Social Media Strategy for Marketing

Social Media Strategy
Executive Summary
This document outlines the social media strategy to promote an e-book as part of an inbound marketing campaign for a B2B software company. The company has some data on its target audience and their social media usage, and this information is helping to drive this strategy. The strategy will be focused on lead generation and ROI objectives. There will be a mix of unpaid social media posting, and paid social media ads, with the objective to generate interest in, and entice the downloading of the e-book. The form for the download is where the leads will be collected, and this will form the basis for the evaluation of this particular social media campaign.
Social Media Strategy
The purpose of this social media strategy document is to outline the external social media strategy for the company. This document will cover the following: social media platforms, target audience, analysis of current social media usage, purpose of social media campaigns, mix of tools and strategies, costs and evaluation.
Social Media Platforms
Waterdog Software is a business-to-business software company, that sells IT asset management solutions to a wide range of small- and medium-sized businesses. The company currently has a presence on the following social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These accounts were set up by the founder of the company, and to this point there has not been a coherent social media strategy for them.
There are several other social media platforms that the company is examining. Instagram is considered a possibility because it is linked with Facebook for advertising and cross-posting, and can be a means to showcase the more visual side of the company. What's App has a new platform for businesses . While it is currently in limited release, this is considered to have significant potential, especially on the customer service side of the business (Perez, 2018). SnapChat is increasingly being used for businesses as well, and brings with it 150 million users. At present, it is best used in B2C applications, but the company will explore the use of SnapChat for its B2B context in the coming quarter (Parker, 2018).The current strategy will focus on the three existing channels, and the use of Instagram as well. Some time will be set aside to explore the use of emerging social media platforms in our context.
Objectives of Social Media Strategy
There are two main objectives for our social media strategy – lead generation and engagement. For lead generation, Waterdog produces a wide range of content such as blog posts, e-books and white papers, as part of a class inbound marketing campaign (Hubspot, 2018). This content is used to attract the target audience by providing them with content that is of interest to them. Social media is one of the major means by which this content can be amplified to a wider audience. This is done by both paid and unpaid social promotion. There are specific lead generation goals associated with each campaign, in particular paid social campaigns, as it will be necessary to weigh the costs of the campaign with the lead generation outcomes.
The second element of the social media strategy is engagement. This is where social media is used to engage with existing customers. Content for this includes feature releases and product updates, company news, and direct communications (i.e. via FB or Twitter, customers can reach us via our social channels). So for engagement there is both a marketing and a customer service component to the social media strategy. The key performance indicators for engagement are going to be engagement metrics (clicks, likes, etc.), response times, and follower counts.
Description of Target Audience
The target audience for our social media strategy is comprised of both prospects and customers. These are small- and medium-sized businesses, generally profitable, and they are located anywhere in the English-speaking world, though we typically target ANZ, EMEA, North America and India as the main markets. Small business owners that we target are entrepreneurs, risk-takers by psychographic, and often focused on their work rather than the functional elements of their business (i.e. accounting, IT, HR, etc.). They want to continue to focus on what they love and do best, so we provide a suite of solutions to help automate many key business functions. Our customers are usually 25-45 years old, as older business owners are often more hesitant about software-as-a-service, the cloud, and other elements of our business. These younger entrepreneurs also tend to run successful companies- almost always profitable. They are 75% urban or suburban, with 25% in rural or small town areas. They are 65% male, and 55% have some higher education. Almost all have high school.
In particular, the e-book strategy (as described under "purpose of campaign") will be focused on a target audience that shares the same demographic and entrepreneurial characteristics of our established customer base, but contains new prospects. The targeting of non-customers for lead generation has certain implications for the strategy versus the promoting towards existing customers. However, we believe that the best target for the promotional plan is to mirror our existing customer base. This is believed to be a substantial untapped market for our product, and this is the audience for whom we can easily tailor effective messaging and social media strategy.
