Goals Determine Use of Social Media
If you work in marketing at any company, it’s expected that your efforts will eventually turn to the ability to be creative or how to leverage new marketing methods. So what do you do when your stakeholders ask you to put together a plan for new media marketing methods?
Inevitably (with all the buzz about social media right now in the industry) social media is a big, white elephant that is sitting at the room. And he’s staring at you.
But how do you know where to start when it comes to utilizing social media in your efforts? How do you decide which tools are right for your organization? Or, a stakeholder will mention that they want to put together a Facebook marketing plan. How do you know what to do when you face this issue?
I see these questions a lot. It is no surprise that many new media and social media marketing efforts have been viewed as not worthwhile endeavors.
Why is that? The answer to this is simple, but often overlooked. I even see the answers to these questions being overlooked by agencies who claim to specialize is social media.
Social media will be looked at as the answer to new marketing efforts rather than a means to spread a message.
The answer to this decision is not based on the tools, but based on the goals. It is not the tool or the channel that must be known in order to produce results with social media. It is the goals.
If you do not first know your goals, you will spend your time searching for that needle in the haystack. You will dig and dig, but you will not find it.
So, if you are deciding how to use Facebook to help your marketing efforts, STOP. Take a step back. First, determine your goals.
After you determine your goals, you will either see more clearly how to use Facebook to aid with your marketing efforts, or you will see that Facebook may not be the answer.
I was chatting with Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing today. We found ourselves entrenched in a conversation that dealt specifically with this issue.
Is it your goal to generate a specific number of page views? Is it your goal to bring more people into your hair salon? Is it your goal to sell cheeseburgers?
Management of expectations is important. Specific goals should be noted as possible and not possible through social media marketing efforts. (This is a conversation for another day, so I will try to not dwell on it too much.) Your service must be worth buying in order for people to buy it. Social media is not the be-all-end-all. It is only part of the answer if, and only if, it can be integrated into a marketing plan with a role of attempting to achieve a specific goal. For example, social media may assist to bring people into your hair salon, but if you suck at hair cuts, people will not come back. I digress.
It is also important to realize that any one specific social media service, such as Twitter, is not the answer to your social media efforts just because it is popular. Yes, audiences may exist within certain social media sites, but what is it that you want them to do?
If you are faced with a marketing consultant who tells you that Twitter is the answer to all marketing or that everyone should be on Twitter, walk the other way. This is nonsense. The same goes for marketers who tell you that it is important to come up with a “Facebook Strategy” or a “Twitter Strategy.” Does the marketing consultant know your goals? If the answer is “Yes,” Twitter may actually be a portion of your social media strategy, but only if it fits with helping to achieve your goals.
If you take anything from this post, please let it be that you must first determine your goals before determining if and how to use social media. Without goals, efforts are blind, and so are the results.
I spoke with Charlene Li, Founder of Altimer Group, about some of these topics on the Web Trends show. Following is the the video of our conversation.
[...] Prebynski in his blog post titled “Goals Determine Use of Social Media” stresses the importance of establishing a goal for your audience before just jumping into a [...]
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