Would you believe it if you heard that nearly 11 percent of most marketing budgets are dedicated to social media? How about if you heard that among Fortune 500 companies, nearly 98 percent rely on social media for a combination of public relations, marketing, and customer service and industry insights?

While these statistics alone are not surprising, it is curious that despite the deep integration and heavy investment in social media activities, marketers are still facing challenges to deliver a strong ROI.

The 2017 biannual CMO survey, sponsored by American Marketing Association, Deloitte, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, shines a light on the challenge businesses have converting social media investments into effective marketing. In fact, the survey found that 44 percent of CMOs said that social media’s impact was nonexistent or minimal.

With the impact of social media at an all-time low, and the investment of social media increasing (spending is expected to grow 19 percent over the next five years), how can companies better align strategies to create a social media plan that is both impactful and successful?

Cision recently published a white paper that taps into this challenge, providing six best practices for companies to consider when creating an enterprise-level social media plan. Checking the box on all six of these strategies will help maximize social media spending.

1. Include all company departments. Taking a company-inclusive approach to social media will help create a plan that is authentic and maps back to the company’s overall business and communication objectives. A marketing department may not have insight into every subdivision, so getting feedback and including insight from different branches will help better define messages, accurately establish targets, select platforms and track results.
2. Establish relevant, specific and measurable goals. Setting objectives you hope to secure from your social media efforts will lay the groundwork for future social activity. Without establishing an end goal, social media efforts can result in being too general and run up budget spending instead of delivering meaningful messages to your target audiences and creating impact for your company.
3. Create target audience personas. A great way to establish and deliver meaningful content to your target audiences is by creating a customer “persona.” This can be done by identifying the character traits and spending habits of your company’s average and/or target customer. Combining characteristics such as age, gender, profession and income to create an “ideal” customer will help you understand the messages they want to hear, ultimately creating a more strategic social media plan.
4. Identify the right platforms. Once you have firmly defined your target audience and established your persona, consider what social media platforms they would visit. What social media apps do they have installed on their smart phones? What platforms do they check at lunch? Depending on your industry and your persona’s demographic and profession, the answer to those questions and therefore the social platforms of interest will likely vary. Consider holding focus groups and issuing surveys to confidently detect your persona’s preferred platforms.
5. Invest in the right technology. Investing in integrated social tools can help marketers monitor analytics around engagement levels and message distribution. A disconnect between social media spending and ROI can often occur when companies have not established an efficient and effective way to track their metrics. Marketing departments should vet multiple tools before making a purchase decision.
6. Get internal feedback. Opening up the communication lines and welcoming feedback from the inner team will help in the brainstorming process and introduce ideas and strategies that the C-Suite may not have considered. Not only will this create opportunity for fresh insight, it may also filter and eliminate suggestions that are not ultimately structured for success and that will not resonate with your persona.

Cision’s full white paper can be found here: A Hub, Spokes & Technology: Social Media Strategy for Enterprise Businesses.