Artem Senatorov - Content marketing: Social media promotion strategies. How to build an SMM strategy: a step-by-step plan for promotion on social networks

Today there is no longer any need to explain how important its presence on social media is for a business. Paradigm competition for the client today has shifted from one-way sending a message to many recipients, as was the case in outbound marketing, towards personalized, interactive communications that attract the target audience to the brand.

TO key factors The success of a business's marketing strategy now includes how deeply it is integrated into modern channels communications. Finding new clients, increasing the loyalty of existing ones, becoming an expert in the industry whose opinion is listened to and trusted - all this can be achieved by choosing the right social media promotion strategy.

Simply creating fan pages on popular social media is no longer enough. Without a clear SMM strategy, you will not achieve the required level of audience engagement to increase sales.

To get the most out of inbound marketing, your SMM strategy should go through the following stages:

● Define key goals in the SMM strategy

● Conduct a SWOT analysis of social media

● Develop a content strategy as part of the SMM strategy

● Prepare a content plan as part of the SMM strategy

● Analyze and adjust SMM strategy

Step 1. Define key goals in your SMM strategy

Any long-term project begins with planning. Social media is no exception. Without a clear idea and defining clear and achievable goals, nothing will work.

Different goals require different approach towards their achievement. For example, if your goal is to increase customer trust, then this requires a completely different approach than if your goal was to get a 30% conversion rate among subscribers.

Start by describing three key goals you plan to achieve using social media.

The last parameter is especially important - measurability. Without it, you will not be able to track progress in achieving the global and intermediate goals of your business, which are indicated in the SMM strategy. To determine how measurable a goal is, ask yourself the question “Is the goal achieved partially or completely?” If you are immersed in many hours of thought, but still cannot answer specifically, then this means the goal cannot be accurately measured.

It is also very important that the goals in the SMM strategy are related to your strategic business goals. They must overlap in the areas of sales and marketing.

Three global goals of your SMM strategy:

Step 2: Conduct a SWOT analysis of social media.

At this stage, you need to understand who is currently interacting with your brand on social media and how this audience corresponds to your target market, what social media your target audience is present on, what social networks your competitors use. You must analyze and objectively evaluate your strengths and weak sides and compare them with opportunities and threats from competitors.

Wherever you want to go, you first need to understand where you are now

Conduct an audit. You need to start by checking the official and unofficial representations of your brand on social media. These could be fan pages, pages with reviews of former employees, malicious sites that pretend to be official. Check out these pages to see how many followers you have, how active they are, and the tone of your messaging regarding your brand.

Conduct a survey. If your business is not yet present on social media, then the first thing you should do is analyze and determine the criteria for selection social networks. Conduct a survey among your clients and you will find out which social media they prefer.

It is important to use the information obtained in conjunction with socio-demographic data.

Monitor the presence of your main competitors on social media. Rate yours strengths and compare them with competitors.

Step 3. Develop a content strategy as part of your SMM strategy

Now that you have collected necessary information, you will be able to answer the questions “How?”, “To whom” and “Where?”. It remains to answer the question “What?” This is a key element of your communication with your audience.

Understanding your brand identity is also key to understanding the type of content your brand should source. Content marketing should help shape and promote a unique, individual brand image.

Step 4. Prepare a content plan as part of the SMM strategy

Your task is to create and publish content that, firstly, will be of interest to the reader, and secondly, will contribute to achieving the goals of the SMM strategy. The content you publish should reflect the interests of the audience you are publishing it for. And also habits, behavior and motivation.

Inbound marketing is an endless experiment. Only through experience is it possible to create what the consumer needs, and not the departments in your company

All manufacturing process content marketing is based on a predetermined content plan. By now you should have an editorial calendar in which you have outlined your goals, topics, and keywords.

Now it is necessary from general idea go to specifics. The topic and keywords will indicate to you the conditional direction of movement, within the framework of which you need to move towards the goal. This approach narrows the space for creativity, but at the same time directs your thinking.

