The Social Media Planning Roadmap: From Ideas to Getting it Done

How’s your 2011 planning coming along?

If  you still has a few plans to finish up, this will help you. So let’s get started!

Often we forget that social media marketing is… marketing. We think of it as new so that may cause planning paralysis. Where do we start?

How would you start if Social Media Marketing was just Marketing?

We use the Goals/Strategies/Tactics format, and although it is of military origin it’s as simple as it sounds – We start with the goals, we develop strategies associated with the goals and then we identify tactics that would support our strategies.

There are a few other steps up front and following the setting of Goals/Tactics/Strategies, such as, “who is my target customer” and “how will I measure results.” However, I believe both belong to goal-setting.

Our goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. So identifying the audience will make the goal specific, determining how and if something is measurable will make the goal measurable, attainable and realistic.

The biggest barrier to following this model is confusion over what makes a goal, a strategy or a tactic. In simple terms, goals answer to “why,” strategies answer to “how,” and tactics answer to “what.”

I frequently see marketers confusing tactics with strategies. “Let’s do a contest on Twitter” is a tactical step, not a strategy or a goal. Every tactical idea should get the “why?” test. Why would we do this? What are we hoping to accomplish? Is this tactic going to help one of my goals? There’s nothing wrong with having tactical ideas, just work back from them and figure out what strategy and goal they would support.

We get a lot of, “well, this campaign was not expected to drive $$$s, it was just for branding.” Once again I am going to ask “why?” And “why” would such a goal be discussed after not before we planned a campaign? It may be reasonable that the goal is branding, however that goal should be clearly formulated up-front – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

We can’t change goals to fit our tactics we have to find tactics that will help us accomplish our goals.

In other words, if the goals are not crystal clear up-front, do not expect clear, direct, effective marketing. Expect a stroke of luck!

Once you have all goals formulated follow this road-map (below) from my presentation at SES Chicago 2010. If you have more questions or would like more planning tips shoot us an email, Tweet us a question @manamica, or leave a question our the Daily Social Media Workouts Facebook Page.
Social Media Marketing Planning and Measurement, The Key Ingredients – SES Chicago 2010