Engage your prospects with the TOMSTER method

For any company concerned about its future, achieving its marketing objectives requires the development and implementation of a reliable and effective Shopify marketing strategy. For many successful businesses, you will always find that engaging with their community is a big part of their social media strategy.

Indeed it is very difficult today to grow your brand without engaging a minimum on social networks and at least to offer them clear and precise brand communication.

Social networks today occupy a place of choice, because they allow brands to meet their users, and their prospects, thanks to effective content marketing and effective Community Management, as Alma points out.

Community management is a crucial element of your strategy, because it is what will allow you to better engage your prospects using various methods. A method favored by community managers is the TOMSTER method.

If you don't know what the TOMSTER method is, don't panic. It is an advanced strategy that can be learned easily thanks to our guide.

In this article we will see what the TOMSTER method is and what this acronym stands for, then we will see why using this method can set you apart from your competitors, and finally an example of this formidable marketing method.

Summary

What is the TOMSTER method?

Definition of the TOMSTER method

Tomster Definition: The TOMSTER method is a social media strategy used to organize, monitor and optimize marketing communication on social networks. It is an acronym that stands for the following words in order: Target, Objectives, Message, Strategy, Technology & Toutchpoint, Evaluate, Resources. Some also call it the TOMSTTER method, but there is no difference.

We can put the TOMSTER method in the same basket as the AARRR methods that help you scale your business.

Unlike a traditional communication method of the "Test, Launch, Optimize" type, this method mixes all aspects of your communication to reach a kind of general point of view (a kind of fictitious Dashboard) which will help you to make better decisions from the start for your communication.

Each point of this method must be taken into account in the reasoning of a communication strategy for optimal functioning. Do not hesitate to launch a campaign with the TOMSTER method and one without the TOMSTER method in order to carry out a kind of A/B testing which will allow you to see the results of this method compared to that of a normal campaign.

In order to detail the different parts of the TOMSTER model, we will see point by point what this method means:

Target

Targeting your prospect is a crucial part of your communication strategy. Indeed, with poor targeting, you will not reach people who are sensitive to your message and your product at all. To achieve good targeting, always ask yourself this question: What does my target need? What need am I solving.

You can craft a persona for and work side-by-side with marketing experts to help you along the way. Develop a workshop with your employees, and present the problem: Who is interested in our products? Determine an age group, a socio-professional category, a sex, a personality, a particular interest... Anything that can help you determine your target.

From there, you can flesh out and build your strategy around your target. Remember that with a bad target, you realize a bad campaign. It is therefore a crucial stage in your development: "Who do you want to target?" It's about defining your prospects and customers.

For more details on finding the target customer/prospect, we recommend this article which talks about it in more detail.

Objective

Once your audience has been targeted and identified — targeting your audience does not mean having understood their expectations — it will then be a question of defining a marketing objective for your marketing campaign. It can be many different things, and your goal depends on your project. You can choose several, because they are often related and sometimes have similarities.

Remember, you need to set yourself a Smart goal, don't push your teams too hard, and stay down to earth to be able to achieve that goal.

Here is a non-objective list of some objectives that can be applied to your campaign:

• Generate more traffic on a website.

• Generate more engagement on a company page on social networks.

• Collect email addresses with a landing page.

• Position yourself on the same queries as the competition.

• Improve the notoriety of its brand image and its presence on the networks.

• Create a long-term communication strategy.

• Send a message.

• Promote a new product and/or service

• Promote an event

• Promote free content to direct people to a sales funnel

• Make sales on the Facebook and Instagram marketplaces to achieve your short-term turnover objectives

The possibilities for the objective of your communication campaign are numerous, it is advisable to choose them well in order to then have a clear and precise social media strategy, but we will come back to this later in this article.

Message

The message you want to convey in your campaign will depend on your objective. This may very well be your business vocation, but also a so-called "ephemeral" message that does not fully and definitively fit into your company's values.

It's about conveying a message that will help achieve your campaign objective, and that is in line with the values ​​that your company stands for. This may very well be a message that takes sides with news, but be careful with this kind of positioning!