The content creation process is described in detail in our article “The Content Creation Process. Six steps from idea to publication”

Step 5. Analyze and adjust the SMM strategy

Deep understanding of your audience is critical to achieving your goals with using SMM strategies. Use analytical tools to understand what type of content is most in demand by your subscribers. Study audience behavior and identify insights.

Use analytics tools to understand who is reading, commenting and sharing your content.

Once you've analyzed your current campaign, take stock of what's working and what's not. Make additions and changes to your SMM strategy.

As a result

Analytics, SMM strategy and content marketing - the three pillars of digital communications. The Jedi who understands their power will only move forward - increasing brand awareness, building long-term communication, increasing engagement, increasing customer trust and increasing sales tenfold.

Use this knowledge and may the Force be with you!

Artem Senatorov

Content Marketing: Social Media Promotion Strategies

Editor Anton Nikolsky

Project Manager O. Ravdanis

Corrector S. Mozaleva

Computer layout M. Potashkin

Cover design S. Khozin

All rights reserved. The work is intended exclusively for private use. No part of the electronic copy of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for public or collective use without the written permission of the copyright owner. For violation of copyright, the law provides for payment of compensation to the copyright holder in the amount of up to 5 million rubles (Article 49 of the Code of Administrative Offenses), as well as criminal liability in the form of imprisonment for up to 6 years (Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

* * *

The book will help:

Learn to create selling content for posting on social networks;

Avoid the main mistakes made by the vast majority of SMM specialists;

Understand what you can and should save on, and what you shouldn’t;

Develop your own effective promotion strategy and actively use it in the future.

Introduction

I was very lucky. When I talk with my colleagues, authors of books on business topics, they often complain that it’s not always possible to really find worthwhile topic for a new work. Either it is too narrow, or its time has not come yet, or, on the contrary, the trend is ending and there is no point in writing anymore. In my case, everything turned out completely differently - the theme of the book, in a sense, found me itself. So I think there is a certain amount of luck involved.

You have in your hands my third work on marketing. The first two books published by Alpina Publisher were called “The Battle for a VKontakte Subscriber” and “Business on Instagram.” These books were warmly received by the public. Among the readers were those who decided to offer me cooperation. So I visited many corners of our vast Motherland as a speaker at conferences, a leader of trainings and a coach in personal corporate classes. Over time, I began to notice that the first dialogue with future partners is usually structured in a similar way. It looks something like this:

– Good afternoon, Artem! Thank you for finding time for us.

– No need for thanks, let's discuss business.

– Of course. We read your books about VKontakte and Instagram and now we understand well WHAT we need to work on. And now we would like you to tell us in as much detail as possible HOW you need to work.

At some point, it became obvious that business owners and heads of marketing departments sometimes simply get lost in all the variety of social media. Intuitively, they understand that if a particular project gains popularity, then they need to open their accounts there too. Is this true? Partly. Different social networks have different audiences. Of course, there are overlaps. For example, most Instagram users are on at least one other network. But in general, if the same people were active in different projects, the social network market would not be able to support so many players. The fact is that the services are different and the people in them are also different (in any case, they use social networks for different tasks). Therefore, before actively engaging in SMM, you should decide on a presence strategy.

In our time, many meaningful and important words have been devalued due to overuse. Unfortunately, the word “strategy” is one of them. Now you can find any kind of strategy: and in personal finance, and in career growth, and even in gentrification summer cottage. Sometimes it seems that even when shopping in grocery store you can’t go without some newfangled “food investment strategy.” Therefore, I try not to use this word unless absolutely necessary. But the case with social media is one where you really can’t do without a strategy (if, of course, you want to achieve results). This is because, in my opinion, working in SMM is reminiscent of chess, where strategy and tactics are also required. At first glance, the comparison may seem unusual, but if you take a closer look, the similarities will be obvious. In both cases there is a position, attacking and defensive actions, effective combinations of moves, creative ideas, strong players, in the end! The only thing that is, perhaps, definitely not on the Internet is the final victory - “checkmate” of the enemy king. Yes, you will not be able to achieve absolute victory: any won battle will still be in the past, and the present will prepare new tests of strength. But this can also be considered a plus, because no one will ever be able to completely outplay you either. No matter what happens, by reviewing your actions, you can find a way to try again to achieve the result.

