Sunday, November 8, 2015

You can’t drive on one lane social media roads and get there

One Social Platform or Many?

The lure of social media platforms for marketers is strong.  Considering there are 560M users on Twitter and over a billion on Facebook alone (Bennet, 2014), the available reach and engagement opportunity is hard to ignore.  So should your brand jump into every platform headlong?  Most likely not all platforms, but an integrated, multi-platform strategy should be a component for every brand’s marketing plan.  

Social media marketing is becoming an increasingly important component of every brand’s marketing strategy.  For brands deciding to remain focused on just one social channel, it’s likely they’ll find themselves late to the party and playing catch up.  The top 3 digital areas marketers plan to allocate more budget on are social media advertising (70% plan to increase spend), social media marketing (70%), and social media engagement (67%) (Nanji, 2015).  If you don’t engage your customers across multiple platforms, your competition most likely is getting ahead. 



The process for determining which platforms to integrate into your marketing communications strategy should take into consideration your target market, the marketing objective your brand is looking to achieve, and the type of content which is most effective at influencing your customer to take an intended action.  Establishing “rules of engagement” will encourage thoughtful interaction that benefits the business, brand, customer, peers, and prospects at every touch point” (Solis, 2010). 
            Understanding your target market and how they engage on each platform is one of the most critical early stage planning decisions.  The process of building a buyer persona for your target markets, one that takes into account their social media behavior, puts the customer first and will point you in the best direction.  While not exhaustive, here are some categories to shape your buyer persona questions:
     Demographic information i.e. age, gender, relationship status, ethnicity, nationality etc.
     Lifestyle habits
     Hobbies & Interests
     Professional information
     Social media usage
     Shopping preferences (online/ in-store)
     Challenges surrounding your industry/service/product
     Factors that enable success in your role (Freeman Social Media.com, n.d.)

A component of your persona research should also include social listening and as Hubspot suggests, spend some time at the watering hole (Hubspot, 2015).  “Discover all relevant communities of interest and observe the choices, challenges, impressions, and wants of the people within each network” (Solis, 2010).  On average, a staggering 55M photos are uploaded on Instagram each day.  This represents a treasure trove of user generated content (UGC).  If your strategy is to increase brand awareness with UGC, this is a great platform to integrate with your website.  Already 63% of prestige brands link their Instagram account to their website and 54% to their Facebook page (Gillett, 2014).  Instagram provides a visual content focused platform allowing brands to give a glimpse into unique, behind the scenes moments.   "That is really what building a brand is about, not just showing the product but showing the story all around it" Gillett, 2014).  Brands need to determine how each watering hole can support their objective. 
With well researched buyer personas in hand for your target markets, a second consideration should be the customer’s buying cycle.  “The reality is that your target audience has different communication needs depending on which stage of the buying cycle they’re in. A customer-centric approach flips content creation from brand first to customer first” (Quesenberry, 2015).  If your brand is focused on gaining awareness and interest among consumers in the prepurchase stage, providing how-to content on YouTube may be an ideal strategy. 



If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is a platform many brands have used to showcase thought leadership and industry expertise.  The nature of this platform makes it highly effective for B2B lead generation.  One study showed LinkedIn to be 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter (Corliss, 2012).  A successful multi-platform strategy aligns platform with content and buyer personas.  
            Another important benefit of executing a multi-platform strategy is the positive impact on SEO.  “Social conversations can inform keyword strategy, and search keywords can inform social content strategy. This process is a virtuous cycle because social engagement boosts search performance, which increases social signals and drives more social conversations” (Lee, 2013).  While Google may have declared social signals don’t impact search engine results rankings, “social is the new SEO because social networks themselves function as powerful and widely-used search engines in their own right” (Patel, 2014).  In addition, social pages which are optimized will rank high in SERP results, especially for brand names. 

If marketing budgets were bottomless pits of gold
            Since marketing budgets are finite, an important decision in creating a multi-platform social campaign is how much time and money it will require to launch and sustain each one.  As you allocate budgets, here are several things to keep in mind for success:
1.    Compare benefits with spend - know your ROI
2.    Earmark dollars for each specific channel
3.    Invest in content that is shareable
4.    Account for rising costs
5.    Leave room for programs and new opportunities (Braziel, 2015)

