Social Strategy: Design an Outreach Plan
This week, we are breaking up our #SocialSpotlight series to talk about strategy. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in Public Relations, so much so that it loses its meaning. So what is strategy and how can it be applied to your business’ publicity? In a nutshell, you will want to track your current progress, set quantitative goals, and implement a thoughtful plan to keep your business on track for those goals. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. Let us break it down for you in a few questions.
What are you doing now? Evaluate your current publicity outlets. Do you have an ad running in your local newspaper? A company Facebook page that you check once a month? It can be helpful to organise them into categories, such as print and online or free and paid.
How’s that working out for you? What’s getting results? What can be improved? What can be eliminated? Run some traffic numbers from the past few months.
What are your goals? Determine which demographics you would like to reach and the content that they view. Do they love to read blogs, like female Generation-X members? Or are they fast-paced millennials constantly sneaking quick glances at Instagram?
How can you reach them? From there, determine your top three outreach sources and invest your time and resources accordingly.
Let’s be sure. Be honest with yourself about the results, and implement ways to track them. Perhaps you can include a specific discount code in the newspaper ad and track how many calls it attracts. Then run some numbers in a few months to calculate if it is worth the expense. Similarly, consider the expense of time. If your thoughtful Facebook posts aren’t creating good results, perhaps your time is better spent on other outreach that may hit your demographic in a surprising way.
In our last post, we promised a free download for this week. We won’t let you down. Below is a printable template for tracking social media progress.