So if you look at work in social networks as black and white battles, a lot of things immediately become clearer. And this book will help you with the most important thing - choosing the right strategy for your brand. I have structured the narrative in such a way that you can find a description of the goals that this or that strategy helps to achieve, compare with what you would like to achieve yourself, and choose the most suitable presence option for yourself. In fact, you can read the book from any section. But I still recommend (at least for the first time) reading it from the very beginning, because we will go from simple techniques to more complex ones, and it will be easier to perceive information in order.

We identify needs and plan work

1. First steps

What is content management and why is it important?

The first topic that I would like to cover is the topic of content. When I worked as a journalist and wrote materials for various glossy magazines, editor-in-chiefs liked to say that “articles are the lifeblood of publications.” It's hard to argue with that. Of course, no matter how successful an issue you put together, a new one should come out next month, and it should also be on par. In this sense, it’s a rather thankless job - you don’t have to rest on your laurels, like, for example, a musician who recorded one platinum album that will be sold (and performed at concerts) for many decades. The journalistic role in this regard is more like the work of a chef, who also has to create his masterpieces again and again every day. I write all this to the fact that working in SMM belongs to the category of precisely those jobs where you need to keep your finger on the pulse at all times. And here, accordingly, there must be its own “blood”, thanks to which the process will continue. This is His Majesty Content.

What's behind this word? I have my own definition quality content– this is relevant (and, if possible, original) information that can arouse interest among the audience and maintain its loyalty.

I would like to clarify the latter. The term "relevant" means that the content you publish meets your audience's expectations. Of course, if you created an Instagram account for the purpose of making money by selling advertising and called it “All the Most Interesting,” then you can post almost anything here - from humor to a video of a spaceship launch. If the page has the name of your brand and you produce, say, teapots, you need to be more careful and explain the appearance of this or that material on your pages. For example, if you want to post something funny, then mention that in Russian the phrases “The kettle takes a long time to boil” and “The kettle doesn’t boil for a long time” mean the same thing. And a video of the shuttle launch can only be provided if, for example, the same metal alloys were used in the production of your product as in the rocket that rushed into space.

Rice. 1. By the way, the so-called “Attacks” show phenomenal vitality - this content format has been well received by the audience for several years

When I write “as original as possible,” this does not necessarily mean “not published anywhere, ever, or by anyone before.” This is far from the case. "Original" in in this case- it is rather “inscribed in your behavioral style.” For example, if you wrote an article and published it, and then (a few months later) repeat it, this is still original content in a certain sense. Even if you just publish thematic quotes from classic books, but design them in a special way in a recognizable way(for example, in pictures with a watermark), then this is also suitable.

Strategic planning in SMM is often given less attention than the content or media component. This is a big mistake that can lead to negative consequences for the entire project. Strategic planning is the basis, thanks to it we can understand what the content should be, for which audience we are producing it, or how to plan media flights so that they are more effective, etc.

1. Goals and objectives

The first thing to do is to clearly formulate global goals, and then determine a list specific tasks, the solution of which will allow these goals to be achieved. It seems like it couldn’t be easier, but this point is often forgotten.

2. Segmentation of target audience

Suppose you know that your audience is women and men from 20 to 45 years old with an average income level, living in large cities of Russia. This is already something, but it is not enough to develop a full-fledged strategy. You need to dig deeper, and for this there is audience segmentation. Its essence is to divide the existing target audience into narrower segments and give them names in accordance with the principle by which we divided them.

For example:

Given: m/f, 20-45, Russia, big cities

Segmentation result:

3. Target audience profile

When the target audience has already been segmented, you can go even further - describe the profile of each user group. This means that you need to highlight any characteristics, interests and character traits inherent in target audience segments.

For example:

This is a simplified example. You can do more detailed descriptions, with breakdowns by territory: home and family, career, travel and leisure.

