Episode C.028 Social Media Campaign

Introduction
​This week we are continuing our series on Plan - Budget - Action. Regardless of your global location, the world's economy is coming out of the forced shutdown and will experience a V Shaped (quick contraction followed by a quick expansion) Recovery during the 3RD Quarter (July - August). The goal of IBGR's Programming is to get you ready to claw back as much of your lost revenue as possible.
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Show Objectives
There is a lot of information out there because everybody is trying to figure out how to make it work. This show will be a combination of where the marketing industry is today on using social media and our experience with several businesses over the last few years.

The biggest issues for you as a small business owner is NOT whether you are going to pay for advertizing on social media, it is a question of when and what.

Our decision at the IBGR Network is to not buy any advertizing for the website except Adwords and PPC, and that will constitute a small percentage of the marketing budget. We will confine the majority of marketing spend to feature our offer and events. What is your decision?
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What You Need to Know

• Split Testing: never commit all of your campaign resources to an untested email or newsletter. This process is commonly referred to as A/B testing where you write 2 different emails to a sample of the target population and what the results;
• Story Telling vs Facts: all of the great books of history, especially religious, are all stories and parables that lead to truths. The same here - create a macro theme (story or narrative) that is the book and each email/newsletter is a chapter in the book. Insert facts to back of the story;
• Educate, Don't Sell: we are in period for permission marketing and selling. Instead of running hard with Specials, go soft with making your prospects smarter consumers of your products and services;
• Followup Power: make sure you spend serious time working on your Thank You and Welcome comments after they take action. You created a set of expectations in the campaign and this is where you start making it true;
• Avoid Looking Like Advertizing: stay away from anything that appears like 
• The Critical Few - Engagement, Awareness, Share of Voice, and ROI: Engagement is the amount or increase in Likes, Comments, Shares, Clicks, Retweets your posts received. Awareness is the number of impressions (showing in someone's timeline) and reach (unique viewers of the post).  Share of Voice is the volume (your percentage of the total conversation) of your posts and sentiment (how people feel about the post). ROI (Return On Investment) is the number of referrals and conversions based on the post.

What You Need to Do

1. ​Create a Content Calendar / Publishing Schedule - in order for this to work and not waste time and money is to establish a relevant message delivered consistently. We have emphasized this issue several times over the last week, promoting your offer directly will not yield the desired results.
2. Build Article Templates to Provide Searchable Structure - Content Title, Content Format, Description, Keywords, CTA, Channels. Every article is written based on this information with some items for publication and others for internal search.
3. Select an Automation Platform - the goal of surrounding your perfect customers (and prospects) requires a quantity of messages. This is almost impossible without some method of automating the posts. This also includes the best time because each platform has a different rhythm.
4. Baseline Your Channels - before you start you need to establish the current level of performance. This will allow you to see the impact of your social media spend and graph charts essential for making the next marketing decision.
5. Track, Track, Track - you cannot manage what you don't measure and since this is related to your most vital function in the early days of a startup - sales, this is where you can have the greatest impact. Each series of marketing spend decisions will generate metrics to track and you can decide the ROI of the decision and how the awareness of your business and offer is trending over time.

Next Show: ​C.029 Relationship Analytics