Social Media Marketing Strategy and Planning

MATT:

This brings us to the next section: describing social media marketing strategy and planning. So, can social media impact your business goals?

How Social Media Impacts Business Goals

GREG:

It should, but way too often it doesn’t.

One of the things that a strategist should do at the beginning of any campaign, let alone during any ongoing program, is to ask, “What are we trying to accomplish?”

If you tell top management, “Our strategy is to send out 47 tweets a week,” will they approve your plan? No, they won’t. They’ll want a strategy and plan that will move the needle.

So, the question you may be asked is, “How many tweets do we need to sell a car?”

That’s a good question. And there’s no answer. Why? Because there’s no correlation between marketing inputs and business outcomes.

That’s why you want to start with “My objective is to sell a car.” Or pick a different product or service. Whatever it is, start with your objective. And then work backward.

According to Luth Research, one consumer journey included more than 900 digital interactions before a 32‐year‐old mother of two decided to lease an SUV.

Did social media help her during any of these shopping moments? If it did, then great!

So, what was the return on marketing investment for the money that you put into that social media campaign, social media advertising, or influencer marketing program?

Top management will probably know how much you spent. What they’ll want you to do is “show a return” on your activities.

Did your strategy increase brand awareness, consideration, or purchase intent? If it did, then by how much? Did your plan generate high‐quality leads? If it did, then how many?

Value of Influencers

MATT:

We’ll talk more about social media measurement later in this podcast. But how do you determine the value of influencers?

GREG:

Actually, I wrote an article about that in September 2021 for Search Engine Journal. It’s entitled, “How to Calculate the ROI of Influencer Marketing Campaigns.”

The demand for the top celebrities and influencers is so great that Clear, a global brand, paid Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most popular soccer players in the world, an estimated $619,497 to $1 million for a single Instagram post.

With so much money getting poured into reaching Ronaldo’s 339 million Instagram followers, you can bet dollars to donuts that someone at Clear asked, “What’s the ROI of our latest influencer marketing campaign?”

That’s a great question—and it’s one that all of us need to know how to answer.

So, how do you calculate your Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)? The formula is [Incremental Revenue Attributable to Marketing ($) × Contribution Margin (%) – Marketing Spending ($)]/Marketing Spending ($).

So, let’s say Ronaldo’s #sponsored Instagram post cost $1 million, just so we can use a round number. And let’s say that the contribution margin on Clear shampoo is 60 percent, which is just a completely unscientific, wild‐assed guess.

If Ronaldo’s post generated $5 million in incremental revenue, then you multiply that by 60 percent to get $3 million in gross profit. Then, you subtract the $1 million spent on influencer marketing and then divide the $2 million result by the $1 million spent on influencer marketing to get a ROMI of 2.

Like this: [$5,000,000 * 60% – $1,000,000]/$1,000,000 = 2.

In other words, every dollar that Clear spent on influencer marketing generated an additional $2 on the global brand’s bottom line.

Now, how can you be sure that you can attribute $5 million in incremental revenue to Ronaldo’s post?

Well, one way is to leverage the fact that Ronaldo was promoting the new Clear Men Legend Shampoo by CR7, which has a design, scent, and texture personally selected by Cristiano Ronaldo, who wears the number 7 on his jersey.

In addition, Clear Legend Shampoo by CR7 was only available at leading drug stores and supermarkets in Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Greece, China, KSA, Gulf, Levant, Mashreq, Maghreb, Russia, Romania, and Greece.

All the marketers at Clear needed to do was track incremental revenue from this sub‐brand and compare that to revenue from Thailand, Italy, and Portugal, where Clear Legend Shampoo by CR7 wasn’t available yet.

Now, social media marketing strategists may not want to bet their jobs on the possibility that a celebrity or mega‐influencer with more than 1 million followers can generate $5 million in incremental revenue with a single post.

Well, they’ll be relieved then to discover that smaller influencers will probably give them an even better ROMI.

For example, micro‐influencers with less than 15,000 Instagram followers might make around $100 per post, although it depends on the profile.

However, the calculation for your return on marketing investment remains the same.

So, let’s say a micro‐influencer’s #sponsored Instagram post costs $100. And let’s say that the contribution margin on your brand is 60 percent, which is as good a guess as I can make without knowing more about your product category.

If the post generates $1,000 in incremental revenue, then you multiply that by 60 percent to get $600 in gross profit. Then, you subtract the $100 spent on marketing and then divide the $500 result by the $100 spent on marketing to get a ROMI of 5.

In other words, every dollar spent on micro‐influencer marketing would have generated an additional $5 for your bottom line.

Now, generating $1,000 in incremental revenue isn’t going to get you a promotion. But let’s say you identified 10 micro‐influencers and were able to generate $10,000 in incremental revenue. Do you see where this is headed?

That’s how you determine the value of influencers.

MATT:

Which brings us to the new buzzword: social commerce.

GREG:

Terrific. But before you jump on the social commerce bandwagon next week, ask yourself: “How many cars can we sell with that?” Or “How many bottles of shampoo?”

And once you use your business goals to determine if your strategy and plans will move the needle, then a lot of the silliness in social media marketing falls away. And some of the serious opportunities actually begin to emerge because there are times when social media marketing pays its way.

MATT:

And it gets right back to what we talked about at the beginning. One of the biggest questions is, “How do I justify this? How do I rationalize the time and the investment that we’re making in that?”

And you’re establishing a very clear connection between business goals and marketing strategy. And without that, we’re not going to impact anything.

But what I like is how social media is a distribution multiplier. If I’m doing content marketing, then social allows me to distribute content across a wide variety of channels in a wide variety of media. And I can target different networks based on what type of reaction I want. What do I want people to do?

For example, if I want someone to click‐through, then I may not want to use Instagram because it doesn’t allow me to put a link in the post. Whereas, I might use Facebook because I can put a link in the post. And I can put a strong call to action and make that happen.

GREG:

And you can use Google’s free Campaign URL Builder tool, which allows you to add campaign parameters to URLs so you can measure custom campaigns in Google Analytics.

All you need to do is:

1. Enter the URL of the landing page.
2. Enter Facebook, Twitter, or blog in the box for the Campaign Source.
3. Enter Ronaldo or microinfluencer_2 in the box for Campaign Medium.
4. And then enter a term like CR7 in the box for the Campaign Name.

The Campaign URL Builder tool will generate a campaign URL for you—and you can even use Bitly to shorten the URL. Then, all Ronaldo or a micro‐influencer needs to do is use this URL in their post or tweet and the marketers at Clear can track the results in Google Analytics.

But this doesn’t work for all products and services. A couple of years ago, there was a brand that came to us to launch an influencer marketing campaign for their jock itch solution. And we had to tell them that we couldn’t identify any social media influencers talking about the jock itch problem, for obvious reasons. So, they were going to have to find a different way to market that product.