4. Behavioral trends

The next step for an even more complete understanding of the audience is to describe the bright trends in the behavior of people who fall into the segments of our target audience.

5. Media consumption

Media consumption is one of the non-trivial blocks of strategy, which is often neglected, but knowledge about what informational resources consumed by the target audience can be very useful for building successful work. This is especially important in order to correctly identify the sites on which it is necessary to build work with each audience segment.

An example of media consumption might look like this:

6. Drivers and barriers

Drivers are what stimulates the target audience to consume your product, and barriers are what holds them back from this consumption.

To get a clearer picture, you can consider drivers and barriers in terms of both the audience itself and the product.

Here's what such a diagram might look like.

7. Communication plan

The communication plan clearly shows in what periods certain tools and platforms will be used. This makes it possible to plan the chronology of actions and avoid any overlaps.

Plans may vary in detail, but basic version there should be a division into three main blocks: Paid, Owned and Earned, which are located on one scale, and on the other - time periods, the number of which depends on the planning period.

*Paid - Owned - Earned - Purchased - Owned - Acquired media.

8. KPI planning

One of the most pressing questions. Simply putting some nice number and saying that this is a KPI will not be correct, because planning is a more meaningful process.

Here are the key questions to ask yourself during the planning stage:

9. Insight

Insight is a deep consumer need that is difficult to realize due to existing problems or restrictions. It is best to formulate it in one, maximum two sentences.

Insight example:

10. The role of the brand

A meaningful SMM strategy always declares some role the brand/product plays in interacting with users on social media. Simply put, the role of a brand is the role that a brand plays in communicating with its consumer on social media. An example of a brand's role: a guide to the world high technology, friend and assistant in matters of healthy eating, etc.

Red Keds has historically had strong strategic expertise: the strategy department has formed good team specialists who deal with a wide range of tasks within their profile. In my opinion, very important point successful work on an SMM project is the interaction between strategists and SMM specialists. We managed to build an effective scheme for the work of two departments, formalizing this into a single process, but this is a topic for a separate publication.

This article is an example of such interaction. I would like to express special gratitude to Red Keds strategist Lena Nenasheva for her help in preparing this material.

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Hierarchy of strategies

Let's start with the fact that the goal of any commercial organization is to make a profit from its activities. And the company owner comes to the marketing department with a specific goal - “more money is needed.” The marketing department, in turn, knows several basic ways to make money.

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More money can be obtained if:

more people will buy the company's products;
each person will buy the company’s product more often;
The company will receive more money from each sale.

If marketing decides that more people need to buy a company's product, the goal of marketing communication becomes, for example, increasing awareness. The more people know about the product, the more people will try the product (trial users), the more people will turn into regular customers (monthly users).

When awareness of a company's products is high enough, marketing decides to increase the frequency of use of the product by creating new consumption situations or launching a loyalty program.

When marketing decides to earn more per purchase, then either the marketing and production costs of the product are reduced while maintaining the cost, or the cost of the product is increased while maintaining the production and marketing costs. The last point entails branding (that is, consumers no longer pay only for the product, but also for the brand).

For each of the solutions (increasing awareness, creating loyalty, creating a brand), a communication strategy can be developed, which is also built from audience insights. Communication strategy, through audience insights, research and market trends, includes answers to the questions “what to say,” “when to say,” and “where to say” about a product. And with the question “where” there is an understanding that part of the audience is on the Internet. And then a digital strategy is developed for the Internet.

Digital marketing takes care of everything interactive interaction with the consumer. Some of this interaction is on social media, and there is another strategy for dealing with it.

Here's what the hierarchy looks like from social media presence strategy to business strategy:

We can also recall the 4P marketing theory, according to which marketing is based on four “coordinates”: product, price, promotion and location (product, price, promotion, place).

