Summative Assignment Final Project

Running head: WEEK FOUR - ASSIGNMENT 1

WEEK FOUR - ASSIGNMENT 2

Week Four - Assignment

Kristina Jackson

March 16, 2021

Overview

Kingdom Consulting, LLC is a small business consulting firm that seeks to assist entrepreneurs start or expand their businesses. Our goal is to help business owners across various industries make their businesses operate more efficiently and identify and reach their target markets. Currently, the organization faces an obstacle in terms of our social media strategy. While we are known in the community in which we began volunteering our services, we wish to expand our services to entrepreneurs throughout central Florida. Unfortunately, the organization is having challenges regarding our communication, marketing strategies, new client recruitment, and creating brand awareness outside of word-of-mouth referrals. The company has a weak brand awareness. In order to create a strategy for how to resolve these concerns, it is critical that our leadership carefully review, analyze, and identify process gaps within our current communication and marketing strategy. This approach will help to identify shortfalls in the existing strategy to move us toward the goal of building a new strategy that will serve as the foundation for continuous process improvement that will assist the company with achieving its short and long-term goals. The primary focus of this analysis will be to focus on creating a strategy that will help us to utilize all appropriate social media platforms to strengthen our brand and increase brand awareness.

Social media strategies and goals

We currently have a very weak social media presence and need to create strategies to increase traffic to our pages. Through the social media platforms, the organization will be in a position to reach out to a broader audience, thereby creating the potential for a larger mentor network for our clients. The best approach to creating an effective and viable social media strategy if to have a clear, well-defined social media goal. A key starting point for our strategy must begin with identifying our target audience, what content is most likely to appeal to that targeted group, content sharing cycles, and current social media traffic to existing pages to determine which platforms are generating the most hits. After careful review of all of these factors we have identified six goals. These goals are:

1. Increase brand awareness

2. Generate new client leads via social media platforms

3. Receive feedback to be used to create future content

4. Increase brand engagement

5. Engage entrepreneurs to grow mentoring network

6. Increase revenue for the firm

These goals aligned with strategies identified in “Social media marketing strategy: definition, conceptualization, taxonomy, validation, and future agenda (Li et al, 2021). All of the identified goals will be contributing drivers for our main objective which to increase visits to the company’s main website and an influx of new business.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness can be defined as "the extent to which a brand is recognized by potential customers and correctly associated with its particular product or service." While as a small business, we do not expect to reach eponym status (ex. someone asking for a Pepsi instead of a cola), we can measure our success in the following ways:

· Consumers having knowledge of what our business is known for.

· A social media user knowing our ad is going to be funny when they come across you in their feed.

· Customers choosing our brand specifically over others, even if there are cheaper options.

· Search engine users typing our business name or other branded terms into search.

Properly branding our organization has a multitude of benefits in addition to increasing the sales of our services. Brand awareness increases customer recognition, customer loyalty, credibility, gives confidence in our services, establishes consistency, creates brand equity, attract talent, and creates a community of shared values. It will be important for Kingdom Consulting to be consistently building our brand and strengthening its associations in the minds of our target audience. This will make it easier to promote our business across multiple platforms, introduce new services directly to our target audience, find and retain new customers, and build a strong organizational reputation.

Increasing Traffic

A goal of our social media strategy is to increase traffic to our website. Part of our social media strategy implementation for increasing website traffic will be to first benchmark channel (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) performance of our competitors against the industry and identify those channels with the highest traffic share compared to those we have chosen for out strategy. We will then use engagement metrics such as visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate to evaluate the quality of the channel traffic. This will be used to evaluate if there was true interest in our service by individuals visiting the website. Evaluating these metrics will assist in revealing the most effective tactics across each digital platform during specific time periods and identify which platforms are more productive for organizational goals.

Increasing website traffic can also be accomplished by carefully titling our content and using the right language in our posts. This strategy will help our organization to organically grow our traffic by optimizing our share of voice per keyword. After three months it will be important to review the traffic share of each keyword by geography, non-branded versus branded, competitiveness and search type. Understanding the keywords that potential customers are using to look for our services and content will be important for how we create future content and posts.

Increasing Conversions

It is our plan to boost conversion rates by utilizing user-generated content (UGC) across the customer journey. Research shows that customer review matter to potential customers. A study conducted by Podium suggests that 93% of consumers say online reviews do impact their purchasing decisions (Fullerton, 2017). The report suggests that customers do trust and engage with online reviews regularly and these reviews remain very influential when it comes to making purchasing decisions. It will be important to our social media strategy to solicit reviews from our past customers and small businesses that participate in the mentoring network. Making these reviews visible across all social media networks will help to increase our conversion rate.

