Social marketing can be hugely powerful: it drives new and
repeat business, builds loyalty and engagement, and even inspires the holy
grail of word-of-mouth marketing: spontaneous brand advocacy.
But, like any powerful tool, social requires knowledge and
skills to effectively harness its might.
Before you rush out to Post and Tweet with reckless abandon,
it’s crucial to have the right foundation in place to inform what you’ll say
(strategy), how you’ll say it (execution), and how you’ll measure the results
(ROI). Here are three fundamentals to set you up for success in social
marketing all through 2013:
Get Over IMC
IMC, or integrated marketing communications, has long been
the de facto mantra of the modern marketing world. Its main premise is that you
should keep brand messaging uniform across all mediums.
For many big brands and old-school agencies, IMC is simply
how things are done. But IMC was created with a different world in mind.
When the term was coined back in the 1970s, there weren’t
nearly as many mediums in play — and they were all one-way, “broadcast”
mediums. TV, radio and print ads were usually the vehicles of choice, backed up
with package design and store placement. It was easy to use the same taglines,
imagery and branding in a uniform way across all of these marketing efforts.
Today? Not so much. With all of the dynamic new mediums
created by the internet revolution, we can’t just shoehorn the same message
into all channels, digital and analog alike. For one, most marketing channels
today are a two-way street.
Brands can broadcast their messages, but consumers and fans
also have the opportunity to respond, remix, retweet and generally change your
message. Two-way marketing channels throw a wrench in good, old-fashioned IMC.
Instead of trying to keep the message 100% uniform across
all channels, we recommend focusing on the unique “personality” of each brand
and on providing consistently great interactions, everywhere from your website
to your social media channels to customer service and everything in between.
Think of a brand more like a person, with different facets
to its character. It’s still a single, cohesive entity, but it’s a heck of a
lot more complex than a label on a shampoo bottle.
Bottom line: IMC had a good run, but the end is near. That
doesn’t mean you should give up on integrating your brand’s messaging. It just
means you need to think about it more holistically.
Start Using Full-Spectrum Attribution
As budgets continue to rise for social media marketing,
executives have increasingly (and rightfully) demanded that marketers prove
their efforts are “ringing registers” and delivering return on investment. But
some marketers claim social metrics are too “squishy” to align with real
business objectives. Others still haven’t summoned the discipline to establish
a rigorous measurement framework.
But for those marketers who have fully embraced social media
marketing and invested in a rigorous measurement framework, it’s easy to
demonstrate the benefits. Success stories like Samsung and Nutella are now
outnumbering naysayers like GM, because marketers are using data to prove that
they can leverage social to solve complex business challenges and deliver
significant returns using social.
This is only possible through an analytical process called
Full-Spectrum Attribution. In order to
attribute positive results (engagement, enhanced loyalty, new sales) to
specific efforts (paid advertising, applications, publishing, customer care),
marketers need a highly analytical, full-spectrum view of their social media
activities.
Tools can enable this approach (more on that in a moment),
but first it requires a commitment to identifying metrics and benchmarks that
are specific to social and that recognize the unique qualities that distinguish
it from broadcast mediums.
Find the Right Tools For You
In order to begin treating your brand’s messaging more
holistically and implementing Full-Spectrum Attribution, you’ll need to find
the right tools.
The right tools for you will depend on the size of your
company and the nature of your brand(s). Most importantly, you should make sure
that the people who are producing social content are directly and constantly
connected to the people who are amplifying that content, and that they’re using
the same tools.
One way to do that is to create a social media “war room.”
Oreo employed this tactic with great success during the Super Bowl, pushing out
fun and timely content with speed that made plenty of consumers and brand
marketers take notice. How did they do it so fast? In a word, integration.
Everyone who needed to be present to make a decision (and
put the creative together) was in the same room at the same time — the right
time. Agile social marketing is best enacted in real time, in one room, with
one group of people who can easily communicate with each other and who use the
same tools to achieve common goals.
Why is this war room so important? Both content producers
(for example, the people writing your Facebook posts) and content promoters
(the people pushing your ads) have valuable insight into what works. If they’re
both measuring correctly, they will start to see patterns.
Perhaps a clever Facebook post is getting tons of likes and
shares. Or maybe a certain retargeting strategy is suddenly paying off and
needs more media spend immediately. In a war room, real or virtual, these
patterns can be quickly identified and used to adjust your strategy and combine
owned, earned and paid media effectively without missing a beat.
To make this even easier, we recommend using automated
software tools that can aggregate and make sense of data faster than humans
can. When a powerful software system is combined with a “war room” full of well-trained
people who can put this data to use, what results is a highly scalable approach
to maximizing the return on your social marketing efforts.
So there you have it. Three important ways to think about
putting social to work for you in the new year.
How will you be approaching social marketing differently in
2013?
About the Author
Jamie Tedford is CEO and founder of Brand Networks, one of twelve companies that comprise Facebook's Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer program, and a leading provider of integrated social software solutions and marketing services for some of the world’s most “Liked” brands.
