The Twentyseven Communications 5 Step Social Media Marketing Strategy is a comprehensive system to take you through the steps of leveraging the tools available to create a strategy for you or your business to reach new customers, find new opportunities, and increase profitability. These are the steps I use with my clients. Many of them have used these steps successfully.  We are currently working on creating a detailed report on this system, but until then, here is a summary.

STEP 1: Strategy and Value – Most companies have this figured out. This is the value that you or your company provides to the market, and what makes you different. The strategy defines the business objectives, the target market and marketing messages.

STEP 2: Create and Post – We need to get our message out. The best strategy is to create “master content”. For some, this will be a blog entry, a newsletter, a presentation, a book, reports, etc.

For my company, it is my blog at twentyseven.com and other times, it’s my spoken word on the platform as a professional speaker. When you create your “master content”, you want to drive people to it using other channels of communication.

STEP 3: Distribute and Promote – It is imperative that you understand (or have someone on your staff who understands) the latest trends in communications and the various channels available for you to distribute and promote your message. Marketers believe that an average “prospect” will not turn into a client until they have viewed a company’s message at least 27 times – sometimes referred to as the “Law of 27” – it is essential to discover how technology can support this process, and make every engagement – whether it is with an existing or prospective customer – a meaningful one.

To do this, you must understand the way that your target market expects to be reached, create a consistent message, and adapt that message to each channel of communication with the end goal being to drive the prospect to your master content.

When I create a blog entry, I use Twitter to tweet a small excerpt of my message with a short URL link to the master content. I also update my Linkedin & Facebook status lines and other channels to communicate my message and drive viewers to where I want them to be (i.e. to the master content). When I do professional or keynote speech, I create an event on Linkedin, post some of the slides to slideshare (as well as several other channels) to drive people to my talks.

STEP 4: Measure and Analyze – Once your message is distributed on the social media channels that you have selected, you will need to find a way to determine which ones are working and which ones aren’t. You will also want to be aware of any comments, complaints, references and other mentions of your content that results from your posts. There are many tools available to monitor activity and reputation. I use tools such as Google Analytics and social media reputation monitoring application (that I developed myself) to monitor what’s being talked about.

With these tools, I find out which channels work for me (and for the particular content and context) and move on to the next step.

STEP 5: Adapt and Participate – With the information discovered from STEP 4, you will need to either adapt your message to increase the effectiveness of the message, add new channels of communication that could better reach your audience, or change nothing. If the campaign worked well, use it again and find a way to improve it even more.

If you find that people are discussing you, your company, or your ideas – whether it’s negative or positive – participate in the discussion. This is another form of “adapting” by adding more value. If it’s positive, thank the person and inform them where they can find out more. If it’s negative, look at it as a customer service opportunity and learn from it to improve the message and your approach over all.

There are many reputation monitoring systems available – some better than others; some that are geared towards larger companies; some that are custom (like mine) but are just as effective. These tools help you identify where and what is being said based on keywords about you, your company and competitors, etc. This will help you in deciding in which discussions to participate.

After this step you cycle back to STEP 1 until you feel it is at a point that it is working for your particular situation. Everyone’s situation and results will be different based on the nature of their business.

CONCLUSION: Again, this is just a summary of the complete 5 Step System for Social Media Marketing. A complete detailed report will be available in the coming weeks. Stay Tuned!