Now that we've looked at the three strategies together, let's look at them separately and figure out which one is going to be best to help you achieve your marketing goals. The engagement social strategy is really important for driving business to your social networking sites. In other words, what we want to do is to build a relationship through great content that will keep people coming back to your site that are in your target market. And so the focus here is really going to be on content and some issues around that. What you want to think about, though, is keep in mind all the time how are we going to be relevant to everybody in the social pyramid. In other words, while we're talking about content, it's much more than text. It could be blogging, it could be audio podcasts, it could be videos, or any combination of those. It could also be SlideShare and all the different things we've talked about. Infographics, the key is how do we get relevant information from our company to the people that we want to engage with the engagement strategy. So the goal is to always be thinking about that and always be looking. We've talked about filter and focus. We gave you tools like Alltop, so you could begin to find stuff, as well as Klout. Now, the key is we need to keep an informational flow going out to our target market that is very, very relevant to them. So you go back to your social listening to figure out what are the topics that are relevant and then find the best possible content to drive it forward. To do it, we're going to give you a couple of tools. One is a very, very useful, 52 week planning calendar. And the key is it's got a whole lot of detail. In fact, I find myself, I go and open it up. I get rid of a lot of the different columns. But what it really does is it says, okay, if we're going to be an engagement marketer, what sort of content do we want to do? And so if you'll start over at the left hand side with the first circle that's in column A, one of the things I find very useful myself is I think about what is the weekly theme I want to focus on. And so what you do is you go back to the discussion topics and look at what you're an expert in, things that you're finding. And what do they want to talk about? For example, in social marketing, a theme might be engagement marketing. Or a theme might be privacy. Or a theme might be nurture marketing. Or a theme might be infographics. In other words, what I do is I think about it over time to figure out what sort of topics are going to be important. And if you look down at the bottom on the left hand side in that column A, you'll notice that the entire spreadsheet is designed for you to do a number of years if you want, doing the weekly runouts. And so the nice part about this is you can kind of begin to plan it out. Then what it talks about is the basic theme that we're going to do. So what are we going to talk about if we're doing privacy or nurture? Or if we're talking about inforgraphics or gamification? What are we going to talk about? The next question, really good, is what are the different media we want to use. Now, you'll notice if you look in column A, for each week, it has it by day. But a lot of times I find I make additional columns in here. Because I may say, hey, this week I want to put out a blog article, but I also want to market it on Twitter and I also want to put the blog article on LinkedIn and so forth. So I begin to think about the multimedia aspects of this. And again, the first column will be blogs and written things. You may want to create another column that will be audio and another column that'll be video to begin to think it through. There is a target primary audience, you probably don't need that in this capstone, because you're going after one but then you can think it through. And you'll notice as you go across this particular group, if you look at column J, it has purchase cycle. Why is that important? Well, that's nurture marketing. And if I think about, even though I'm doing engagement, I can address different points in a product purchase life cycle for different target markets. And so as you go through there, you'll notice you have keywords, they're also going to have hashtags and things like that. So as you're going through it, it allows you to put on a single piece of paper, your plan. The plan doesn't have to be down to the detail of the day yet. But in the terms of the different media you're going to use, the different themes you'd like to talk about. Because here's what happens, when you become successful, and you will, you're going to get really rushed. And one of the things that's really a problem, and I find this all the time, is what do I want to write about today or what do I want to talk about today, or what sort of articles should I go get? It's nice to have a pre-thought calendar where you can go and find the things you want and say, yeah. I wanted to do this. I wanted to talk about that. But the other thing that's important is that these are not set in stone. For example, if I'm talking to about social marketing, and suddenly in week 30 of a year, some big thing happens that changes the nature of social, or becomes a real big news event related to social, I forget about my calendar, I go and address that. And so as you're going through, these are not set in stone, but it's a way to begin to capture your thoughts about what could I talk about. If this is my target market, what can I really talk to them about, what would they find to be really interested in, but also what can I go find? Because what's going to happen is as you're going through it, if you think about the 52 weeks and different topics, and now you're not going to do 52 to get started, but we'll talk about it in terms of that. The key is what you're going to do is you're going to say, wait. I'm going to use that in a couple weeks. That's a great article. And I'm going to save it. In fact, once we go for through the 52 week planning calendar, you'll see there's another tab, and so we'll go to that here in a minute. But the considerations. Think multimedia. Think one way versus two way communications, in other words, do I want to do an article or an ebook, or do I want to do a blog. Do I want to do a podcast where I'm just talking to you or do I want to do a webinar where it's two ways? Think about how you might want to do those sorts of things in terms of your target market. One of the most important ones, and Stan Smith talks about this, you think frequency. If your competition is putting out a monthly newsletter, go weekly or go bi-weekly. Try to be more informational than they are. Think about how much do you really want to do. You don't have to do it every week. This could be a bi-weekly plan or even a monthly plan, but the less frequency, the more difficult it is to maintain the relationship. Also, when I think about frequency, I really spend a lot of time saying, how much do I actually have to make myself versus how much could I get. Because I find that I can have a high frequency by just giving people other things. In fact, if you think about this specialization, I go out on our NU social marketing site all the time, I don't necessarily create stuff. I do put it out occasionally of some interesting things like Twubs and here's a video to watch. But the key is most of it is just working within the community and finding great stuff from one participant to show the other participants. Also think about positioning. Do you want to become the sole source or the big expert? Or you're just trying to be part of the community? How best do you want to really position yourself along all the different multimedia? The second thing we have is this really nice support file that's in the Excel tab you're going to have. This is where you build a content library. And so what I do is when I'm looking at different sorts of articles that come through Twitter or through my LinkedIn's page or I'm out looking at a different site, if I find something really, really good, I copy it over here, put a little description so I can find it by searching for it, and then it's there for my use. And so what I do is during the off-season when I'm not teaching, I build a big library to give the students things that are going to be very useful for them. Now, if you noticed, you have in blue the different actual locations of these. Those I will actually convert into a Bitly line so I could track how many people click on it. And then I will go and use that at the appropriate time. So this links over to your master library or your master plan, if you will. To say, here's some library things that you can use to actually achieve your 52 week calendar. So what I want you to do in terms of engagement deliverables is build a bi-weekly calendar for three months, okay? One topic per week or every other week. I want you to think about it in terms of multi-mediate integrated plan. So for example, if I'm going to write an article, then put into the calendar for that week to do a podcast, and to do a one or two minute summary video, identify the keywords you're going to use, that's actually a part of the spreadsheet. And make the topics relate to what these people are and very relevant to their lives. All right? Consider monthly themes. Maybe I'm going to say, for this month, I'm really going to focus on nurture marketing. And I'm going to talk about different aspects of it. Now, what do you need for a database, how do you do realtime marketing, or different aspects of what the topic is? Because that helps people do it. Also, consider the month of the year. If you're in the United States, you got the holiday seasons. You got Thanksgiving, you got 4th of July. In your country, you have similar holidays and events. Consider if that impacts your theming and what you're going to do within each of the weeks. Then use the calendar you downloaded to actually go through and lay out the calendar of what events, then what we're going to do is build the rest of the engagement marketing program around it.
