What if you could transform your brand in 30 days, using the resources and skills you have as a social media marketer today?
Thirty-day transformation isn’t just for bikini bods, folks–your brand can have its epiphanic moment sooner than you think. Here’s what to do.
Day 1
Conduct an audit. Run analysis on where your brand stands this year vs. last year on social:
- By engagement level, sentiment level, and business value contribution
- Broken down by active social channel
Conducting this audit will give you a clear overhead picture of where you are today and what your trajectory looks like.
Day 2
Use the analysis from Day 1, and drill down on the spikes in engagement, positive sentiment, and business value you’ve seen.
Create a “one source of truth” list of your greatest moments of success, whether intentional or unintentional and deepest moments of failure to meet expectations, too.
Day 3
Using the data you’ve gathered as guideposts showing you what to do and what to avoid, start planning a new campaign that will span at least a six-month period, to give your messaging a chance to really saturate the market and your target audience.
This campaign should tie into your brand’s larger marketing messaging and should have strong visual and video components. Think about it this way: this campaign should become what your brand is known for in the year to come.
Day 4
Look at your earned social media content–how people mention your brand and target topics on social in conversations with their nearest and dearest. This is great fodder for your campaign.
What you find out about how people think of your brand and industry should be your campaign’s bedrock and inspirational force.
Day 5
Once you’ve put together your campaign, it’s time to get buy-in from key stakeholders.
Outline the following for your key stakeholders:
- The resources you will need
- The benefit this campaign will have on your company at large (I recommend going beyond “generating awareness” here)
- The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators–how you will know you are succeeding or not, i.e., metrics)
- The timeline
Then ask for feedback.
Day 6
Take this day to incorporate feedback into your plan, and send a revised version to key stakeholders.
Day 7
While you’re busy planning your big, game-changing campaign, don’t forget to conduct your weekly review of the social media metrics that matter to your business.
Knowing what your goals are and which KPIs are significant will give you a wonderful foundational benchmark to work from when you do launch your campaign.
Day 8
Don’t forget experimentation: make sure that your plan includes at least one “emerging” social network or platform feature, like Snapchat or Instagram Stories.
This will challenge you to keep innovating and freshening your brand identity. It can also drive web traffic from people who already love your brand.
Day 9
Put together a detailed social media editorial calendar to share with other departments/personnel you will need resources from during your campaign. This will also keep you sane during the busier moments of your campaign.
Day 10
Schedule as much of your content as you possibly can before you launch. This will free you up to run analysis as you go along and make the optimizations and pivots you need to make.
Day 11
It’s launch day! Time to put all your plans into motion.
Day 12
As your campaign unfolds, take some time to look at your competitors’ social performance.
What are your competitors doing well? What does their social performance look like? How does it compare to yours?
What can you learn from their competitive social data, and how can you weave these lessons learned into your campaign?
Remember that your campaign isn’t stagnant, like a statue you build and leave alone. It’s more like wet clay, which you can keep changing and creating better and better shapes from as you go along.
Day 13
Are you leveraging influencers as a part of your campaign and brand transformation? If you are, it’s time to check in with your influencers and see if they’re on track with their deliverables and/or need any help.
If you are not leveraging influencers, you should be, no matter what you sell. Well-chosen influencers help you reach a broader audience that is likely to be interested in and buy your product. They also give your brand more clout and authenticity in front of these audiences.
Day 14
Expand your perspective. Do some research on social media trends. Pew is a great places to start.
Day 15
Make sure you’re clear on who your target social audience is for this campaign, and for your brand generally. You can do this by:
- Finding out who your most engaged users are
- Searching your top hashtags, both owned and general
- Discovering who follows your competitors
Day 16
Get conversational. As mentioned in my overdone statue metaphor above, social media marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” business. Make sure you’re responding to folks who are mentioning your brand and campaign content as quickly as possible, to keep that conversation going and keep your brand top-of-mind.
Day 17
It’s time to check your visual consistency across all your brand’s web and social properties.
Do your graphics on the social networks you have accounts with–even the ones you don’t use that often–mirror one another? Is the experience that a social follower has coming from Twitter to your website seamless, or will he or she be startled by the difference in messaging and visual approach?
Work with your web/content team to make sure your social followers have a consistent experience–and, ultimately, convert to customers.
Day 18
At the end of day 18, your campaign has been alive for seven days–a full week! Go, you! Now it’s time to see whether you’re on track to hit the goals you’ve set for the campaign.
If you’re right on track: Yay! Keep doing what you’re doing.
If you’re behind: Don’t worry. Take a deep breath. Look at the most well-received posts in your campaign right now. Double down on posts of that nature, or promote those very posts more aggressively. Remove low-performing posts from your queue. Learn from what’s happened this first week, and tweak future planned content in the campaign accordingly.
Day 19
Run your brand through the “Big Four” checklist of successful digital brands:
- Do you know your buyer? What does he or she care about (beyond your industry/product type)? What do these demographics look like? What keeps your buyer up at night?
- Do you have a unified strategy? Is every part of your organization up to speed on your campaign, how it’s going, and what your projected results are?
- Are you a full-funnel player? Do you know how your social media content is affecting buyer movement in the funnel?
- Are you setting goals and measuring results? Have you fallen behind on keeping tabs on progress?
Day 20
It’s time for continued education. Watch a webinar targeted at marketers in your industry or field.
Come prepared with questions you want to be answered, and ask them during the Q&A section of the webinar. Integrate what you learn into your campaign.
Day 21
Time for a check-in with your boss. Make sure you’ve refreshed your reporting system, and are including these elements when you inform him/her on transformation progress:
- Trends, not tactics and endless metrics: Your boss wants to eat the food, not go in the kitchen and make it him or herself. Be prepared to answer specific follow-up questions, but no need to include every little tactic and metric in your report.
- Conversion rates FTW: Your peers serve up conversion rates to indicate success or failure.
- Own your losses: Are things not going according to plan? Explain why, and do it using the data.
- Leave ’em with an action plan: Not your setbacks. Analysis is only as useful as it is action-oriented.
Day 22
Bring an unexpected guest onto your Facebook Live, Snapchat, or Instagram Stories.
Day 23
Send out an email soliciting UGC via your strongest social channel (so as not to dilute the power of the responses), and offering a chance to win a prize.
Day 24
Get to know your digital neighbourhood through social.
Day 25
Your second weekly review has arrived! Follow the same recipe as Day 18!
Day 26
Solicit internal UGC. Ask your employees to submit campaign– and brand-relevant content for social, and offer a prize for published submissions.
Day 27
This is your boost day. Check your progress towards your 30-day goal. Are you just a tad behind? This is your day to pull out all the stops: post more frequently, host a giveaway or impromptu Twitter Chat, get a surprise influencer/partner on your Facebook Live.
Challenge yourself to blow past that finish line on day 27–this will force you to get more creative than ever before.
Day 28
Take a marketer you know and admire out to lunch, or approach him or her on social and ask for a quick chat. Come prepared with a set of questions, as specific as possible.
We recommend choosing a particular campaign you were floored by and digging deep to find out what you can learn for your own brand.
This information will help you on day 30 when you take a look at how far you’ve come and where you need to make major modifications.
Day 29
Round up your influencers for a group chat to discover how they’ve perceived your campaign, and what kind of feedback they’ve received from their respective audiences. This information will help inform your 30-day review.
Day 30
It’s time for your 30-day review. You’ve built a campaign that will keep going, but what have these 30 days taught you? You’ve gotten agile.
You’ve learned a lot about which content your audience will consume, and which they decline or ignore. You have a good idea about whether or not your messaging is on the right track.