Current Social Media Usage
Each channel is slightly different in terms of usage. In our experience thus far, Twitter has the highest number of followers, but they are not the most engaged. Twitter users often use the app for news consumption – they want quick links to articles, or brief snippets of information about product updates, promotions and other things. Facebook users have a higher level of engagement, and they typically prefer to read longer articles, rather than engagement with short announcements. LinkedIn users skew more towards the business owners of our customer base, and their interests are more aligned with content that speaks to their needs specifically. They are engaged, but the smallest of our current audiences. We are unsure at this point who will be the audience for our Instagram account, as we have just set that up.
Twitter users consume 60% on mobile, but our FB and LI audiences often browse while at work, so there is a 60% desktop or laptop consumption. Tablets rank low for usage of our social media channels, though they are highest for Facebook. Knowing the hardware that each user consumes our content on will help guide our efforts in terms of visuals, video and copy. Twitter is used remotely more, while the LinkedIn audience uses from home more than the others. The Facebook audience uses everywhere, but skews towards the office. Twitter usage slumps over the weekend, but FB and LI engagement is higher as people have more time to consume long-form media.
Purpose of Campaign
Each individual social media campaign serves a specific purpose, either lead generation or engagement. An example would be the promotion of our latest e-book Ten Things All Business Owners Need to Know About Cybersecurity. This book promotes one of Waterdog's product suites, by providing valuable information. The e-book is gated, meaning that people need to fill out a form to receive it. As such, the objective of the social media is to generate leads by creating awareness and enticing people to download the e-book. This campaign will be measured on the number of downloads, and the quality of the leads.
Mix of Social Media Tools
There are two different elements to the social media campaign for this e-book. The first is the unpaid campaign, where we will promote the e-book with regularly interspersed social media that serves to create enticement to download the e-book. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all have audiences that we seek to target. The LinkedIn and Facebook audiences will be served long-from blog posts that introduce the e-book, while Twitter will mainly be short posts that go directly to the landing page.
The paid promotion will be focused on Facebook and LinkedIn. Paid will include ads, and boosted posts. The objective of serving ads will be to reach new audiences for this content, and to do so at a level where we are paying less per lead than our budget. Using paid promotion will help us refine our target audience by seeing what audiences respond best to this sort of social promotion. A/B testing will be utilized in order to determine what audiences convert better with the social ads.
Estimated Costs
The promotion of this e-book will be stretched over the course of six months. The e-book has already been produced, so the costs in this section will be limited to the incremental costs of the social campaign. First, there are the labor costs, which are around 20 hours of labor. The labor is already paid for, on full-time, and is thus not incremental to the project. There are opportunity costs, however, of this labor, which comes in the form of our digital marketing team, and our copywriter. Opportunity costs will not be included. But the cost of the ads will be, and we have budgeted $5000 for both paid ads and boosted posts. Most of this will be allocated to the paid ads, as we are going to cast a fairly wide net geographically and in terms of industries that we are going to target.
Evaluation
The objective is lead generation, thus that will be the basis for evaluation. The company has lead generation targets, and it has a target cost per lead target. This social campaign will be evaluated in terms of the cost of each lead, the total number of leads, and the quality of those leads (i.e. if they convert at normal, superior or inferior rates relative to other leads). The campaign will also have a total ROI measure associated with it. Given the long sales cycle, the ROI figure will not be available until several months after the lead gen figures are available, but the ROI figure will be used in the year-end reporting on the success of our marketing initiatives. By evaluating several different elements of the campaign, we will gain insight that will help us with future social media campaign strategy, especially when analyzed alongside the other social media strategies that we have conducted in recent months.
References
Hubspot (2018) What is inbound marketing? HubSpot. Retrieved April 1, 2018 from https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing

Parker, S. (2018). Snapchat for business: A guide for marketers. HootSuite. Retrieved April 1, 2018 from https://blog.hootsuite.com/snapchat-for-business-guide/

Perez, S. (2018). What's App officially launches its app for businesses in select markets. TechCrunch. Retrieved April 1, 2018 from https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/18/whatsapp-officially-launches-its-app-for-businesses-in-select-markets/