Thursday, January 10, 2013

Part 1 of my social media marketing plan e-book


Dear Reader,

I promised you a feast for the upcoming year. Now that we are there, here are some ideas to chew on. 

Hopefully, it will help trigger some great ideas of your own, which you will share with all of us in the comments section, yes?

This yet-to-be-named-e-book is in the draft stage, so kindly pardon the errors…

On that note, without much ado, let’s get cracking…


36+ Ideas for a Social Media Marketing Plan

Duration of the plan: one year

Introduction:

Imagine your company is toying with the idea to go into the confectionery business in general, and the milk business segment, in particular.

You would have to decide first on the name of the brand, assuming you know the nature of the product. For starters, let’s assume it is a milk product. You would have to factor in, terms, such as, “milk” or “nutritious” in it, bearing in mind that it shouldn’t sound like your competitors. For the purpose of this paper I have chosen the word Nutramil, although DANONE has a similar name for one of their products, and so it’s not a viable name should you be in that business category.

Let’s suppose after careful brainstorming, that the team has arrived with a name that satisfies everybody. The next few steps would take them through the branding exercise factoring points such as price, product, place and packaging. 

Some might try their skill at logo design, so let them. Or you could let the professional designers take care of it.

So, what do we have here?  A name and a logo.  You see, when the product is new and yet to be launched, we can do just about anything with it. It’s something like an empty canvas for a master craftsman or a struggling artist to improve his skills on.

And so, excited as we are about it, we take the first few baby steps to bring the product from obscurity to the spotlight. 

Here’s how:

So the product is new. How would you start? Big or small? With a big bang or a whimper?

For the purpose of this paper I have started it big. Huge, to be honest, with a pre-launch event. Something which if played out well would grab the attention of neighboring countries. And that is the very intention: to reach the shores of distant and not-so-distant lands. With a video on YouTube and through simple WOM, we will have the attention of thousands of eye-balls, or so it is believed.

Having done that with just the pre-launch event, we have caught the imagination of countries that matter most: our populous neighboring countries, and this, our land of teeming wombs.

The seeds have been sown; now we have to ensure that with the help of the elements, it takes root.

At this point, let’s take a breather from the impending storm of activities that could sweep the weaker among us like paper-boats in a turbulent sea.

We put the ceiling of our ambitions to a humble duration of a year. That is our short term plan. Now, break that up into still smaller plans and what do we have? A road map detailing down from months, weeks… heck, even a day’s plan of activities! With the help of our short-term plans we have the daily practice chalked out for us. So we know just what we have to do each day and we plan for a “day-two”, weeks in advance to ensure that nothing will go wrong.

How are we going to spread the word? How are we going to involve the rural market? Or don’t we want the rural market covered? 

These are some of the questions we need to ask ourselves.

Also factor in the different ideas for ad campaigns…

Brainstorm whether the it would be preferable to treat the rural separately from the urban…

Ask: how could we spread the word across the country’s length and breadth, leave alone the world with minimum spending.  How this thoughtful idea would itself endear us to our client…

How a social media plan is neither simple nor cheap…

How we could work around the problem of free and try to earn the company a little by ‘charging’ nickels…

One big hitting idea that would make the citizens sit up and take notice…

How to keep the interest alive and also build on the brand for product recall…

At least twenty ideas that will keep fans of your website suitably engaged…

Ideas for the different social media sites…

Ideas to keep the entire country engaged…

These are the points you would have to go through in some details while chalking out a year-long plan of social media marketing and what you will find in this brief e-book…

For the next few days, let the pages of this e-book unravel the mysteries of social media marketing for brand Nutramil.

Set forth! Ahoy!

The journey has just begun…


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