Now that you've identified a social strategy, the first step is to develop your marketing program. Essentially making the audience aware that you are doing something that is really relevant to them, why is this important? Because the effectiveness of our marketing program is going to impact our performance funnels, our KPIs, and all the other aspects of our program. But the good news is, regardless of whether you're doing engagement, nurture, or social IMC. The marketing program and the development of it is identical, so let's get into how we're going to do that, the way you want to think about it is that you have a launch event. The launch event could be your first use of your Facebook page, it could be a new Pinterest site, it could be a nurture marketing program with landing pages attached to relevant content. It could also be a social IMC private virtual community, but at some point, you're going to start that. So what you want to do is you have to choreograph different sorts of media so that they all hit right on or before, just before the launch date, and so what you want to do is to figure out how you're going to do that. Then once you launch, of course you're going to have marketing happening afterwards, but the real important part is you really want to get the stuff up to the launch event, really coordinate, why? Because you only have so long to get a lot of buzz about what you're doing, I mean after a while people get bored. So the better you can coordinate that, the better you can do it, so the way I like to think about media leading up to a launch, is in terms of long tail, medium tail and short tail media, what is that mean? Well, there are certain media that's going to take me months to coordinate. If I'm doing a direct marketing television ad that DRTV as they call it, or I'm doing something that's, or a print added in a magazine, it's going to take me a long time. If it's a medium tail it could be something like banner ads, I can't just do those on a moment's notice. I have to kind of plan them out a month or so in advance, lay out all the different tests I want to do, all the different banner ads I want to test, pick a site, schedule it with them. So, it's going to take me a couple of months to do that, short tail media are more things that I can do immediately, like tweets. I can make tweets every single day, I can also respond to people on Facebook or in the LinkedIn community or Google Plus community. I can do a lot of things where I could do those very very quickly in a matter of days or perhaps even hours. And so, what you want to do is coordinate all three of those levels up to the launch event, so what are the different parts? Well, this is kind of a handy way of thinking about it, long-tail events are things that take a couple months to do or more, and think of it as print, press releases, PR, print advertising, direct response or response television. And I also put the influential bloggers there, even though it doesn't take me a long time to use them, they're actually part of the short tail. Influential bloggers, it takes a lot of time to develop them so I put it there to think about that. The other thing that's useful is you can go to the Influential Blogger with your marketing idea, and ask him if you think that's going to be something that will really resonate in your target market, they're very helpful. So I put them on a long tale, simply to say, you gotta take time to really develop them, to be able to use them in your go viral marketing program. Medium-tailed are things like banner ads, e-journals, e-magazines, SEO, in other words, putting in the keywords that'll drive the SEO or search engine optimization function on your site. Facebook ads, making a video, making emails, those sort of things take a little bit of time, a couple months, and we'll probably want to set them up to execute weekly or whatever that we're going to be doing. If you think about it, the TV ad or print ad In a long tail, we'll do one per magazine. We'll probably get a couple of them before we launch, medium tail we can do it with much more frequency, short tail is really fast to do. It's Facebook postings, it's Twitter ads, it's going to LinkedIn circles, it's going to Google plus communities. It's doing things like talking to the influential bloggers, or giving them content that they can send out, it's pay per click advertising. These are things that are very very short-tailed, again you want to keep them all focused towards that launch event. And then afterwards you want to use all of these to keep the buzz going, you also should think about launch events, it might be Twitter parties. If you think about it, we had the tweet wall behind us during the specialization, all of the videos we shot, but you can do that yourself. In other words, you could have an event at a local restaurant or bar or nightclub or whatever, and actually have a tweet wall where people will talk to each other, even though they're not at the event, you're live streaming it out to them and then they're sending in questions and comments. It works really well, we had a client that had a major conference. We set aside a room that was essentially the treat tweet room, he would come in there and they would send out tweets and they would send out comments about what they were learning about the conference, but it was also livestream, so they could also talk to a tv camera and people would send in questions and comments to them. So there's a lot of things you can do that way, you might actually