Social Media Marketing Campaign Overview

For this social media marketing campaign project you will plan an integrated social media marketing campaign for a non-profit client of your choice.

What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media describes the computer platforms, practices and media that people use to share their opinions, experiences and perspectives online. The platforms and applications that allow users to interact typically are blogs, message boards, audio and video podcasts, wikis, social media news sites and social networking web sites, while the social media components can include text, images, audio and video. The social media one finds on social media platforms is usually a mixture of professional and user generated content that is made social through online distribution and its ability to create dialogue between people.

Social media marketing is initiated on social media web sites like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs and relies on the premise that a marketing message, packaged in exceptionally good, outrageous or unique content, in the form of video, text, audio or widgets, can be virally distributed throughout the social web to invite people to interact and to share it with other people.

Unlike Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), where the primary goal is to target “influencers” to spread the message online and offline, social media marketing is a marketing strategy that is based on connecting directly with the target communities, engaging them and generating content or discussion online. The latter can range from submitting a How-To article or Tip sheet to Digg or bookmarking it at Delicious, putting images up on Flickr, uploading videos to YouTube and establishing a business profile at social media web sites or just passing a web page on to a friend via email.

Social Media Web Sites
Social media web sites are increasingly complementing, and in some cases replacing, traditional search engines as a way for people to find content that is specific to what they are interested in and as major channels for web site traffic. But a social media marketing campaign will be more than a link building or a low cost viral marketing campaign when it is well planned with content that is prepared for a target audience, a message that engages them and is integrated with traditional online marketing to give it the strength and acceleration it needs to spread virally throughout the social web.

Social Media Marketing Benefits
Social media marketing campaigns provide businesses with new ways of online marketing that no longer relies primarily on traditional online advertising with large budgets, such as banner ad campaigns and paid search advertising, to build brand-awareness and drive web site traffic. The main benefits of a social media marketing campaign are:

More Web Site Traffic and Links
Social media marketing campaigns generate links and web site traffic from profile pages at social media web sites, web widgets, social network applications and messages that travel virally throughout social media news and bookmarking web sites. More links result in higher rankings of web pages in the organic search results at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search and others.

Improved Customer Relationships
Social media marketing - through blogs, podcasts, wiki’s, forums and other social media tools, can improve customer relationships and customer. They accomplish by developing a deeper, two-way communications channel with the customer base, wherein the business can take part in the discussions, receive feedback and build trust.

Increased Brand Awareness
A social media marketing campaign can create more brand visibility from viral messages that travel throughout the social web. Whether from active participation that ravel throughout the social web, or from active participation in the target communities (customer and influencers) using either helps it establish its power of authority and its online reputation.

Strategic Development
Your assignment is to strategically develop a social media marketing campaign plan for your client that creatively and effectively integrates different types of social media we have explored in class. You will develop a plans book, execute social media tactics, and prepare to present your campaign in class.

With strategic development you will 1) conduct situation analysis 2) define goals and objectives, 3) indetify target audience(s), 4) create content messaging and distribution methods/social media mix 5) integrate with traditional online marketing and 6) establish methods for campaign monitoring and measurement/analytic tools. You will focus on tactics with the greatest potential for generating web site traffic and visual brand exposure and build practical campaigns with maximum user engagement at the lowest risk.

1. Goals and Objectives
Setting the campaign goals and objectives is one of the most important exercises to engage the client in before a social media placement campaign can start. The campaign goals and objectives allow the client to determine the scope, budget and ROI of the campaign before execution so that campaign results can be tracked and measured when it gets underway.

2. Target Audience
Knowing the target audience and how to reach them via social media is one of the most important aspects of planning a social media marketing campaign. Advanced Media Productions researches the social web to find out where the clients’ target audiences and influencers are active online, where their social networks are, what kind of conversations and content they have.

3. Strategic Messaging
When the target audience has been defined we create the messaging and content that has the greatest potential for the clients social media engagement.

4. Content Creation, Messaging and Distribution/Social Media Mix
Focus is on creating and optimizing content (video’s, images, blog postings, podcasts, press releases) for optimum viral distribution to popular social media web sites like Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Technorati to name a few.

5. Integration With Tradition Online Marketing
Regardless of the clients’ product or service, a social media campaign can and should be an integral part of the overall marketing strategy. It needs to be accelerated through traditional online marketing tactics such as search and online display advertising.

6. Campaign Monitoring and Measurement/Analytic Tools
Monitoring and measuring the results of social media marketing campaigns require tools that go beyond basic Web site analytics tools that measure traffic and page views. Social media marketing analytics tools are concerned with tracking buzz and viral marketing and must measure the full potential and extend of the various tactics used in a social media marketing campaign. A sample of metrics that are most important when measuring social media marketing success include: amount of social bookmarks received, blog comment activities, new links attributed to a social media campaign, blogs and forums conversations, visitor engagement, Facebook fans and page views and YouTube video views.

A comprehensive guide to effective strategic communications campaign planning can be found in Dave Fleet's e-book Strategic Communication Planning.