 

Cost 

Implementing a social media strategy for our organization vary in the cost. The cost can vary by the size and the campaign type that is chosen. Other variables that must be considered in the cost are advertising cost, external fees, and cost and staff cost, some organizations sometimes outsourcing their social media strategy. As a small business, it is important to look for social media strategy implementation method which will be effective, efficient, and budget-friendly for the organization, (Tsimonis & Dimitriadis. 2014). The cost to implement will be nominal when weighed against the potential benefits. Since creating pages and posting to social media is free, the costs we will incur will be in relation to managing those pages. We have chosen to use Hootsuite for teams at a cost of $129 per month, billed annually ($1548) which will be used and monitored by a dedicated social media team of three employees with more added as needed. Hootsuite is a platform that will allow our organization to simultaneously manage up to 20 social media accounts across multiple platforms. The software will also allow our business to plan and prepare content in advance then schedule it to auto post at a designated time in the future. We will be able to plan our posts for times when out target audience is more likely to engage. The software will also allow our company to connect our existing software with over 250 apps and integration in one place. The software will also allow us to discover flexible and scalable ways to increase our reach and our revenue. At this time, we are still weighing our options for paid ads on Google and Google search. 

Communicating the Strategy to Stakeholders& Employees

It is important as an organization to recognize that social media has created drastic changes to the way consumers spend their time and money. This became even more evident during the pandemic. Studies show that the average person spend on average more than two hours per day on social media. Many are not only using social media for entertainment, but also a source for news, communication, community, business, and much, much more. As an organization, it is important that we do not limit our marketing strategies to traditional techniques but evolve with the time. It is important that our stakeholders, leadership, and employees understand that thes peed of the internet never slows, and the success of our business will rely heavily on successful social media strategy and management (Chua et al. 2015).

As a business, it is important to quantify the audience that an organization has access to through social media. Social media platforms have created new channels for organizations to market their products and services to potential customers. If used correctly, social media can be one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal.

· Facebook has around 1.44 billion monthly active users and 936 million active daily users.

· Instagram’s growth of more than 50% has put the mobile app at over 300 million users.

· Tumblr increases its subscriptions at a rate of 120,000 users each day

· Pinterest has 150 million monthly active users, 85% of them are females.

· LinkedIn is used to distribute content by 94% of B2B marketers. (Dong & Wu, 2015)

Stakeholders will be advised of the social media strategy at the next quarterly meeting. The strategy will be discussed in full detail and feedback will be solicited from all those present. It will be important to receive buy-in from the stakeholders. Minimal pushback is expected as most in business understand the need for a social media strategy to remain relevant in today’s marketplace.

The social media strategy will be introduced to employees via town hall and round table discussions. These discussions will include a basic layout of the social media strategy as well as an introduction to proposed content. Employees will be able to view the content before it is introduced to consumers and provide their honest feedback. By allowing the employees to participate in content creation, the organization hopes to create a sense of employee ownership in the strategy. Employees will be more likely to promote and share the content if it is something they helped create and that they feel proud of. With implementation of the social media strategy, our organization will take the responsibility of communicating before, during, and after the strategy rollout. This communication will include leadership and employees at all levels. Transparency during every stage of the rollout will establish employee trust and decrease the occurrences of resistance to the change in marketing strategies. The organization must build a convincing case on the necessity of having the change to the organization.

Overcoming Resistance to Implementation

In many cases, the issues of denial in the implementation of a new social media strategy in the organization come about where the involved stakeholders lack the trust in the necessity to implement social media and its ability to perform the intended purpose. If the employees exhibit resistance to the implementation of the proposed technology, it in most cases arises due to fear and uncertainty this makes them go to the extent of trying to convince the managers and other employees not to accept the changes and therefore stopping the implementation process. As I have mentioned above, many reasons can make employees resist the implementation of new technology which includes distrust, the displeasure of the technology, self-interest, the cost that comes with the adoption and implementation process on the project, and the impacts of the technology on the project, (Dreher, 2014). Where there is resistance to the implementation process, there are several ways to dealing with the challenge.

