Developing a Social Media Strategy

Many marketers are at a loss on how to get started with Social Media and Location Based Marketing.  Having no experience with it or not even being familiar with the different applications makes it difficult to develop a marketing plan around this new groundswell.  In addition, many marketers are tasked with developing this new marketing medium within their company and are assigned with developing an ROI around it.

As I was thinking about how to help business owners get their head around this new medium and about how to help marketers put together a plan with an ROI;  I pulled out an old business diagram that I was introduced to by a colleague of mine, Jim Hart.  I first saw this years ago written on a napkin during a discussion at lunch on how to help advertisers breakdown selling within their organization.

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I was shown that if you could impact any of these three areas in your business; sales leads or customers, the frequency of purchases and the amount of the average sale, you could grown your business incrementally. But if you look closer and understand the diagram you soon see that you can actually exponentially effect your bottom line if  you could increase all three.  It’s a simplistic diagram and doesn’t adequately cover the nuances of a real business but it should help you get organized as you go about setting up a strategy for using Social Media.

Now as I think of how to deploy a Social Media strategy and to also teach others how to wrap their old traditional marketing brains around it, I’m struck by how social media and location based marketing can help me in each of these three areas.

Increasing the number of leads
It’s a matter of touch points on the Internet.  How many times can I get my message/brand in front of users.  The more Social Media options I use, the more opportunity I have to, as Greg Chapman advocates, ‘be found’.  Do you have a FaceBook fan page?  Do you Twitter?  Have you claimed your pages at Google.com/places?  Are you testing the SM waters?

Increasing the frequency of purchases
Can you motivate your fans or an interested passerby with location-based marketing applications like Foursquare or Gowalla?  I was just using FourSquare on my EVO and discovered over 30 restaurants within 10 miles of my house.  Are you posting deals on FourSquare where potential customers can find deals in their geographic area.  Location based marketing is the closest thing to just-in-time marketing.  You can reach out to someone when they are in your geographic area with money in their pocket and buying on their minds.  Social Media marketers should be utilizing and experimenting with location based marketing.  There is no definitive leader in this space as of yet.  The tools are getting better and membership and usage is growing exponentially.

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Increasing the average sale
When you place your message in front of potential buyers are you just advertising a ‘discount’?  If so, I’d encourage you to also look at packages and add-ons that will help you increase your average sale amount.  Instead of , ‘Get a medium sized pizza for $7.00′ .  How about, ‘Get a medium sized pizza and wings for $10′.

The key to using these new marketing vehicles is to develop a plan.  The plan will be based on your current situation and sales goals.  I just wanted to give you a framework to help you think through what you can do with social media and location based marketing.

-Mike Huber