Creating and implementing an effective marketing plan is essential for any business, regardless of size or industry. Unfortunately, however, many companies struggle with simply where to start. So if you're feeling overwhelmed by the task of creating a plan, don't worry - you're not alone! And although the answer for what an ideal marketing plan looks like differs in almost every case, one common denominator rings true nearly every time, START WITH THE EASY STUFF.
One of the most popular and versatile tools for marketing is social media. Social media can be used to build brand awareness, strengthen customer relationships, and drive traffic to your website. Using social media correctly can achieve the broad reach of a message, improve SOV (share-of-voice), and impact a large audience. The best way to accomplish a wide reach and a large audience are to deploy the full firepower of your companies connections in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social platform. Full firepower means encouraging each employee to re-post, re-tweet, and re-share corporate or departmental posts. Remember the old Faberge shampoo commercials, repurposed by Wayne's World, where if you tell two people, and they tell two people, and they tell two people, all of a sudden, 15 people know about your product. Well, imagine if each of your employees has hundreds of contacts and connections. That math means exponential reach.
Establishing a large footprint with sheer web real estate volume means all your employees will also be on-brand with consistent messaging, sharing voice as subject matter authorities. Expand the reach that bit more via your partners by offering the content as a value-added service, and you can see how a simple social strategy can quickly go viral. Add a call-to-action or link to a landing page, and measurement comes into focus. The viral nature then makes the strategy quite attractive for promotions, events, newsletters, or company announcements. And with over 85% of decision-makers claiming social channels often influence their buying decisions, by recruiting your employees to get on the sharing bandwagon, you'll be well on the way to building relevance and positive metrics for your social strategy.
