The importance of strategy, tactics and action in social media marketing

Setting the right social media strategy to reach your goals.

There is a wealth of literature about marketing strategy, and with good reason, a sound strategy can make a difference in a business's success. We don't aim to give a comprehensive overview in a few paragraphs but to provide a practical framework for building a winning social media marketing strategy.

Before starting, we need to clarify what a strategy is. Although often just a few lines, a strategy must explain how you aim to achieve your marketing objective. A good strategy statement must answer the question, "How do we win?"

The most important thing when working on strategy is avoiding the "planning trap". The main difference between strategy and planning is the control you have:

• When you work on strategy, you examine the customers and external environment and formulate a theory about how to win in your field.

• When you work on planning, you look at your internal resources and plan a set of activities you have complete control of (such as opening a new factory, launching a new brand, etc.).

The good news is that you can apply a process to ensure your "theory" is sound, increasing your chances of success.

The first step is reviewing your social media marketing objectives and the KPI framework and summarising how you will achieve them. We discussed the Objectives and KPI framework topic at length in the previous article of this series. Feel free to check it out if you haven't read it yet.

Next, we look at our segments. During the social media audit, you performed an audience analysis and should now have access to essential information such as age range, gender split, country of origin and interest profile (per channel).

Other findings from your audit will also give you ideas of what you need to improve to reach your goals (e.g., slow response rates, low customer sentiment or engagement).

If you are unsure how to run a comprehensive audit of your social media channels, read the first article of this series.

It's time to bring those three together and formulate some strategic options.

Look at your objectives. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Or are you trying to boost sales?

Ask yourself what matters to your audience(s). Do they want to be entertained or informed? What platforms do they prefer?

Finally, uncover meaningful insights from your social media audit. Is your engagement rate high? What about the community sentiment?

To make things more concrete, let's make a fictional example.

We'll look at EcoWave, a Danish scale-up that sells eco-friendly, reusable, BPA-free water bottles.

According to their market research, EcoWave has good brand awareness in Europe but falls short of consideration. They aim to become one of their sector's top three preferred brands on the continent.

The audit results highlight a significant misalignment between EcoWave's current social audience and its target demographic (millennials in Europe). The low engagement rate shows that the content may not resonate with the existing followers or the desired audience.

Based on these insights and their specific business objectives, EcoWave formulates the following strategic statement:

"Become the most loved sustainable hydration brand among European millennials by enhancing their engagement on social media through tailored content and partnerships that align with their eco-conscious values."

Although concise, the strategy indicates what EcoWave wants to achieve through social media marketing and how it aims to do it.

Tactics and Actions

"Strategy without execution is hallucination" - Thomas Edison.

A clear strategy statement functions as a North Star for the whole team, but to guide implementations, you will need to define the tactics (and the actions within them) that will bring it to life.

Tactics

Tactics are the details of the strategy. In a broader marketing sense, these usually refer to the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). It is essential to ensure your tactical decisions are aligned with the broader marketing strategy of your organisation (so you don't want to be offering discount codes through Instagram if your company is pursuing a product differentiation strategy), yet for the sake of keeping this guide practical and actionable; given that we are focusing exclusively on social media, we will focus on the specific tactics that can be implemented within this channel: content, distribution, community management, and reporting.

The actions are the steps you will need to implement for each specific tactic.

Content

Content is one of the core tactics of your social media marketing strategy, and it can be broken down into specific actions:

• Define content buckets;

• Consider content partnerships/influencers;

• Establish calendar and frequency;

• Create and publish the content;

• Define reporting format and cadence.

Distribution

Distribution is the way your content is shown to relevant target audiences. Over the years, social marketing has become a pay-to-play environment, so it is essential to have the right approach when promoting your content:

• Define boosting KPIs;

• Define target audience;

• prepare media plan;

• Define reporting format and cadence.

Community Management

Different from most traditional marketing channels, social media is a two-way communication platform. As a brand, this means that you need to have a solid plan for engaging with your audience:

• Define TOV and FAQ

• Define the channel's role

• Define KPIs per channel (SLA, Sentiment, etc)

• Create a CSAT survey or NPS tracker

• Define reporting format and cadence

Reporting

As we mentioned above, a strategy is a theory on how to succeed on your playing field.

That means you need to be able to measure it constantly and tweak it accordingly. In a previous article, we discussed building a KPI framework for your social media marketing activities (read it here if you haven't yet).

Ensure you have a consistent cadence and avoid the "analysis paralysis" trap.

Many companies end up tracking so many different metrics that the results of their analysis are often inconclusive.

By working on your KPI framework and narrowing down the metrics, you can ensure that your Social report is actionable and informs the right changes to your strategy.

In conclusion

Creating a winning social media strategy is much more than just building your content calendar and starting to post.

You must understand how your social activity will help the organisation reach its business goals.

At Enneffe, we specialise in digital marketing strategy, and our social media experts are ready to support you in every step of this journey.

Get in touch if you want to know how we can help your company win on social.

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