Social media marketing: a strategic approach

Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach is built upon an eight-step planning cycle that helps ensure the development of a winning SMM plan. This model incorporates the conceptual foundation and practical techniques necessary for creating a comprehensive and effective SMM plan. The model also provides a framework for developing a personal brand, a subject given chapter-by-chapter coverage in the third edition.

This planning cycle begins with observing an organization’s current goals, presence and competition on the social web, followed by the establishment of SMART social media objectives and effective strategies to achieve them. The next step is to define an organization’s target markets and campaign-specific audiences on the social web. This process makes it possible for a company to identify the social media platforms with the highest concentrations of its target audiences and determine how they are participating on those platforms, which enables the organization to select the optimal social media platforms for reaching its target audiences.

Interaction on the social web is guided by informal rules of engagement and general principles of appropriate behavior (social media ethics). Marketers must be aware of these precepts before attempting to participate in social media or risk alienating the very market segments they hope to connect with and influence.

With these guidelines in mind, as well as the company’s social media goals, strategies,

target audiences, and prime social media platforms, marketers can craft actionable platform-specific marketing tactics. The execution of these tactics allows an organization to implement its social media strategies across multiple platforms and realize the company’s marketing goals. The bulk of this textbook is dedicated to learning how to create and deploy specific marketing tactics using online platforms and the mobile web.

Social media tools that make the process more efficient as well as more effective are given detailed coverage. In addition, extensive consideration is given to monitoring and measuring the progress made in reaching social media objectives and demonstrating return on investment. Feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, provides the means to continuously adjust and improve the elements of an SMM plan to maximize the chances of success. Because the organization must work toward the goals selected in a cohesive manner, an entire chapter is devoted to managing and staffing the social media organization.

The final chapter draws upon all the preceding material in the textbook to demonstrate and explain how to develop a formal SMM plan with multiple references and illustrations from a real-world sample plan (presented in its entirety in the Appendix).

Hence, this textbook provides a rich and robust cumulative learning experience with deep contextual relevance that endows the reader with an enduring understanding of the process of effective SMM planning. This process provides the social media marketer with a strong foundation for dealing with the ever-changing audiences, platforms, and technologies of the social web.