LightThread – IT, Business and Marketing Strategy

What you need to know BEFORE creating a Social Media Strategy

We are preparing to meet with a potential new client who happens to be in the franchise business.  They are evaluating overhauling their brand to address some PR challenges they have faced the past year. Before we can help them, we need to learn more about them. In order to brainstorm social media strategy options, we need to establish a baseline of performance, process, and expectations.

We put together the following agenda list for our first meeting together. If you are thinking about creating a social media strategy, you may want to consider answering these questions first. Please keep in mind this list was created for a company who is recruiting franchises so if this is not applicable to you then please replace “franchise” with “customer.”  Also, the list was created for a specific client in mind, depending on certain factors the questions may be altered. If you’re not sure what to do once you have your answers, then please give us a call, we would love to help you!

1.  Messaging

• What is the message you are trying to convey?
• What is the brand identity you want created? What are your brand attributes?
• When people hear (your company name), what do you want those people to think?
• Is your primary purpose to recruit new franchises, engage with existing franchises or make the general public aware of the company services?

2.  Resource availability

• What resources are used today for marketing and customer/franchise service?
• Do you have a resource(s) available to write blog posts, update facebook (I saw that there last update was in November), comment on forums?
• Do you resources fully understand the online landscape? Are they aware of how to identify, engage and manage top influencers?
• Do you have the tools and metrics available to monitor and measure progress?

3. Customer engagement

• How do you address customer/franchise service today? Do you have an 800 number? Email?
• Are you prepared to appropriately engage with negative sentiment?
• Do you have a process to respond digitally to requests/comments?
• What is your expectation regarding timely responses?

4. Marketing

• What marketing are you doing today?
• What is your marketing mix?
• Are you participating in online marketing such as Pay Per Click, Banner Ads, Facebook ads, etc?
• What marketing support do you provide to Franchises?
• Do you offer promotions/discounts/contests? If so, how often?
• Do you sponsor anything?

5. Franchise/Recruitment Support

• Do you include online marketing as part of the marketing support to Franchises?
• Do you offer a specific site/resource portal/discussion board for Franchises?
• How are you targeting/recruiting Franchises?
• How often do you pro-actively check-in with Franchises?

We hope this helps give you a jump start to considering how you can adopt social media in to your business model. As always feel free to give us a call if you want to learn more.

Cheers,
Lisa