Most main conclusion What needs to be concluded from everything that is written above is that social media alone cannot solve the problem of marketing, and therefore business. It is impossible to increase sales through social media, as well as through advertising in general. Through communication you can convey information about the product. Whether they buy this product or not depends on the price, the product itself and distribution. These are the basics of marketing that are taught almost everywhere. Then why do speech topics appear on the topic of selling through social media? I wonder if at these presentations they talk about promoting FMCG in social media? Do they sell shampoos and chocolate bars through communities and social media profiles? It is also important to pay attention to the following rule. Achieving the goal low level should contribute to achieving the goal high level. That is, achieving the goals of presence in social media should contribute to achieving the goals of the digital strategy. And achieving digital goals should help solve communication problems. According to this rule, it is easy to check whether or not you are doing what you are doing.

So, the conclusions of the first part:

Social media presence should not conflict with digital, communication, marketing and business strategies.
A social media presence strategy should help achieve digital marketing goals.
Presence on social media (like digital promotion and advertising) does not solve the issue of sales.

New strategy

Social media marketing and digital marketing in general have their own characteristics. Mitya Voskresensky from Red Keds wrote well about them (see “A New Approach to Strategic Planning”). These features and the fact that the Internet is not a media channel, but a new environment, force us to come up with digital separate strategy (see also ""). And that's why:

A communication strategy designed for a “monologue” is not suitable for a “dialogue” This thesis relates to the already boring advice “don’t write press releases on the blog.” The communication developed in ATL is most often not suitable for communicating with an audience on the Internet. ATL communication is designed so that it is not interactive, and does not imply that the user will be able to “reply.”
Mechanics and creativity are limited by the capabilities of the platforms In ATL advertising, creativity extends to all media: a video is made, and a print can be made from the video, which can be placed outdoors and in the press. If desired, make a radio commercial. On the Internet, the creativity, the mechanics of interaction with users that were invented for one platform (for example, VKontakte) most likely will not suit another (YouTube). And what was invented for VKontakte and YouTube will most likely not be suitable for Twitter. All three sites are different; each site needs to come up with its own mechanics.
Measurability The Internet and digital provide many more metrics. Much more than needed. And the question is no longer how to measure, but what metrics to use to determine efficiency.
Real-time measurability In ATL advertising, everything is measured after the campaign. The company created a video, posted it on certain channels, waits for the campaign to end and only then measures everything, when hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been spent. On the Internet, if the distribution of the same video goes unsuccessfully (the wrong strategy was chosen), we can either simply stop the campaign or change it. And we don't have to keep wasting money. In the case of ATL, we only find out whether we wasted money or not after the campaign.

In addition, in digital there is an opportunity to create platform communications. And this is a definite plus.

Platform communications and activations

Before we talk about platforms and activations, you need to understand that on the Internet there are three main channels for conveying a message from a company to a user - paid, owned and earned media. A similar division of channels is used in large Western advertising agencies (for example, R/GA, Critical Mass, Sapient, Isobar). Here's a summary table that defines each channel and shows the benefits and challenges of using it.

Owned, paid and earned media

Communications in digital and social media are of two types: platforms and activations.

Platforms are the company’s own information dissemination channel, own media. There is also a good definition in Mitya Voskresensky’s presentation: Activations are advertising campaigns aimed at solving a specific problem. Activation tasks are tasks advertising campaign. For example: announcing information, supporting the launch of a new product, increasing website traffic. Also, through activations, they attract an audience to the platform, and the platform, with a competent strategy, retains this audience. For activations, platforms are often used first of all, and then, if it was not possible to earn media, the missing contacts with the audience are purchased (paid media are used). In order to avoid confusion, I will give a few examples (otherwise, on one side of the activation they use platforms, and on the other side of the activation they promote the platform).

GMail Art

Google Company in Russia has a YouTube channel ( youtube.com/GoogleRU), which has less than 2,000 subscribers and corporate blog, which is read by 15.5 thousand people. These are all proprietary media companies. The Saatchi&Saatchi Russia agency shot a GMail Art video that has viral potential. If the video were simply posted somewhere, then a small number of users would see it, or resources would have to be spent on seeding.