Budget dollars should be allocated towards channels that drive the most impact and deliver an ROI. “Creating highly shareable content that accomplishes a business objective is a craft, and you need to invest in the creation of it” (Braziel, 2015).  Marketing teams need to develop a content calendar and determine the total cost for each platform.
 In addition to affordability, the content plan needs to be one the team can sustain. “Once you start with a given cadence, you’ve made a content promise. If you can’t maintain that promise, it will quickly alienate your readers” (Greenberg, 2009).  The extent of a multi-channel campaign is dependent on the team's’ ability to adhere to a content calendar.  However, in the quest for generating content on a regular basis and integrating across platforms, it’s important not to forget to customize the content for each platform.  A brand could adapt content across platforms in the following way:
     Twitter - share news and promotions
     YouTube - entertain and educate
     Pinterest - organize products around consumer interests (Quesenberry, 2014)
     Facebook - share emotional brand stories and contests

It’s also important to remember that social media is intended to generate engagement and even conversations.  Brands must evaluate their ability to have dedicated community managers who monitor and respond to comments, handle complaints, and amplify user generated content on each channel that reflects that the brand is paying attention and interested.  In evaluating the number of social channels to use, a brand must evaluate their ability to identify and feed advocates and remember that “tools don’t build community - people do” (Momentum Marketing, n.d.).  All of this requires time.  In a recent study by Social Media Examiner, 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and nearly 19% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.


The good news is that this same report shows this investment of time is paying dividends in reduced marketing expenses (Social Media Examiner, 2014).
Regardless of which channels are chosen in a multi-platform strategy, each one provides another opportunity to use analytics tools to monitor tactics, measure ROI, and adjust strategies.  Chris Sietsma from Convince and Convert provides 5 reports for social media on Google Analytics that will allow you to monitor and refine your multi-platform strategy:
1.    Use advanced segmentation to monitor traffic and user behavior exclusively from each source
2.    View conversions by source 
3.    Measure traffic to social outposts to understand how your website drives awareness of your social channels
4.    Create and deploy content experiments
5.    Use multi-channel funnel reports to understand digital attribution and show the value of social media in the sales funnel (Sietsma, 2014).

The days of driving on one lane social roads are over.  Consumers and B2B buyers are consuming content across a myriad of highways.  Take the time to develop strong personas, prioritize social channel development based on the audience and your goals, develop a content and staffing plan that is realistic and attainable, and use your analytics tools to avoid the traffic delays and roadblocks.            

References:

Bennet, S. (2014, January 20). Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn – Social Media Stats 2014.  Adweek Magazine: Social Blog [Web log]

Braziel, L. (2015, July 13). 5 Tips to setting your social media budget in 2016.  Retrieved from http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-strategy/5-tips-setting-social-media-budget-2016/

Corliss, R. (2012, January 30). LinkedIn 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30030/LinkedIn-277-More-Effective-for-Lead-Generation-Than-Facebook-Twitter-New-Data.aspx

English, A. (2015, July 20). Top 100 Global Brands on Youtube: 2015 update.  Retrieved from http://www.pixability.com/top-100-brands-2015/

Gillett, R. (2014, April 22). How the most successful brands dominate Instragram, and how you can too. Adweek Magazine (Online).  Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/3029395/bottom-line/how-the-most-successful-brands-dominate-instagram-and-you-can-too

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. MultichannelMerchant.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

Lee, W. (2013, October 25).  SEO and social media alignment. Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/seo-social-media-alignment-174775

Momentum Marketing. (n.d.). 5 keys to engaging and driving online community engagement. Retrieved from http://momentummediamarketing.com/5-keys-to-engaging-and-driving-online-community-engagement/

Nanji, A. (2015, January 27). 2015 Digital Marketing Budgets: Top Priorities, Metrics, and Challenges. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/26900/2015-digital-marketing-budgets-top-priorities-metrics-and-challenges#ixzz3qwquVy7r

Patel, N. (2014, April 11). Why social is the new SEO. Retrieved from http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/11/why-social-is-the-new-seo/

Quesenberry, K. (2015, May 14). How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/#more-83257

Quesenberry, K. (2014, December 8). Three Ways to Customize Content Across Social Channels for Greater Response. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/26645/three-ways-to-customize-content-across-social-channels-for-greater-response

Seitsma, C. (n.d.). The 5 Top Google Analytics Reports for Social Media Marketers. Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-measurement/the-5-top-google-analytics-reports-for-social-media-marketers/

Social Media Examiner. (2014). 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Reprt. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2014.pdf

Solis, B. (2010). 21 rules for social media engagement. Mashable. Retrieved January 2, 2011, from: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Freeman Social Media. (n.d.). How to: Create buyer personas for social media marketing. [Web log]. Retrieved from http://freemansocialmedia.com/buyer-personas-for-social-media/


HubSpot. (2015, October 13). How to create personas. Retrieved from http://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts-user-guide-v2/how-to-create-personas

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