond, others who are following them see and can get involved in the interaction. Creating groups interactions and having your group of personae (individual or otherwise) involved, watching for other groups and the attempts they make to move targets including your team, and operating them in situ is used to identify events to get involved in and which ones to avoid, and as a team, identifying when to help each other in what ways to move different events in different directions.
• Interact with events: Once events are identified or created, interacting with them can extend or reduce them, as can interactions with individual personae within those events. Pulling people in, pushing people out, driving them toward other targets and actions is the central activity of event interaction. For example, showing expertise is useful in getting customers for expert services, but showing affection for a product and depending it against liars claiming it is no good (even if you have planted them in the event to address objections) is a path for commodity product sales.
• Build-up and lay-down: Events get built up or laid down over time. Some events are things you want to short circuit, so by identifying them quickly, perhaps within the first few interactions, you can often shut them down before they grow. On the other hand, others you will want to grow and transmute into different discussions. But at the end of the day, events do not last forever, and if they are going to, they should be segmented into subsets and brought to new events with subsets of the target audiences. Thus a stream of events characterize the activities interacting with targets.
• Follow-ups: Targets identified and interacted with are then followed up by creating individual or different small group interactions. Again, for sales purposes, these should get grouped into cliques that get along and have the relevant personalities involved. They ultimately become friends who interact over the long term, hopefully as buyers and sellers and ultimately collaborators toward common goals.

If this seems more than a bit Machiavellian to you, you understood the points well. But it doesn't have to be exploitive. I have lots of good friends who I have interacted with over periods of years and who end up as customers or vendors, but ultimately become folks I work with and communicate with over the long term. And that is the ultimate benefit for the social media strategy...

A call to action

So here's your next step to social media success... Sign up to our free ...

It's just a quick introduction to other folks like us. People you meet who you might end up working with for the rest of your life. And ideas that may lead you to the next fun thing.

In summary

Your click on the button above will show you get the idea of this article. Your failure to do so will show you that this technique doesn't always work all that well...