Before Launching into Social Media, Answer These 5 Questions
Digital marketing and social media can be very effective business development tools to advance a well-planned strategy. However, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can also be a huge drain on time and resources with a questionable ROI if not used properly.
Before hiring an SEO consultant and jumping onto the social media bandwagon, take the time to define what you are trying to accomplish and to map out a reasonable path for achieving those goals. At Brand Personal, we work with clients to answer these questions before deploying their personal brand in the world of social media:
1. Who’s your audience?
In other words, who are you talking to? Approach this question by first considering the various roles in the purchasing process — are you reaching out to influencers, decision makers or approvers?
As a next step, identify who those people are in terms of title and affiliation: Are they CFOs at small and medium-sized businesses? Executive recruiters who specialize in CEO placements? Mommy-bloggers with Ivy-League MBAs?
Finally, test your target audience definition by putting together a list of the top 20 people you would most like to reach. Do their roles and organizations line up with the target audience description?
2. What do you want your audience to do?
Do you want your audience to click through to a landing page? Send you an email? Call your 800 number? Take a survey? Or post a comment?
Answering this question is important because it will force you to identify potential weaknesses in your approach. For example, you might discover that you need to procure and test an 800 number answering service before launching your social media campaign.
Whatever the desired action, make it easy for your audience to figure out what they are supposed to do next. Studies show that offering people too many options results in indecision and abandonment.
3. What message will incent action?
Importantly, the message you send your audience should be from their perspective and not from yours. Your audience wants to know how you can help them. So you’ve been at it for 25 years and have worked with all of the big studios, consulted to the entire Fortune 500 or argued cases all the way to the Supreme Court. Guess what — that also describes at least half of your competition.
What problem do you solve? What do you do? How do you do it? Those are the questions people will be asking as they look for meaningful ways to differentiate you from alternative solutions. If your message answers these questions, then your audience will take the appropriate action.
4. Where will your audience go?
We also phrase this question as “Did you build a place to land before launching the space shuttle?”. The destination for your audience can be as sophisticated as a set of landing pages set up with A/B testing for iterative optimization. Or it can be as simple as your blog, a page on your website or even your LinkedIn profile or Facebook page.
In any case, preparing for your guest’s arrival before sending out the invitations is a smart strategy and one that will save you from a lot of headaches and last-minute frenzied activity.
5. How have you defined success?
Brand Personal’s view is that any spending on digital marketing and social media should pay for itself. However, defining return on investment is not always clear-cut and so it is better to settle on your definition of success before you start rather than trying to figure it out after the fact.
If your goal for digital and social media marketing is to produce leads, then one approach to the ROI problem is to quantify the value of a lead and then work backwards. Taking into account the value of an average sale, marketing allocation, conversion rates and click-through rates can help you determine the incremental traffic required to justify a marketing investment.
Where to go for help
Answering these five questions before you get started is important but not necessarily easy. That’s where we come in. Brand Personal specializes in working one-on-one with senior executives, independent professionals and company owners to discover, synthesize and express their brand DNA.
We also work with clients to develop and execute a strategy for deploying their digital brand in a way that moves them closer to their professional goals. As a result, our clients have answers to these questions and more before committing time and resources to digital marketing and social media.
Contact us to arrange a free digital brand assessment or to learn more about how personal brand coaching can work for you.
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