To build your campaign message, refer to your objective and your corporate values, and ask yourself what interest this objective will have for your prospect. Define a framework, with an editorial line. Brainstorm by talking about potentially important topics related to the objective, and define 3 to 5 axes that seem relevant to you. As a result of this meeting, you will already have more inspiration to help you reflect on your message.

Now remember. A message must be clear — easily identifiable — and concise.

Take for example the Nike brand. Nike was a Greek goddess symbolizing victory and glory in all their forms. Art, Sport, War, Politics... Anything goes. The symbolism that the name of the brand represents implies that with Nike, you will win, you will surpass yourself, you will have glory.

The notion of overcoming is found a lot in Nike's ads, but also in the brand's slogan: "Just Do It"

You can create a campaign slogan especially for the occasion, see several campaign slogans. This method is very effective because a campaign slogan allows consumers to remember your campaign for a long time.

This was particularly the case of the Camaïeu campaign "Away From Work" created by the Creative Buzzman agency. Indeed in this campaign, the key phrase - or slogan - was "In the city, this woman wears Camaïeu". A short, simple and effective slogan, combined with images implying Work and determination in the background, link the brand to a message of equality and determination.

Clearly, to develop an effective message for a communication campaign, you must touch your prospect's emotions.

Strategy

In this part it is a question of defining an angle of attack of your target, by distinguishing the strategic with the actions and long-termist reflections, of the tactics, and operational which they, are carried out on the short term.

In the strategic, you will reflect and coordinate actions, establish a marketing plan of concrete actions implemented by operational marketers. Here, you think long term and over time.

In tactics, you will directly carry out the actions given and established previously by the marketing plan. So for example, carrying out active community management of the company's social networks, creating striking visuals, videos, advertisements, etc...

Each part is fundamentally nested in the other, and you cannot manage a communication campaign without one or the other.

Of course, your strategy will entirely depend on your communication campaign objective. An Adidas communication campaign is not the same as Nike and may have a different objective. Remember that there is not necessarily a process to copy paste. You must yourself create the strategy that best suits your campaign.

Now, to establish your communication strategy, think consumer. And ask yourself the right questions:

• Where does my target expect to see me?

• How to hit my target more precisely?

• How does my target perceive me?

• What are the interests of my target for me?

Depending on your answers to these questions, you can easily define a concrete action plan to carry out.

Let's take an example. I am a Shopify store selling handicrafts made from vegetable leathers. My current clientele is a clientele with an affluent lifestyle, earning more than 2500€ per month. My clientele is in an age bracket ranging from 25 to 45 years old, and lives mainly in the city or in the suburbs.

Her consumption habits lead her to prefer Instagram and Facebook as her favorite social networks, her main entertainment being mainly in television, nature walks and friends. It's an active clientele, aesthete, who pays attention to what they buy, because it must be in accordance with their values.

Based on this premise, I will therefore target my target by combining Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing. On Instagram and Facebook, with ads, posts related to his concerns, light entertainment such as interviews, workshop visits, and ideas for nature walks.

I will therefore establish a post publication schedule, an inventory of the resources I will need, analyze the data from the latest communication campaigns, and if this excludes my field of consequence, call on a service provider such as a marketing agency for me. helping to set up an effective communication strategy.

Technology

In this part, you should make an inventory of the tools and technology you will need. Think about the BtoB solutions that already exist, and which can be useful to you in pursuit of your objective.

Think of solutions like chatbots, software, innovative solutions... Anything that can help you achieve your goal.

Evaluate

Evaluation is one of the most important steps in the TOMSTER method. Indeed, its purpose is to analyze the entire marketing strategy that you have put in place. To do this, you must define key success indicators — in other words, KPIs — for the objectives you have set for yourself. Thus, these indicators will allow you to measure and monitor the performance of your objectives throughout your campaign, but also at the end, to assess its profitability.

