Connect Your Social Strategy to Line of Business Goals
I am regularly asked to connect Corporate Communications digital strategies to business outcomes, aligning the pain points for customers and business partners with content as the solution. At Bank of America, I prepared content that articulated the bank's emerging-payments, mobile-banking, small-business, and retail strategies and formatted them for use with multiple stakeholders.
We started by sitting down with our line-of-business (LOB) partners and talking about their goals for the year and the strategic metrics they would use to assess success or failure. We then built social-business goals that aligned with those LOB strategic goals and identified social business metrics that would help us determine our progress.
This is not as easy as you might think. In some cases, the LOB goal was a bit squishy (i.e., it lacked a high-profile LOB strategic metric). In other cases, you could create a social-business goal but the metric was a challenge because of a lack of ways to track the information. In a perfect world, your LOB Strategic Metric and your Social Business Metric could be aligned and the remaining challenge was creating actionable and meaningful goals.
As for the one-page dashboard, it had five components:
Core Messages. What are the 3-5 messages that should be included in every piece of content? When we did this for our Small Business area, we wanted to reinforce that (1) we continue to make every good loan we can; (2) we offer new and responsible ways to provide more credit to help small business grow; (3) we continue to make small-business expertise more accessible through 1,900 specialists; and (4) we provide comprehensive, simple business solutions with convenient access.
Audiences. This can be personas or broader target audiences, particularly if your business partner has well-defined segments. Including this on your dashboard acts as a constant reminder of who you’re talking to and encourages you to constantly think about their pain points.
Themes. Again, these are just broad reminders of what you’re trying to do to avoid going off the rails. Update them as business needs change. But articulating them will help you obtain story ideas from your partners. Our themes were
Success that is shared, highlighting local stories.
Small business owners are an essential element of our local and national economies and we’re there for them.
Differentiated treatment.
Dedicated specialists to recommend the right solution.
Tone and Content. How are we going to talk to our target audience and with what type of content? We wanted our tone to be “helpful, informative, and encouraging” and our content to be focused on “thought leadership, risk mitigation, and brand support.” Just keep yourself on track so you can take every idea that comes in and determine whether it fits the strategy.
Goals and Metrics. We created a four-column chart with LOB goals, the overall strategic metric, the social business goal, and the social business metric. Our terrific digital strategy team helped us define actionable social metrics and put processes in place to measure them. If you don't have one, hire someone who can help.
Build and document your content strategy as you work on connecting your social strategy to LOB goals. There are hundreds of great posts out there on how to do that, but I prefer the approach of the Content Marketing Institute. You can sign up for their content and get a great PDF on this part of the process here. But you can just as easily Google “documented content marketing strategy” and get many other options.
What other questions might help strengthen the relationship between you and your business partners?
