I began college in engineering, switched to another major, and then journalism before finding advertising in undergrad and marketing in grad school. Yet I don’t view those other classes as wasted. I firmly believe that diverse knowledge helped make me a better marketer. The same is true for social media strategy.
Marketing via social media is unique and requires different skills from marketing, advertising, public relations, personal sales, and customer service professionals that can be more relevant to different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Customers’ needs and interests change when they’re in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Social media marketers should create unique content and engage in unique ways during these stages. Yet, the best person for the job isn’t always a marketer.
In your business or organization, you have different people or departments better suited for various content and response depending on buyer stage. Diverse employees and departments are best suited for communicating with and appealing to consumer interests and needs in these distinct stages.
Optimize your social media strategy with appropriate content and engagement from those employees, disciplines, and departments. Distributing social responsibilities to the most relevant people can be more effective and efficient. This often requires alignment of goals and objectives, software integration, and a system to identify, sort, and assign social media tasks across siloed departments.
A cross-discipline approach tailors content and engagement to consumer needs. It also can help scale one-on-one social media engagement spreading out time and costs across department responsibilities, budgets, and staff. To ensure the most appropriate people are creating the content and engagement follow these suggestions for each stage.
Click image to download a template PDF.
Pre-purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.
During the pre-purchase stage, B2C or B2B consumers are not actively seeking to buy. They may have a general interest and are simply exploring and learning. Or they may have a problem but have not realized the solution yet. In the pre-purchase stage use social media listening to find people in the market who haven’t purchased. Listen for brand, product, category, competitor, or specific product and service mentions.
- Marketing and advertising can contribute by creating relevant messages and content. This includes content from followers and reviews. Monitor conversations to engage with marketing-related questions.
- Public relations can monitor for reputation issues and negative mentions must be managed. PR uses media and influencer outreach to generate earned media awareness.
- Sales reps create and share valuable content and answer consumer questions to generate leads.
- Customer service can create satisfied customers who share positive experience reviews and make more purchases turning customer service into marketing.
Purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.
During the purchase stage, people are interested in buying and are seeking the best options. They’re looking for value, convenience, special offers, guarantees, and signals that your product or service is the best for their needs and budget. In the purchase stage use social media listening to find people seeking purchase information such as prices, offers, stock numbers, contact information, shipping options, or store hours.
- Marketing and advertising can help answer questions, and provide additional information related to the product, service, and offers.
- Public relations create content to educate via media and influencer outreach. PR looks for competitor comparisons and 3rd party endorsements for social sharing.
- Sales reps in B2C directly interact with customers to facilitate sales. B2B sales reps engage identifying leads to set up appointments and sales presentations.
- Customer service can respond to any technical and account issues or complications in the purchase process that may prevent a sale.
Post-purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.
During the post-purchase stage, people have purchased your product or service but are looking for validation that they made the right decision. In most markets, there are many options and buyer’s remorse may creep in. There may be complications, issues, or hiccups that come with a new purchase. In the post-purchase stage use social media listening to look for current customers seeking help with product usage, problems, and account issues. Also, seek happy customers who share positive product and service experiences.
- Marketing and advertising can create messages that reassure purchase decisions, share messages of happy customers, and build brand community through offers and loyalty programs.
- Public relations creates relevant brand and earned media that engages current customers, other stakeholders, and influencers to maintain relationships.
- Sales representatives can follow up with customers to ensure they are happy with regular interaction while encouraging referrals and additional sales.
- Customer service can resolve any post-purchase issues to help with retention and loyalty, plus contribute to positive social media comments and reviews.
Social media marketing is more than marketing. Are you missing out by not working across disciplines and organizational department silos?
Customizing listening and response with cross-discipline teams in social media can help scale social media engagement. Meeting different needs of consumers through all stages of the buying cycle can help businesses achieve their overall goals more effectively and efficiently.
Another way to improve your social media content is to consider the right content in the right places. For help see my post “Does The Shoe Fit? How To Make Your Social Media Marketing More Strategic” including a Social Media Content Planning Template.
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