Guest blog from Aren Grimshaw, strategic marketing and communications consultant.
Social Media has moved from buzzword to bandwagon to become the mainstream marketing must-have for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Its growth has been meteoric.
There are facts, figures and statistics that show that speed of growth but perhaps the clearest way to see what has happened is by looking at two definitions.
Social Media used to be ‘media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques’ and it has become ‘how people read, discover and share information’.
Businesses are of course more than enthusiastic about the thought of being discovered, read about and shared with others all across the web and so they have embraced this marketing ‘magic bullet’ with both hands.
But there are three problems with social media for most businesses.
They don’t know what is involved, they don’t know what they want to achieve and they have no way of measuring whether they have achieved it or not.
In their rush to keep up, they have left something behind. They have forgotten to ask, ‘What is our strategy?’ Without an appropriate strategy, some businesses have not seen the return on investment that they hoped for.
So rather than beating social media with a stick for failing to deliver on its promise, what I suggest they need is ‘CARAT’.
CARAT is the planning tool that I use for generating an effective strategy for social business. It stands for:
Community
Aims
Resources
Approach
Technology
As you can see, in this system the technology comes last; it ensures that businesses understand the ‘why’ before dealing with the ‘how’.
The first three stages are all about diagnosis. Who do you want to engage with, what do you want to achieve and what resources do you have to make it all happen.
The Community will include your customers, influencers – people or groups who can sway a potential customer’s decisions – and partners, who are your potential allies because they share a common goal or need.
Traditional marketing would call this group the target market but that in itself highlights how social marketing differs. You are not aiming messages at this group; you are planning to become engaged with them, to share knowledge and opinions and to have that input passed on, referred and commented on.
Your Aims might include improved search listings, increased brand awareness, a better reputation or new sales leads.
One thing that your aims must include is some element of research. Social Media is not a space for talking to people, it’s somewhere to talk with them and as in so many conversations, you should spend more time listening than talking.
The Aims of the strategy should be specific, measurable and be given a defined timescale. (Just like in the old days.)
Under Resources, you would file the time and money that can be dedicated to the activity and the people and skills that your business already contains that can be utilised in the project.
All too often, businesses under-resource their Social Media strategy; generating content, managing relationships and responding to the community that you establish takes a commitment of time and effort.
The Approach is your guiding policy, the overall concept that you are working with.
The approach needs to be visible; people need to be able to see and understand what you are about. It needs to be credible. It needs to have value from the customer’s point of view and you need to know that you are capable of dealing with any responses.
The approach has strong links with traditional marketing, as this is where your brand and its values are represented. There seems to be a belief that Social Media should be fun and funky; however, if those two words don’t appear in how you would describe your business, then they shouldn’t reflect how you behave in the Social Media environment.
Finally, we come to Technology. There are a host of Social Media platforms to choose from and not all of them will be necessary or even appropriate. The diagnosis section of the CARAT process will lead you to see which are the ones to use.
What is necessary however is to understand how your social business activity can be embedded into your existing processes; to see what needs to be outsourced and what can be done by existing staff, and what needs to be done to empower those people to successfully represent your business in the Social Media environment.
Integrating Social Media into your marketing plan certainly takes an understanding of the technology but an understanding of people and how they behave is equally important.
For it to be effective, everyone in your business needs to be involved, want to be involved and know how best to do that. To achieve that, you need a strategy that is easy to understand and to share.
In my experience, CARAT produces something that motivates your people as well as your business growth.