The different KPIs you can use vary from tool to tool, and from strategy to strategy. But here is a non-exhaustive list of KPIs that may be of interest to you:

• The engagement rate of a publication on social networks

• The rate of evolution of your subscribers on your social networks

• The conversion rate of a Google Ads campaign

• The conversion rate of a social media campaign

• The profitability rate of your communication campaign

• The bounce rate of your website traffic

• The loss rate of your prospects who entered your sales funnel, but did not arrive at the end

• The rate of evolution of your turnover

• The customer satisfaction rate

• Customer lifetime value

• The cost of acquiring a customer

• The number of recurring and/or one-shot customers

• The rate of One Shot customers compared to repeat customers

• Your impressions of search results with SEO (our Tips: contact SEO Consultant for a free pre-audit)

If you want a more complete list as well as the formulas, we invite you to consult this article right here.

Now that you have chosen your KPIs, it will be time to follow them, and for this, you have several solutions.

Most KPIs are calculated automatically based on the tools you use. For example, Meta provides companies advertising on its networks with a dashboard based on a number of metrics (KPI), whether it is an engagement rate, an impression rate, visibility, etc. You can rely on this dashboard, because generally the data comes directly from Meta, so there is little error possible.

Another solution is to use a Growth Hacking method with a simple excel file, or a Notion dashboard. Indeed, you can link most of the tools you use with a Google Sheet file, — thanks to automation — and harvest the KPIs that only interest you.

For this, you can use automation tools like Zapier, which works on the basis of APIs and which has a wide range of supported applications and software.

Also, be sure to organize your dashboard according to your campaign priorities. If the engagement rate is not very important to you, do not highlight it, and prefer another KPI. Also, favor graphs, as well as formatted data, rather than a simple table, with stuffy data.

Resources

This part will bring together all the resources you will need to perform in your communication campaign project. This will necessarily combine the budget that you will allocate, but also the human resources, photos, videos, tools, digital, external and internal that you will need to carry out your campaign.

A first step is to list the skills you will need based on the actions you are going to take. Once this step has been completed, classify these skills in two columns: An internal column, where you have the skills internally in your company, or it is your area of ​​expertise, and an external column, where you do not have of these skills, and/or it has nothing to do with your field of activity.

Depending on this step, you will therefore have a list of skills to internalize — to assign to people who are part of your project/company —, and a list of skills to outsource — find a service provider, perform benchmarks, etc. .

The second step will be to make a first provisional budget in order to evaluate the costs of your communication campaign. Do not omit any costs, take into account the salary, even sending a simple email. The objective here is to obtain the largest possible budget so as not to have any surprises at the end of the campaign.

Remember that it is better to plan a budget that is too large than a budget that is too low and to exceed it! Also, take some leeway to deal with unforeseen events that happen more often than you think.

Once this first budget has been made, try to reduce unnecessary costs by performing benchmarks and A/B testing of the solution. Then, you can then have a budget as close to reality as possible.

Why use the TOMSTER method?

In 2022, most companies are present on social networks, because they know that most of their customers spend 4 to 6 hours a day on social networks. This presence has accelerated further during the COVID crisis, and companies are therefore forced to innovate to attract their consumers.

It is now increasingly difficult to stand out from the competition, and it is in this context of hypercompetition that the TOMSTER method comes.

The TOMSTER method allows a global approach to a communication campaign. By having a global vision of this strategy, and can more easily overcome the unexpected with crisis communication, but also to think long term and satisfaction rather than carrying out short term actions that have no effect.

Having a communication strategy has now become mandatory, with an acceleration of exchanges, particularly in the e-commerce sector, which is becoming more and more present in the lives of consumers.

What does the acronym TOMSTER stand for?

the acronym TOMSTER stands for Target, Objective, Message, Strategy, Technology, Evaluation, Resources, and corresponds to the different stages of development of a communication campaign.

Why implement a communication strategy?

Today, in a context where all brands have at least one social network, it is absolutely necessary to stand out, especially by having in mind a precise communication strategy, as well as an objective. The TOMSTER method helps communicators and marketers to develop this communication strategy.

How do I develop my communication campaign budget?

To help you develop your campaign budget, you must first list the skills you need, then classify them according to their degree of feasibility within your structure (to see if you should not outsource) and then draw up a table of charges with salaries, costs related to the tools used, etc.