We're now through what the target market, and assessing that, and developing its social size and its social dimensions. Now we need to start thinking about strategies. And to do that, the first thing that's really useful to do is establish the empowering concept that you then could drive the community. Regardless of whether you're going to do a engagement marketing strategy, a nurture marketing strategy, or social IMC. You really need to think about, what can you do as your company, that would really help them achieve the mission that they're on, or address the challenges that they're facing. And that's what we're really going to be doing in step 2.1. So there's three things I want you to do, and this is a really proven methodology that works great. The first thing I want you to do is to identify through learning the mission of your community. In other words, what I want you to do, is I want you to say, what are these people dealing with? What are these businesses dealing with? And what are they really trying to accomplish? Don't think of it in terms of your products and your services or your industry. The key is, they're on a mission, and they are trying to do things. What do they want to do? Then, we're going to think about empower. We want to find out what they need and then develop a plan to help them achieve their mission, their goal or address their challenge. And regardless of which strategy we're going to use, well that would be very, very useful. Finally, we'll want to spend some time thinking about, how do we keep them coming back, and what other things will help them, help us, keep them building in their relationship with us? Now in some of the strategies like engagement, we won't use that much other than in terms of developing content. In other ones, it'll actually become part of a social community that we're going to want to do. So you need to go through all three steps regardless of which strategy you're using. So, let's talk a little bit about identify. The key in passion communities are different, as we've talked about, from trigger event communities. And so, we need to know, what are they doing, what are they talking about, and you need to say where are they going? If I'm in a passion community, I really want to establish myself as being one of the experts and being part of the group that's really known as being the key person. And that's what I'll be driving for. I want to own my opinions and have other people listen to me. If I'm in a trigger event market, it's very, very different. And so what you want to do is you want to state the problem or the challenge that they're doing to senior management so that they can understand the role your system is going to play in there. So what I want you to do is to write down what you think is the key thing that is the mission of the community and what are they trying to accomplish you know? We're not going to try to sell them immediately. What we want to do is to track them by helping them solve their problems, their challenges or to achieve their mission to move forward. The second thing we want to do is to say, what is the way we can help them achieve that mission? You know. And so what we want to do is we want to take them somewhere. And so we want to eventually take them either to a nurture program or to a social IMC site or to our social network sites. So we want to take people from other sites to us, and we want to take them from our competitors. So the key is, the more that we can do something central to their mission, the more high impact our empowering concept is going to be. So the question you want to ask is, what can I do? Again, get outside of your products and services, but what can you do to really help them? Could you give them a webinar series? Could you give them a tool that will help them? Could you give them some additional information? Should we write them an e-book? Should we do a podcast? What will it take and what cerrtain topics would those be? What will it take to really empower them to help them achieve and get to where they want to go? The better you can do that, the more effective your social strategy is going to be. And then for example, here's an energy company. They wanted to go after CEOs and CFOs that were really central to buying their products and services. What they found is senior executives were concerned not so much about energy, but they wanted to build their skills as CEOs and CFOs. So the company went and built a quarterly webinar where really high powered people that have built businesses would talk with them about the challenges of building businesses. They never tried to sell their energy products but it was powered by their energy company and when the bid came up for different sorts of products and services they tended to get it. Simply because the CEO and CFO relied on their site to actually help them become better at managing their companies, which was their mission. Then another one be an all natural pizza company. What they wanted to do was they wanted to go after what they call the soccer moms. These are people that are really time stressed. And so what they did is they said, well rather than just giving them access through their smart phones to our website, why don't we build a tool, essentially a mobile app, that will allow them to say okay, I'm sitting at a soccer game let's say. I'm going to be out in an hour. My kids would like to have this combination of things, which were combinations of, say, pizza, as well as drinks and so forth. They could set the order. They could say when they wanted to pick it up. They could say what store they wanted to pick it up. They could put it on their credit card. And, when they drove past the all-natural pizza shop, someone was standing out front because they had a picture of the automobile or this SUV that they had. And, they walked out and they just handed through the door and the people drove home to enjoy their pizza. In other words the app made it easier for soccer mom's to deal with their busy calendars and their busy schedule in a way that was very compatible with them. It was very in tune with the way they were living their lives, taking their kids around to all the activities that they're in. So the key is, you really want to think about the empowering activity in terms of something, it could be an activity or tool, to really help them do what they want to do. Not what you want to do, but what they want to do, and if you do that right, they will come to you when they are ready to buy. Finally, we need to think about how we can keep them coming, how we're going to attract them and keep them coming back. For engagement, what we're going to do, we need to have a great stream of relevant content going out there and we need to have it going out all the time. And as we go into that, we're going to give you some scheduling tools to help you figure out how you're going to do that to keep things moving along. For nurture, we gotta figure out a messaging strategy that understands the consumer journey, knows when they're moving from step to step, and really helps them, and we can gamify that and do multimedia. For social IMC, we're going to be taking them to a private virtual community with gamification forums, if that's appropriate, multi-media content. We want to do things that will essentially keep them coming back after that first aha, and of this is really cool, empowering idea, so that they'll be coming back over time. The deliverables. On your social marketing template you're pulling together, identify and describe the mission of your community. List one or more empowering concepts which you think would help them reach their goals to accomplish their mission. And what are some other components you think would keep them coming back? You're going to o go back and forth and adjust this as you go forward, but let's take it a first step at a time and kind of put it down on paper. Also, consider listing more than one empowering concept. As we move forward, we may want to contact the influencers that we really trust, or customers that we have that are in this target market. And say which one do you really like? And, they can kind of help you hone it in, but put down the ideas you have. Where are they going? How can I help them? And what other things could I give them to keep them coming back? That'll give us a great platform from which to select the strategy that's best for you.