But the video was posted in their own Google channels Russia, where a little more than 10,000 people saw it. Thus, the company, due to the fact that it has a platform, received 10,000 contacts among loyal users. Further, due to the fact that the video had viral potential, part of the loyal audience either posted the video somewhere on their site (on a blog, on a social network), or transmitted the video via IM to their friends. Thus formed viral effect and the video collected 530,000 views.

Coca-Cola Happiness Machine

A similar story happened recently with Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company owns the world's largest platform. On Facebook, Coca-Cola is loved by 5.6 million people. And any brand message is seen by tens and hundreds of thousands of loyal users, which allows American Coca-Cola not to spend money on such things as sowing. The Coca-Cola Happiness Machine video went viral worldwide with 2.3 million views after 70,000 fans of the Facebook page saw it and talked about it further.

Coca-Cola actively uses this platform and each post gives the brand from 400 to 700 thousand contacts. Every person who clicks the Like link or comments on a post shows the message to their friends. On average, each user on Facebook has 140 friends. More details are written about Coca-Cola and its platforms in the article “”.

IKEA on Facebook

To support the opening of a new IKEA store in Malmo, Sweden, the company used the photo tagging feature (you can tag yourself and your friends in any photo). IKEA uploaded twelve photos of IKEA interiors to Facebook and offered users a game: whoever tags themselves first on an item will receive it for free. When a user tags themselves in a photo on Facebook, all their friends in their feed see it. The user's friends have a photo of an IKEA interior in their update feed, and all the user's friends will know about the opening of a new store.

Old Spice and Clearasil

The site has already written about the Old Spice and Clearasil applications on VKontakte. Companies invest in such platforms to accumulate audiences. Then this audience is informed about the brand’s new activities.

conclusions

So here are some takeaways from platforms and activations:

The platform is the brand’s own media, which means it requires a lot of time on the part of the company, which does not necessarily pay off (see. pivot table by media type).
The stronger the brand platform, the less resources you need to spend on activations.
It is more effective to invest money in the development of platforms, and to receive those contacts that are planned to be received as part of the activation for free through the use of the platforms.

Catalyst topic

Here I will talk about one feature of creating communities. Community is the very first platform that a business thinks about when it comes to social media. If a brand is not a lovemark, then it is impossible to build a community around the brand. We need a catalyst topic that will give participants food for discussion. If there is no such topic, the community will soon dry up, even if there are competitions and sweepstakes. People are not interested in talking about shampoos, TVs, chocolates, carbonated drinks, cigarettes, or the hairdresser. They are interested in communicating about other things that may be close in topic to the brand:

However, everything interesting topics» are already occupied by unbranded communities or other brands. Therefore, you need to think longer and come up with a catalyst topic that will not intersect with existing ones. Of course, there are product categories that are interesting to talk about. Off the top of my head, these are phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung), cameras (Canon, Nikon, Lumix), cars, computer games. That is, those products that require a long time of communication with the consumer (a telephone, a camera take a long time to set up, photography needs to be learned, a car always requires support, computer games require a long playthrough). So if you're promoting a brand that isn't fun to talk about, come up with a catalyst theme. One of them good examples in Russia it is Clearasil. It's not interesting to talk about an acne remedy. It's interesting to be someone who knows what he wants and is not afraid to change.

Conclusions:

If you are not a lovemark, come up with a catalyst theme.
Communities should not live on competitions and gifts, but on the fact that users exchange content with each other.
Platform communications may differ from general marketing communications.
Communication on the platform should not contradict the overall brand communication.

Bottom line

At the moment, I am of the opinion that a social media presence strategy should be based on a single platform, which in turn unifies the brand’s presence on various platforms.

Other findings:

No money should be spent on activations that do not enhance the platform. Only platform resources should be spent on such communications.
Most likely, communication in social media should be different from communication in ATL, but not contradictory to it.
Social media presence must be structured, taking into account the company's business goal, platform and competitor activations.
Ideally, social media presence should be integrated into your overall advertising strategy.
It is necessary to understand the user journey from each element of the online presence to the main web platform.