This week’s guest blog post is provided by Marie Wiese the founder of Marketing CoPilot which builds online strategies for business owners to help drive lead generation and customer engagement.
I had the occasion recently to present to a group of business owners about using social media for their businesses (2 Tweet or Not 2 Tweet?). An interesting observation came from one of the CEOs. While social media seems like a bottomless pit for most companies, it has an often overlooked silver lining. Once you get past the hype and deciding whether to Tweet or Link In, you cut through the clutter to find that social media could be adding tremendous value to your strategic plan.
To demonstrate the point, let’s make some assumptions about your strategic plan for this year. Most people will be building a plan that includes:
1. Vision/Future Direction
2. Blue Sky/Opportunities
3. Sales/Growth Projections
4. Product/Service Delivery plan
5. Alliances/Mergers
Assuming you are going to build your strategy with an accompanying work plan, there are things you could be doing on social media right now to test and enhance your plan.
1. Market Opportunity – You can use tools like Twitter and Linked In to see if there are groups of people talking about a topic related to one of your strategic initiatives. If you are looking to expand in a market or offer a new service, listen in to the conversation to see what the challenges are, who is already there and what you might need to do to fine tune your position. Social sharing means you can listen before you leap.
2. Service Innovation – I recently discovered on Twitter a growing segment called “virtual assistants” who quickly followed me when I asked about how the service worked and if it would be right for my business. As a result, I determined there was a need amongst small business owners to have a Virtual Marketing Manager for their business, as opposed to a full time marketing manager they had to train and manage. My strategic plan called for productizing a service like this and I found a wealth of knowledge amongst people in a similar industry who were more than willing to share what they knew. They used autoresponders in Twitter to send out content about their services, what they covered and what the price points were. It made my service development a snap.
3. Pricing Strategy – There are some wonderful online tools today that allow companies to innovate inside the way they deliver their products or services and there is no faster mechanism to test it than a social sharing platform. Let’s say you have decided to skinny down a product line and sell a less feature rich product at a reduced price. Why not offer it up on social selling sites like, eBay or Kijiji to test the price point and see what kind of customers you attract before you retool the plant.
4. Concept Testing – There is no other immediate feedback mechanism that I have seen of late that can be as useful a tool as having to explain what you do in 140 characters and immediately seeing if people get it. Using Twitter to stake out your ground on a topic and create a following is an immediate gauge of interest of what you sell or talk about. If are not compelling and able to explain your concept so that people respond and follow you, maybe your concept is not ready for prime time. Social media can save you a ton of time and money figuring this out.
It might seem odd the marriage of social media and strategic planning, the first being immediate, the second being long term, but the immediate can guide long term planning. Hopping on line and listening before you execute can save you from costly investments of time, money and resources in a strategy that may not make it the distance.
The most important thing to remember about any tool or research that you deploy to support your strategic planning exercise is to clearly define your target market and value proposition before you start. The one thing that social media forces us to do is to create laser-like focus of our messaging so that we can engage. Once you sort this out during your strategic planning process, the sky is really the limit in what you can do with social media to innovate within you company. Possibilities are endless.
Check out Chapter 1 of Marie’s new eBook, Why Marketing Fails….and what you can do about it!
Tags: business owners, Jim Stewart, Linked In, Marie Wiese, market, marketing, Marketing CoPilot, marketing manager, product, ProfitPATH, service, social media, social sharing, strategic plan, strategy, Twitter