Social Media Strategy Executive Summary

This document outlines the social media strategy to promote an e-book as part of an inbound marketing campaign for a B2B software company. The company has some data on its target audience and their social media usage, and this information is helping to drive this strategy. The strategy will be focused on lead generation and ROI objectives. There will be a mix of unpaid social media posting, and paid social media ads, with the objective to generate interest in, and entice the downloading of the e-book. The form for the download is where the leads will be collected, and this will form the basis for the evaluation of this particular social media campaign.

Social Media Strategy

The purpose of this social media strategy document is to outline the external social media strategy for the company. This document will cover the following: social media platforms, target audience, analysis of current social media usage, purpose of social media campaigns, mix of tools and strategies, costs and evaluation.

Social Media Platforms

Waterdog Software is a business-to-business software company, that sells IT asset management solutions to a wide range of small- and medium-sized businesses. The company currently has a presence on the following social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These accounts were set up by the founder of the company, and to this point there has not been a coherent social media strategy for them.

There are several other social media platforms that the company is examining. Instagram is considered a possibility because it is linked with Facebook for advertising and cross-posting, and can be a means to showcase the more visual side of the company. What's App has a new platform for businesses . While it is currently in limited release, this is considered to have significant potential, especially on the customer service side of the business (Perez, 2018). SnapChat is increasingly being used for businesses as well, and brings with it 150 million users. At present, it is best used in B2C applications, but the company will explore the use of SnapChat for its B2B context in the coming quarter (Parker, 2018).The current strategy will focus on the three existing channels, and the use of Instagram as well. Some time will be set aside to explore the use of emerging social media platforms in our context.

Objectives of Social Media Strategy

There are two main objectives for our social media strategy – lead generation and engagement. For lead generation, Waterdog produces a wide range of content such as blog posts, e-books and white papers, as part...

This content is used to attract the target audience by providing them with content that is of interest to them. Social media is one of the major means by which this content can be amplified to a wider audience. This is done by both paid and unpaid social promotion. There are specific lead generation goals associated with each campaign, in particular paid social campaigns, as it will be necessary to weigh the costs of the campaign with the lead generation outcomes.
The second element of the social media strategy is engagement. This is where social media is used to engage with existing customers. Content for this includes feature releases and product updates, company news, and direct communications (i.e. via FB or Twitter, customers can reach us via our social channels). So for engagement there is both a marketing and a customer service component to the social media strategy. The key performance indicators for engagement are going to be engagement metrics (clicks, likes, etc.), response times, and follower counts.

Description of Target Audience

The target audience for our social media strategy is comprised of both prospects and customers. These are small- and medium-sized businesses, generally profitable, and they are located anywhere in the English-speaking world, though we typically target ANZ, EMEA, North America and India as the main markets. Small business owners that we target are entrepreneurs, risk-takers by psychographic, and often focused on their work rather than the functional elements of their business (i.e. accounting, IT, HR, etc.). They want to continue to focus on what they love and do best, so we provide a suite of solutions to help automate many key business functions. Our customers are usually 25-45 years old, as older business owners are often more hesitant about software-as-a-service, the cloud, and other elements of our business. These younger entrepreneurs also tend to run successful companies- almost always profitable. They are 75% urban or suburban, with 25% in rural or small town areas. They are 65% male, and 55% have some higher education. Almost all have high school.

In particular, the e-book strategy (as described under "purpose of campaign") will be focused on a target audience that shares the same demographic and entrepreneurial characteristics of our established customer base, but contains new prospects. The targeting of non-customers for lead generation has certain implications for the strategy versus the promoting towards existing customers. However, we believe that the best target for the promotional plan is to mirror our existing customer base. This is…