The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, Second Edition

Chapter 41. Identify Resources

The three previous steps (chapters) are mostly your responsibility to implement. Now that you have a comprehensive integrated marketing strategy developed, you have to figure out who is going to be responsible for implementing and maintaining all of these new tools and efforts. I'll bet right now it seems like it would take a team of people to execute your plan. Don't worry; here's how we'll get it done.

The last couple of years were tough ones for businesses around the world. The economy affected all businesses from the Fortune 500 down to the one-person sole proprietor. It had the same effect on nonprofits and governmental entities as well. Marketing budgets and personnel were cut, fewer people had to do more work, and now in the middle of all this, we have a whole new way to market using social media.

This is actually good news. While all marketing takes human resources to implement and social media is no different, social media is free and doesn't require huge media buys, creative, and production. Here's some of your resources right here.

Going through the process in the first step showed you what marketing efforts were effective and what weren't. Now is the time to make a list of all of the efforts you are going to put on hold in place of using social media. Grab your yellow pad or erasable whiteboard and start making a list.

List all of your previous activities that didn't return the return on investment (ROI) you had hoped for. List print advertising, ...