Business goal – grow market share

We need to grow revenues mostly through market share increase, therefore through switching competitors’ customers to our products and services.

From marketing point of view, we need to push compelling message to competitors’ customers, preferably highly targeted to specific influencers decision makers and users. The business is global, and we can anticipate limited LinkedIn reach. And in order to achieve highest marketing spend ROI, we need to ensure both high reach and strong targeting. We have some customer database with non-customer contacts, suitable for targeting and we need to expand targeting to similar audiences.

From social media point of view, we should consider following platforms in order of priority and relevant goals for each of them:

1. Priority: Google Customer Match with similar audiences along Display and Gmail for conversion goals like leads or sales
2. Priority: LinkedIn Account targeting + Sponsored Messaging for website or forms conversions
3. Priority – Facebook + Instagram Custom Audiences with Lead Generation and Conversion goals
4. If budget allows – Google Search with similar audiences with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn remarketing for lead generation

Business goal – grow revenues

We need to grow revenues with increased usage from our current customers, dormant accounts and attracting new customers, mostly through switching from competitors and in very limited scope – to attract new users.

From marketing point of view, we need to push compelling message with priority to current customers with whom we see potential of usage growth, up-sell or cross-sell. Secondly, we need to target hot leads or account representatives who had worked with our organization in the past or people who had shown interest in our solutions. And thirdly, target account representatives from companies, similar to the 20% of our top customers.

From social media point of view, we should consider following platforms in order of priority and relevant goals for each of them:

1. Priority: LinkedIn Account targeting + Sponsored Messaging for leads and sales
2. Priority: Google Customer Match with similar audiences along Search, Display and Gmail
3. Priority – Facebook + Instagram Custom Audiences
4. If budget allows – Google, Facebook, LinkedIn remarketing for conversion and lead generation goals
5. If budget allows – Google Search with similar audiences

Business goal – expand addressable market

We need to expand on our top 20% revenue generators through geographical reach and/or greater penetration among underserved industries.

From marketing point of view, we need to establish both pull and push strategies for expanding brand consideration and reach. The critical task here is to achieve optimal reach and brand awareness while controlling for costs in push strategies. From geographic point of view, we need to carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of different social media platforms. For example, while LinkedIn is great for account-based advertising, it has limited geographical reach while Facebook and Google have great global cost-effective reach but sometimes quite low conversion rates. One prudent approach is to decide on the social media platforms according to the level of separate geographies’ usage.

From social media point of view, we should consider following platforms in order of priority and relevant goals for each of them:

Geographical awareness:

1. Google Display CPM for Brand Awareness & Reach
2. Facebook ads for Brand Awareness and Reach goals
3. LinkedIn ads for Brand Awareness

Industry penetration

1. LinkedIn Forms and Website conversions
2. Google Display for Sales, Lead Generation and Website Traffic
3. Facebook & Instagram Lead Generation and Conversion goals, including Lead Forms
4. Google lead forms

In conclusion, while paid social media is far from the complete picture of an organization’s marketing communications, it is connected to direct cash outflows and marketing costs and needs to be tightly controlled and very precisely planned along goals, channels, duration, creative and copy. And although all of the discussed strategic approaches have been tested in practice, they are just the start in strategic social media planning and in no case they exhaust the general marketing or digital strategy of the organization.