What Is Strategic Marketing and How Is It Connected to Social Media?

If marketing and promotion are the actions your company takes to let people know what products and/or services you offer, strategic marketing is directing those actions to the people most likely to buy your products or services.

While this may seem logical, in practice this is often not done.



Think of traditional television advertising:

Even if people actually watch the commercials during a TV show, how many of the commercials shown are actually pertinent to the lives of the TV show viewers?

Even shows whose demographics are presumed to be known cannot show only ads that interest the show's viewers. After all, the same consumers are not necessarily interested in buying diapers as well as cholesterol medicine as well as any number of disparate products or services.

Now let's look at strategic marketing for an imaginary company selling college dorm room products:



Instead of spending gobs of money on TV advertising with the hope that some of your target market will see your commercial (and then later act on the commercial's information), you can engage in targeted social media campaigns that directly target your audience.

Plus social media campaigns (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) can enable your target audience to take action immediately to download a free coupon or sign up for discounts or even, believe it or not, BUY your products online and have these delivered to the college dorm.

Of course, even with using social media, not all social media sites are right for reaching your target audiences:

First, you need to clearly define what business you are in. For example, are you in the box manufacturing business or the business of supplying containers for different customers' needs?

Second, you need to clearly define who your target audience is. Business to business or business to consumer is only the top level question of this defining process.

Third, you need to clearly understand how social media works. Just because social media sites are easy to join does NOT mean that effective social media actions are intuitive.

Fourth, you need to figure out which social media sites are best for creating online conversations with your target markets.

Fifth, you need to implement social media activities on those strategically defined social media sites in order to connect with your target markets.

While this does require more effort than simply paying huge gobs of money for your advertising agency to create and place, for example, TV commercials, your return on investment for attracting your target audiences – and getting these people to buy your products and/or services – can be much higher.



If your company needs help with any of these steps in strategic marketing and social media, email me at pzmiller@millermosaicllc.com

© 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company Miller Mosaic, LLC.