Managing social media marketing using the SOSTAC® approach

A structured approach to implementing a successful social media marketing strategy

A recent survey suggests that 93% of marketers have transitioned to the world of social networking. But this does not mean that we all currently understand its place in our marketing mix, how we should be using it and how to generate an ROI...  The shift from one-way outbound messages to real-time dialogue has caught many of us off guard, so much so that 20% of businesses still don't even have a social media strategy in place. In this post I discuss some of the planning decisions we can make to improve management of social media comms. The reason many brands do not utilise social well is that they don’t think about strategy, because we use these tools ourselves to connect with people we immediately think it is easy for brands. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Utilising the SOSTAC® planning framework to build a social media strategy

As Dave Chaffey explains in this post applying SOSTAC® to digital marketing, PR Smith’s SOSTAC® model is a great framework for marketing and business planning but also social media since this often requires a strategic approach.

I will now apply each stage of SOSTAC® to creating a social media plan

Situation Analysis

Outside of objective setting I think this is the most important part of a planning, especially if done properly.  There are various things I would urge you to do as part of your situational analysis:

Review your key outpost performance data, especially against competitors. There are tools that help you do this

• Complete a strategic SWOT & PEST analysis with only social in mind
• Look at how social has influenced wider marketing KPIs such as traffic, leads & online sales (or repeat visit / repeat sales)
• Assess the opportunity. Utilising SEO data and social data such as potential fans is a good way to understand the scale of the opportunity. SEO is relevant due to the fuel of social being content as well as the social score we all know Google considers when ranking you

Key to any situational analysis work is to not get emotional about it, ensure you ask bigger picture questions and bring other people into the room with you, ideally those with different world views.

Objectives

Your most powerful tool to get motivated and align teams / businesses. The objectives you set should be ROI-focused as it’s essential in these early stages to decide on what outcome you want from your activity.  Ask yourself what you are trying to achieve, what you consider to be “successful,” and how you will measure it.

It’s useful to follow the SMART acronym when setting your marketing objectives.

• Specific - ensure your goals are simple and not open to interpretation
• Measurable - it is and can be measured
• Achievable - you can actually achieve your objective with the resource and budget you have
• Relevant - it is relevant within the wider marketing and business objectives
• Time-bound Strategy - it has a timeline by which you will have achieved it

Strategy

Strategy is about making choices. There is so much you could be doing and social while key is a part of your full marketing activity. With your social media objectives set you need to consider how you will achieve them. Social can be broken down into simple areas that your strategy would need to consider:

• Key campaign times throughout the year
• What content themes are relevant to your audience
• What types of content do you have the resource and budget to create
• Outside of brand monitoring which other topics are going to monitor online and how do you as a brand respond
• How will you utilise paid and earned media to drive your social presence

The Smart Insights social media hub page will help you with how to craft your social strategy.

Tactics

Creating a view into your next 90 days is crucial so you and your colleagues can start to move on the strategy. Within tactics you should ensure you are clear on your editorial calendar, the tools and processes you need to publish and respond to social media activity. Creating rules around your various social outposts at this time is key too. Ensure to run tactics properly you have:

• Designed the use case for the core social outposts
• Created your content calendar and process around it
• Configured your social listening tools
• Setup any appropriate paid media

The more detail area of your strategy but something you should do over several days as the detail can often get confusing and difficult.

Action

The day-to-day management requires that you have a clear understanding of :

• The roles and responsibilities of those working on social media
• Tools / software in place to enable this (listening, publishing, collaborating and reporting)
• Processes of how things should be done need to mapped out and team members educated
• Any agencies or external consultants briefed on their role

Control

It is critical to understand how your channels are performing in order to monitor the success of your goals and to produce genuine insights that can aid their future performance.  Keep an eye on the reach, engagement, acquisition, conversion and activity on your social media channels.  Produce regular reports as a checking in process of your KPIs against your objectives.

Something to remember is that analysing your social media performance is as much about reporting what’s been going on as figuring out what needs to be done in the future. Using tools like Facebook Insights you can spot common themes and track posts that performed well.  Apply these insights to your strategy by emulating high-performing posts, as well as picking up on areas that haven’t worked and discarding them from your plan.

So, what is the secret to successful social media marketing?

Social media is in flux and as such you must be flexible and reactive in your use of it.  The real secret to successful social media marketing is having a clear goal and knowing that there are multiple ways to get there.

[Editor's note: You can learn more about managing social media marketing in our new guide or how to develop a social media strategy in our Expert members guides].

Reference:

PR Smith (2011) The SOSTAC ®  Guide - to writing the perfect plan  by PR Smith (2011),  published by www.prsmith.org and available at Amazon.