Ian Barr, VP of social and innovation, Camp Jefferson
Can we all just admit it? Most of the social marketing that appears in your feeds sucks. Many brands lack a point of view across their channels and have the mindset that pumping out three posts per week against a calendar of events featuring their product or service, warrants a check in the social media marketing box. That wasn’t so hard, was it?
So why do you stick to a strategy that isn’t working and continue to support lackluster content that penalizes your brand’s reach and effectiveness in these channels? You’re wasting money and internal resources. You’re wasting the time of the people you’re trying to influence. And your executive team is likely questioning its value.
Here’s some ways you can go about fixing it…
Define what “social media” is for your organization and the role it plays
Ask five different people in your organization to define what it means to them. You’ll get five different answers depending what department they’re in. Social media touches many aspects of marketing, sales and service. Clearly articulating how you define it and the role it plays ensures alignment, allows for clearer business objectives and ownership.
Re-assess your purpose
I’m shocked at how many social media strategies don’t ladder up to the brand purpose. What you say and create may be expressed differently for social media, but it still needs focus and consistency. If you make a natural food product and your brand purpose is to make people feel confident about what they put into their bodies to achieve a healthier lifestyle, your purpose in social should probably engage people on topics about the relationship they have with food/where it comes from and leading a healthy lifestyle versus just pushing products with lifestyle stock imagery.
Social = Mobile
By a large margin, mobile apps are the primary point of access to social media. Your content needs to stand out on a very small screen in a very crowded environment that people are thumbing through very fast. That’s a crucial filter to assess everything.
Forget your category
There are only a handful of social networks with mass reach and sophisticated targeting and measurement capabilities. That means that every brand in the world is fighting for attention in a crowded space. You’re not fighting to stand out amongst your category; you’re fighting to stand out against the biggest and best in the world. That’s your creative bar!
You can’t afford everything
You don’t need to be on every channel. It’s costly to feed, monitor and a resource drain. Assess your team size, production and media budgets and make hard choices. All channels are placing enormous weight on video and rewarding brands that do it well so take that into consideration.
This is not mass media. Measure it differently
You’re not dealing with a target market. Stop calling them that. They’re people. And people use social media to be entertained, to discover and to connect with other people. It not only changes how you produce content, but how you measure it. Here’s the secret to measuring social media… there is none. You need to create a custom measurement platform for YOUR business that maps back to YOUR objectives and with metrics that matter to YOUR executive team.
Give evangelists a role to play
Most brands have vocal advocates. If you empower and give them a role to play it can unlock incredible word of mouth for your brand and contribute significant cost savings to your bottom line. For the NHL, we leveraged fans to create a ‘fan-cast’ of the 2015 Stanley Cup Playoffs that showed a different side of hockey to fans outside of the sport and around the globe.
In a different scenario, our client Koodo Mobile, empowers brand advocates to be unbiased social service representatives called Mobile Masters. These volunteers are passionate about the wireless space and answer customers’ questions in their online community in exchange for behind-the-scenes access and the ability to improve a company they love. Every correct response they provide online saves big $$$ because it offloads a call. Think about the yearly savings to their bottom line!
If you finished reading this, I’ve also proved that a great post can be more in-depth than the “7 keys to …” click-bait that fills your feed.
Ian Barr is VP of social and innovation at Camp Jefferson
