Summative Assignment Final Project

Running head: WEEK TWO - ASSIGNMENT 1

WEEK TWO - ASSIGNMENT 2

Week Two - Assignment

Kristina Jackson

March 1, 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.

Identification of the target market – The step is critical to determining the social media strategy. The target market will have an influence on which social media platforms our company focuses gives more attention. The target market also influences the content create and shared on the platforms and how often it is shared. As content is created and shared, the engagement and feedback from the target market will shape future content. Feedback received via these channels may also play a role in shaping the services that we offer to our clients.

Content – To appeal to our target market through our social media strategy, it will be critical to create content that they find useful, informative, and entertaining. Social media offers the ability to post varies forms of content from creating short videos on TikTok to longer videos with more content on YouTube. Posting memes has become quite popular and may be used to grab an individual’s attention while providing the company’s website information in the caption for the post. For our company, it may be beneficial to post content that new and existing entrepreneurs, and those considering entrepreneurship will find helpful in running and/or starting a business. That content will include how our business can help them to achieve their business goals.

Which Social Media Platforms – There are several options to choose from in social media platform. Today’s platforms include, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest, with the possibility of more in the future. The choice of platform will be based on appropriateness for our business needs and goals. LinkedIn and YouTube would be optimal sites as they provide more flexibility on content that can be shared. For example, establishing a YouTube channel would allow new, existing, and potential clients to subscribe and receive notification about new content. Facebook provides access to individuals of all ages, races, nationality, profession, and background versus LinkedIn which is a site that has access for the same group of individuals but is mainly used by professionals seeking career mobility opportunities and other career-oriented content. The advantage of social media today is the ability to share content across platforms. A link for a TEDtalk shared on LinkedIn can be shared to Facebook with the link for the post taking the Facebook user to the content to view it directly on site from which the original content was posted.

Our Call to Action

Kingdom Consulting has formulated a plan to use social media to increase interest and generate additional sales of our services. By devising a plan to use social media, we are also striving to create more brand awareness of our services and grow our entrepreneur mentoring network and program. The primary target market and audience are individuals between the age of 20 and 40 who are interested in or have started their own business. Two critical factors are needed to successfully implement a call to action. The first is to determine the preferred social media platform(s) for implementing the strategy. Secondly, is to know and understand the purchasing power of our target market. Of the current options available for social media, our firm has determined that the platforms that would be most suited for our business needs, goals, and strategies are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. While we will not exclude the other platforms from use, the majority of content will be shared across the primary four platforms. The websites chosen will allow our organization to showcase our services, post testimonials, offer helpful tips, and increase overall brand awareness.

Successful implementation will be executed by employing a dragonfly effect model across all chosen platforms. Principally, there are four “wings” of the model: Focus, Grab Attention, Engage, and Take Action (Seo, 2018). The first wing, Focus, advises that the organization needs to identify a single quantifiable goal. For our organization, that goal will be to use social media to increase new clients by 35% over the next twelve months. This goal is actionable and testable. A question can be added to our existing intake form to ask how the new client heard about our services. This data can be tracked and relayed to leadership during quarterly meetings and our annual shareholder meeting. Wing Two, Grab Attention, is intended for the organization to translate their social media intent into activities that can create a buzz. This can be done by creating content that is personal, unexpected, visual, and visceral. Appealing to those areas of your target market can generate additional traffic via likes and shares. Wing Three, Engage, is the stage where the organization begins to build a community. We will accomplish this by sharing video testimonials of current clients. By allowing the clients to share their story with other, it allows the feel celebrated and seen. Success is very satisfying but even more satisfying when others are able to use your story as a building block to build their own. Wing four, Take action, is the final step is to put your plan into action. We will make the content interesting, engaging, and fun. It will be tailor-made for spiring entrepreneurs and existing entrepreneurs who are seeking to increase stagnant sales. Mirroring the way a dragonfly uses all four wings to propel itself, these phases can be represented by the model as pictured below (Seo, 2018):

We are currently considering creating short videos that can be posted to our preferred social media platforms. We will highlight success stories from our clients who are willing to share their information. These videos will add a human side to our services. Hearing how they have benefited from being a client and using our services directly from a client helps to build trust and a sense of community. These videos will also offer the opportunity to highlight our mentoring program, Kingdom Konnections. Creating a unique branding strategy will be critical to setting our organization apart from other business consulting firms in the area. Consumers are aware that they have options, so we need to create a branding strategy that makes choosing our firm the obvious choice. Kingdom Konnections will be what sets our firm apart from others and gives us a competitive edge.

Social media monitoring strategies

Our organization will employ four social media monitoring strategies. The company will utilize four social media monitoring strategies. The first strategy will monitor the effect of the social media strategy on brand growth. The metrics for monitoring the effectiveness of the platforms will include gathering data on the increase or decrease in the number of followers/subscribers for the organization on a quarterly basis after strategy implementation, the number of shares of each post receives, and the number of mentions the company across our primary social media platforms. The second strategy will monitor whether the social media platforms employed are driving sales for the firm’s services. The metrics for monitoring the effectiveness of the platforms will involve gathering and analyzing data for the total number of new client received and the income generated on a monthly basis after strategy implementation. Measuring income generated when a social media strategy is used is an effective way of knowing whether the strategy is good enough to attract potential customers (Sajid, 2016).

The third strategy will monitor whether the social media platforms employed are improving brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. The metrics for monitoring the effectiveness of the platforms will require the firm to review social media sentiments, testimonials, and compliments that the company after strategy implementation. The fourth strategy will monitor whether the social media platforms employed are driving traffic towards the company’s website. The metrics for monitoring the effectiveness of the platforms will involve analyzing Google analytics and our internal hit report bi-monthly after strategy implementation.

Customer engagement and strategy effectiveness

Of the four platforms selected as primary, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube have shown to be the most effective. Content across these three platforms have generated nearly twice the traffic as the same content shared via Instagram. Of customers surveyed after participating in the client reviews and viewing the content online, 70Z% said they are more likely to remain customers, and 90% more likely to recommend our services to others. Customers appear to be more engaged with our LinkedIn profile versus any of the other four which seems logical as the website is geared towards individuals looking to grow their careers or business. It will be important to continue to monitor and evolve the strategy as more data is gathered.

References

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.

Sajid, S. I. (2016). Social Media and Its Role in Marketing. Business and Economics Journal. http://41.89.240.73/bitstream/handle/123456789/810/social-media-and-its-role-in-marketing.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Seo, W. (2018, September 6). The Dragonfly Effect: Driving Social Change through Social Media. Cooler Insights. https://coolerinsights.com/2011/10/the-dragonfly-effect-driving-social-change-through-social-media/.

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