launch your site here, private virtual community with the TV event. You might have a PR event, you might even have a forum party, so there's lots of ways you can do it. The key is to keep in mind that it takes a long time to do some of these and so you need to plan it out. So I'm going to give you a planning calendar to do that, but you need to think about how long it's going to take. But before we do that, let's go over to the template, and I want to talk a little bit about that When you're building out your Go Viral marketing program, what you're really doing is trying to figure out how those are going to relate. So the way I like to do it on a template is the first thing we do is we start with the total target market, the total social market, and then what we do is we identify the different activities that we want to do. Generally I plan them in terms of a full year and then I think about it in terms of a pilot project of about three months. And what you want to do is to capture not only the cost that you're going to do, but how many people or how many exposures are you going to get? So this is basically a summarization of the dollars and it shows you how we kind of lay it out with a full year calendar and a three month pilot when many of you are probably saying, okay that's easy, where do I get the dollars? And so there's a couple things that I would recommend, first off, you can talk to digital agencies. Tell them about the size of your market, what you're trying to accomplish, and often times they'll give you some pretty accurate estimates. But if you don't want to do that, or you don't have the ability to do that, one of the things you can do is to go online and actually find the cost for any of the components. That I've talked about in this program, so let me give you one, I'll actually show you one. This is a publication called Meredith, it actually is a company that has lots and lots of publications and online things. And if you look at the top, they national media that shows you the different things that they have, local media that they could do, marketing capacities and so forth. Any magazine, any company that has banner ads and things are going to have something like this. So, if you look at this, and you scroll to the bottom you'll see something very important, it will either say brand media kits or advertizing kits or media kits itself. And so it will tell you different types of kits if you click on that, what it's going to do is it's now going to take you to the various media kits. So media kits are where advertisers get their revenue, that's where they get the costs that they're going to put into a spreadsheet. So these are the different publications of Meredith, my wife loves quilting, so let's do the Quilting one, you notice it says media kit, so I'm going to click on that. What it does is it takes me over to their media kit that they have for different publications, all right? And so what I can do is I could click on anything, but the thing I'm looking at, the audience will tell me a description of how well their audience maps over to the target market that you want to do. But the other one is rates and specs so if we click on that it takes us over to the rate specs for 2015 and so I can download the rates, I can download the specs which specs are here's how big you have to do a banner ad. Here's how big you can do for an advertisement, in their particular print journals and those are also online, but let's just download the rates. If I click on that what it is does is it gives me a spreadsheet where here the rates for advertising and quilting display rates and things like that. They also have separate rate cards for doing their banner ads and doing other sorts of things. So what you do is you go through and you're going to download the rate cards. That gives you the cost that you're going to do, this will then build into the spreadsheet to say here's how much I want to invest. Again use your professional network to do this, find what you can, most companies advertise their banner rates. Their advertising rates, other sorts of rates, if you go out to bloggers, they'll say here's how much it'll cost, also go out to Google and just search on it. How much does it cost to advertise on a blog, how much would it cost to advertise in a banner? That'll get you to sources, again, all the numbers are out there but what you ultimately want to do is to say here's how much I think I'm going to invest to go after the target market. Which in this case is 1.8 million people. And that'll then, we can sit down with somebody that's in digital marketing and digital advertising and say, if I invest this much into this market with these channels, what's it likely to produce in terms of people coming to my site or being a part? So part of what you want to do is to think it through in terms of the market you want to go to then do the channels you want to do, the advertising channels. Then go out and figure out where they're at, in terms of cost, build that into your spreadsheet for a year, then make it for the three months and go forward. Again, you can always go to us on the discussion boards to ask questions, these numbers are actually pretty relevant, they're realistic for the market of this size. So you can start there, but as you go through, we're going to have to feel our way into this. But there are a lot of resources online to really help you build your marketing plan and once we have the marketing plan, we can then get into budgeting and other sorts of activities.