Training Needs

The use of social media sometimes can be very challenging for an organization as it involves more than just sharing videos and funny memes as one would do on a personal social media page. For this reason it is important to train the employees chosen to implement our social media strategy. A successful social media strategy can assist an organization with increasing brand awareness and reputation that can lead to an increase in sales (Dreher, 2014). Leadership and employees that will be directly involved in the social media strategy and implementation and content creation will be required to successfully complete and pass several computer-based training (CBTs) courses on social media implementation. The courses will be supplied by a third-party agency contracted for this purpose. The course will help the employees to understand the impact of a clear social media strategy and the trends that are important to consumers. The courses will help employees to align content with our defined marketing goals, to attract our target audience, and create a effective content strategy. The purpose of the CBTs is to help the employees and organization to launch a social media strategy that creates a presence for our organization across platforms and prioritizes our efforts for maximum impact. The overarching goal for the training to is to help those charged with managing our social media strategy to set track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for success and identify the need for changes when necessary. Training will be ongoing with annual recertification.

Timeline for Implementation

It is our goal to implement our social media strategy in six months. The first two months will be used to identify our target market and create content. The second two months will be to test the content with our employees and solicit feedback and get their buy in for the project. The last two months will be used to implement any feedback about the content into the content prior to rollout. Strategy will be closely monitored every thirty days for the first three months to gauge traffic, engagement, conversions, and sales. Strategy will be adjusted as needed. Full rollout expected at six months after initial rollout. Strategy will be revisited quarterly to ensure feedback is implemented and process gaps identified in a timely fashion.

Evaluating Success or Failure of the project

To gauge the success or failure of the strategy implementation, it will be important to evaluate the rollout at the one-week, thirty-day, and three-month mark. In the process of evaluating the success and failure of any project, it will also be very important to engage our employees to get their feedback. A good evaluation system should incorporate the outcome and process criteria, (Agnihotri et al. 2016). Four factors should be considered for there to be an effective evaluation. These factors are; 

· Time: Was the project implemented within the timeline in the implementation as measured by successful completion of all milestones by deadlines?

· Cost: Was the project implemented within the budget? 

· Product: Was the social media strategy implemented with high quality posts and content that aligns with the quality standards of our organization? 

· Engagement: Has customer engagement increased as measured by website traffic and conversion rates? 

Predict Possible Problems That Might Be Encountered During Implementation

Social media allows access to our organization to internet trolls. It will be important for our social media team to monitor and block any negativity on our page that is not generated from a true customer complaint. Customers will be allowed to voice their concerns and provide feedback towards any content or service issues, but those individuals who are seeking to be disruptive will be blocked from the page. Internet trolls are an unfortunate byproduct of social media. With careful monitoring, we hope to limit the impact on our brand, reputation, and strategy from those types of individuals.

It will also be important for our social media team to refrain from engaging in slanderous or negative posts about our competition, even if an individual makes a negative comment about our competition on our page. The comment will be ignored and deleted. Posting negative remarks about our competition will tarnish our reputation and possibly drive consumers to our competitors. This can also have legal implications should the competitor seek legal remedies to any perceived slander or business interference (Ngai et al, 2015).

Another issue that could arise is online security. Use of social media exposes a company to security issues such as spyware, virus attacks, hacking, and other cyber threats. This might result in a situation where confidential information leaks from the organization to the public or unwanted hands. Finally, employees may post inappropriate and unauthorized content on the organization’s social media page. Included in the training will be the Social Media Code of Conduct. This training will emphasize the importance of discussing any grievances with the organization using the proper chain of command to have any issues addresses. The social media platforms are not the correct forum to air internal issues or concerns,

References

Agnihotri, R., Dingus, R., Hu, M. Y., & Krush, M. T. (2016). Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, 172-180.

Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2015). How businesses draw attention on Facebook through incentives, vividness, and interactivity.

Dong, J. Q., & Wu, W. (2015). Business value of social media technologies: Evidence from online user innovation communities. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(2), 113-127.

Dreher, S. (2014). Social media and the world of work: A strategic approach to employees’ participation in social media. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 19(4), 344-356.

Fullerton, L. (2017, March 27). Online reviews impact purchasing decisions for over 93% of consumers, report suggests. The Drum. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/03/27/online-reviews-impact-purchasing-decisions-over-93-consumers-report-suggests.

Hootsuite, Inc. (2021). Hootsuite Team - Pricing and Plans. Hootsuite. https://www.hootsuite.com/plans/team.

Li, F., Larimo, J., & Leonidou, L. C. (2021). Social media marketing strategy: definition, conceptualization, taxonomy, validation, and future agenda. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49(1), 51–70.

Ngai, E. W., Moon, K. L. K., Lam, S. S., Chin, E. S., & Tao, S. S. (2015). Social media models, technologies, and applications: an academic review and case study. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(5), 769-802.

Tsimonis, G., & Dimitriadis, S. (2014). Brand strategies in social media. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 32(3), 328-344.

shford.edu/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.537