Strategic Planning And Social Media For Business

Have you ever experienced this in handling your social media page or executing marketing campaigns?

• You keep on posting on your social media page but no one is engaging with your posts.
• You tried boosting your posts spent 5000 or more, and all you got are likes and a few comments but no sales.
• You sent samples and PR packages to influencers which got you posts from them but their audience did not materialize into sales.
• Despite constant spending on ads, people have no brand recall and still have no idea you exist. (Except your family and friends)
• Answering inquiries from people who don’t seem to be like your target customers, therefore again, does not result in a sale.

Generating contents to post on your social media is time and labour intensive. We wouldn’t want all your effort to go to waste if no one is actually looking at what you are posting. If you have experienced the situations above, it could be that you need to reformulate your marketing plan and revisit your strategy, before posting again on your social media page.

So what’s the difference between Strategic and Tactical Marketing?

Strategic Marketing is answering the questions WHY, WHO, WHERE and WHAT. This crucial stage involves determining your goals, your target audience, your brand message and identity, mission and vision statement, positioning and location for selling. This stage will determine the WHY of what we are doing. Why are we posting at 8 pm? Why are we creating posts with a pink theme? Why are we posting on Facebook and not on Twitter? The strategy will dictate the course of action in the Tactical Plan.

• Who do you want to sell to?
• What are the problems they encounter?
• Where should we sell?
• Why should people buy your product?
• What makes your product different from the rest?
• What are our S.M.A.R.T goals?

Tactical Marketing involves the HOW, or the process in which your goals under the Strategic Plan can be achieved. If your goal is to target mothers looking to buy clothes for their newborn, your tactical would be, how do we target those mothers? Do we join Facebook Groups with mom communities? Should we create Facebook Ads and select “Parents” and “Female” only? The ways in which we breakdown the tasks and activities to be done to achieve the goals belong to the Tactical Plan.

• How do we target moms aged 30-44?
• How can we reach people who have those problems?
• How do we sell on Facebook?
• How can we target people around SM Megamall?
• How can we show that our product has the ‘x’ feature?
• How do we know if our goals are met? (Analytics)

Most people jump into Tactical without even narrowing down the Strategic plans. It’s akin to driving down the highway with no destination in mind. It’s tempting to jump in and start posting, creating ads, and sharing content, but at some point, it does get old, tiring, repetitive and quite frankly, a waste of time, if all those activities do not connect with a strategic goal in mind.

When you plan ahead, you will be able to schedule your tactical activities, set particular budgets for each one, set a Key Performance Indicator or KPI for each one, so that you know when your goal has been attained. Without planning, your wayward way of guerilla-style of creating, publishing, and distributing content will be directionless. That’s when you’ll experience having no engagement, inquiries, conversations, and sales on your social media pages.

Are you guilty of going gung-ho without planning?

Marketing planning is essential before spending anything on ads. The more fine-tuned your strategy is, the more efficient your ad spend will be. Online Philippines helps small to medium businesses find their space in the digital world so that their customers can find them easily online. Let us help you strategize for your holiday campaign so you can focus on growing your empire.

Article Originally Published in Online Philippines Corp.