Developing A Social Media Marketing Strategy With Elon Not Musk

Developing a robust social media marketing plan or strategy involves four fundamental stages, serving as the cornerstone for content marketing within the customer value journey on social media. Proficiency in these stages is essential for content marketers, copywriters, email marketers, sales personnel, and others.

All four stages play a pivotal role in achieving social media success

1. Social Listening: It serves as the linchpin. Social Listening provides valuable insights necessary for excelling in the subsequent stages. This proactive approach enables the formulation of a strategy that fosters influence, builds a robust network, and generates numerous leads and sales.

The key lies in presenting your information to prospects and customers in their preferred online hangouts. For most businesses, this involves leveraging one or more of the top social networking sites. By mastering Social Listening, you lay the foundation for a strategic approach that maximizes your online presence and enhances your business's overall success.

As with any marketing strategy, you need to start with your target audience. That’s why social media marketing starts with listening. This is key to creating a successful social strategy.

Whether you’re paying attention or not, people are talking about you and reaching out to you on the social web. They’re sharing their experiences with your products. They’re talking about the things you’re saying or doing. They’re even asking you questions.

Some comments are positive. You’ll want to celebrate them—and respond with a great big thank-you. In the same vein, negative comments need immediate attention too. Other comments aren’t so positive (and some are downright negative).

They need immediate attention so followers know you’re present and accessible. It’s a lot like customer support. And in the same way, it can help or hurt your public perception. Every day, your social phone is ringing. If you don’t answer, it leaves a bad impression.

On the social web, it’s a bit like leaving your customer service lines unattended. But when you do answer the call, listening and responding appropriately, you can connect with your fans and followers, find and fix issues you may not be aware of, and build incredible goodwill.

The key, of course, is to make listening to your number one priority and use your insights to inform the other 3 stages of the social success cycle.

For example, on X (Twitter) MTN, 9mobile users may call out the companies due to different reasons on the app. (Although these are relatively large companies, the Idea I am trying to portray here is that swift response proves that you listen to your audience and are willing to provide solutions to their issues especially when they are negative comments). It is very important to sympathize with the complaints and if it is a compliment, it is important to acknowledge it. An MTN network user who complains of network inaccessibility (in a rant) still needs to be addressed at least in the next 24 hours. (Find out The 3-Step Social Customer Service Plan - Click here!)

Goals of Social Listening What are you listening for? When tuning in to social conversations, your goals are to:

• Track public perception of your brand.

• Identify the topics you need to be talking about.

• Keep a pulse on the industry, where it’s going, and how it’s being perceived.

• Perform customer research.

• Conduct competitive research

In addition, it is not only about being an attentive listener, it is about responding to the market based on what you have seen or heard. A strategic “feedback loop” is the best way to do this. What is a feedback loop? It’s a process you create for your teams to use when addressing issues that arise during social listening. It maps out the people or departments that issues should be routed to and who has responsibility for resolving them.

When your social listener sees a complaint or issue, say on Twitter, they’ll perform “triage”—responding with an empathetic “you’ve been heard” response—and then route the issue to the proper team. This should happen within 12 hours of the complaint/issue.

Once the issue has been forwarded to the appropriate person, this specialist will then respond to the issue, aiming to resolve it completely within 24 hours.

2. Social Influencing: At this stage, you aim to lead and direct your followers’ opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. And since you’ve been listening, it’s relatively easy. You already know the trending topics and conversations taking place, so adding your authority voice is the natural next step.

What are the signs that your influence is growing?

• You get more engagement – people retweeting or sharing your posts, and people responding to your posts.

• Your traffic numbers increase – people click on your links.

• You develop greater mindshare – people share their questions, thoughts, and opinions with you, and they eagerly seek interaction with you.

• You become a recognized authority and a brand people watch. Keep in mind, that this stage of the success cycle is influenced by the social listening you did in Stage 1. But the reality is that you’ll continue listening at every stage. Once the cycle is going, you’ll perform every stage every day

3. Social Networking: It’s at this stage of the social cycle that you connect with other influencers and authorities and begin to move the needle. Social networking is important for all businesses, whether you’re just getting started, scaling, or expanding into new markets.

It may help to think of social networking as a live event—except your interactions are online rather than face-to-face. After all, networking is networking, no matter where (or how) it happens. And it can lead to deep and lasting relationships, both with your followers and potential partners.

Each time you publish an article on your blog, produce a new piece of content, or have a new offer, you’ll create social media posts designed for the channels you’re posting to (think “native” content) that get the word out.

You’ll share valuable content from peers and, yes, even your competitors. If it relates to your brand’s primary topic and helps your followers, it’s worth sharing. You’ll also engage with people one-on-one, both asking and answering questions.

It is very important to know the social media you are using. To get the hand of it astutely. You cannot post on Facebook like you would on X (Twitter). Luckily, I discovered a picture that tells the story better.

4. Social Selling The fourth and final stage of the social success cycle is social selling. This is where social media marketing gets interesting. Finally, after listening to your prospects, building authority in your space, and establishing a strong network, you can start putting your offers in front of people—and converting them.

The Lingo You’ll Use in Your Social Cycle Knowing the lingo will help you communicate what you’re doing with other professionals. Here are 5 terms you need to know.

“Value First” Offer Social media marketing is just another channel for your marketing, which means you’re creating an environment where you can make successful offers.

Offers that are appropriate for social channels include:

• Valuable content. Link to content that has embedded offers and CTAs.

• Lead magnets, or opt-in offers. These are designed to get cold traffic into your funnels.

• Tripwires, or deep-discount offers. Use these to upsell and cross-sell new and existing customers.

Feedback Loop You need a system where complaints, praise, and other useful comments “heard” during social listening are routed to the correct person in your organization.

Like it or not, we live in a social world. Your customers are on the social web, sharing experiences and opinions related to you, your brand, and your industry. Are you listening? The approach we’ve shared in this chapter will help you create a strategic social media plan that helps you keep up with the conversations taking place online, as well as getting you in front of your customers—and helping you lead, engage with, and sell to them.

In case you missed out on the opportunity to access my 3-Step Social Customer Service Plan get the full PDF/Ebook instead - Download.

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