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As marketers dive deeper into social media, many have discovered that a brand’s social presence extends beyond the traditional umbrella of marketing. There is no doubt that social media is a dominant form of marketing, but the scope and possibilities given to us by social are forcing marketers to develop new skills sets that will help them become more successful. That being said, many marketers also have great skills that they can bring to the table.
Here are six powerful lessons I have learned from life-long, traditional marketers, and adapted them for social media success.
Today’s marketing game requires more agility than ever, and marketers now have to face constant change. Some change might be forced upon them, but sometimes, change can be more profitable than expected. Whether you control change or not, agility is crucial because the journey to success is filled with it. With social media, change is often exciting as it typically introduces an evolution. The social media space is, however, incredibly fast, requiring very frequent maintenance and readjusting for your various processes. The rest stays the same: over communicate, learn to improvise around processes and become more adaptable to new timelines or requirements.
Agility also involves resourcefulness and the capacity for detecting good opportunities for internal and external collaboration. In this case, marketers should leverage their relationships internally to combine forces with other teams and avoid duplicating efforts. As technology for social media marketing evolves, it becomes increasingly easier to connect social media goals with other marketing objectives that may be seen as more “traditional.”
Externally, think about word-of-mouth marketing. Social media empowers people to extend the reach of their connections, and see how other people’s conversation about your brand can impact social metrics like Share Of Voice (SOV) or Share Of Conversation (SOC). Word-of-Mouth is more powerful than ever, and finding your advocates and influential people in your industry can help you get more positive brand impressions, leading to higher top-of-mind and purchasing considerations.
Before thinking about nurturing, it’s crucial to determine what relationships your brand can take ownership of by establishing direct connections with your followers, customers and prospects. In addition, your brand may be overlooking the amount of great-quality relationships with people that have become (or are becoming) emerging advocates. If your brand creates valuable content regularly, what segment of your audience is more devoted to sharing it for you? If you host online events like webinars, Tweet chats or launch a campaign for a specific product launch, who are the people that engage the most with your brand?
After determining who these people are, build a plan for engaging and reinforcing your direct relationships with your audience. The opportunity for effective relationship nurturing begins once you find the right people to engage and establish unique connections that only your brand can own.
First and foremost, as a marketer you need to define what is meaningful to different parts of your organization. Moreover, how impactful are your marketing efforts to other departments, and vice-versa? Thanks to social media, breaking down the silos between different departments is not so much a challenge, but an opportunity to uncover data and new metrics that will directly connect and support the goals across the board. For instance, when you see a proactive Customer Service team in social, wouldn’t you see that as a Unique Selling Proposition?
When determining the extent of your social listening efforts, separate your search query by plugging in keywords that are relevant to your industry, and not only your brand, products or solutions. By doing this, you can actively monitor the latest trends in your industry and find out what it is that’s driving interest to your target audience. Then, you can develop relevant content and adjust your brand’s messaging to increase web visits and top-of-mind.
Marketers are used to having a wide set of options of marketing automation tools at their disposal. With the very nature of social media engagement being all about one-on-one, personalized interactions, successful automation tactics simply take a different approach. Instead of mass-tweeting, see this as an opportunity to route the right social media mentions to the right people on your team, or even to other teams. Competitor mentions, for instance, may not be as important to a Community Manager as it may be to someone who specifically works in Competitive Intelligence.
With an overall strategy that integrates the efforts of your marketing with those of other departments, one highly effective way to gain perspective of your success is by leveraging the power of a Social Media Command Center. Download the free eBook below to learn how Cisco and nine other major brands use their Social Media Command Centers to drive and monitor their social media marketing success.
