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6 Reasons Why Social Media is the New Marketing

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For decades, Marketing was a one-way street. We designed, wrote and delivered corporate marketing communications – collateral, ads, direct mail and the like. It was all about the company speaking to the market with one voice.

Fast forward more than two decades and the old “Mad Men” Marketing model is all but dead. In other words, Social is the New Marketing. To see why this paradigm shift has occurred, let’s take a quick step back.

The traditional definition of Marketing goes something like this (from the AMA): “the activity and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.”

Go searching for a definition of social media and you’ll find so many that marketing strategist Heidi Cohen came up with a collection of 30 Social Media Definitions. Personally, I like Cohen’s own definition of social media as “platforms that enable the interactive web by engaging users to participate in, comment on and create content” as a means of communicating with other users and the public. In this environment, the company/brand can engage in a two-way conversation with prospects, customers and the public at large.

With these definitions in mind, let’s look at 6 reasons why social media is the new marketing:

1. It’s about content.
Social media places the power of the media in everyone’s hands. Unlike the old days, nobody needs to own a TV station, a newspaper or a printing press to communicate with a virtually unlimited audience. All that’s needed is a computing device and an Internet connection. That’s huge because it gives companies, organizations and individuals enormous power to communicate, persuade and impact other people across the globe.

2. The concepts of messaging and positioning have morphed. 
One-way messaging is out. Two-way communication via a variety of social channels is in. Marketing must both listen and speak to what the market actually wants to hear – not what you think they want to hear.

3. The never-ending campaign. 
The old marketing campaign had a beginning and an end. The new one is a never-ending, living, breathing, organic campaign that requires constant care, feeding and nurturing.

4. There’s not just one target; there’s many. 
Social media focuses on one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communications. It’s no longer just the “message to/for the masses.” Now you can speak to one prospect, to many, or jump into a conversation of many-to-many.

5. Bring the brand to the table.
If you don’t participate in the conversation via social media, you’re letting the market define you and your brand – without any input from you and your organization.  Far better to see social as an extension of your brand and use the tools to engage with and evaluate the impact your brand has on key audiences.

6. Focus on execution. 
In Marketing, as in life, it all comes down to the details, doesn’t it? That’s where execution comes in. In the age of social media, effective marketing demands that we maximize and integrate all media: text, video, photographs, images, audio, presentation, design and more. Your brand isn’t just your website; it encompasses all communication and must speak with one, unified voice across multiple channels.

Have you made the leap to the New Marketing? More importantly, has your marketing made the shift: Is your marketing social and your social (integrated with) marketing? If not, use these 6 key points to rethink your marketing.

So what do you think? Is Social Media the New Marketing? What key reasons would you add to the list above?

 

5 Pitfalls that Keep Marketers from Maximizing Social Media Channels

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Posted by Sheryl Roehl  

More and more businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re getting everything right.  Here are 5 things that keep marketers from getting the most from their social marketing programs.

1. Running your social marketing without a strategy or a plan. Social media is maturing, but is your approach to it? You should build a plan for your social marketing like you would for any other marketing discipline. Your plan should include the strategies and tactics, branding, messaging, content, tools, resources and goals that will help you make your social media presence a successful part of your marketing.

2. Operating in a silo. 7 out of 10 marketers in a recent BtoB survey said branding is their top goal for social marketing.  Funny, but the reality often seems like the exact opposite. Many companies seem to run their social media programs like a separate sideline and tactical program handled by an intern or entry-level marketer. This is a mistake. Instead, you should incorporate social media into your integrated marketing programs. Be sure to project a consistent brand in all your social media channels (and across all marketing channels) in terms of design, positioning and personality.

3. Using social media as just another marketing “me” channel. Twitter and other social media are not just another corporate press release wire for your PR team or product announcements. Can you say boooring? Too many B2B companies use their social channels to push out one-way PR announcements and top-down messages.You can instantly set your company apart from competitors by delivering interesting and valuable content and engaging in two-way conversations about topics that really matter to your target audience.

4. Neglect your following. I’m always surprised when I run across companies’ social media accounts that push out plenty of tweets and posts, but have relatively few followers — let alone engaged ones – even after years of maintaining an active social presence.Like it or not, your company’s reach and engagement with its following help drive your Klout score, a key measurement of your social media influence.

You wouldn’t drop a major email campaign to a dozen contacts, nor should you do the equivalent on your social channels. Just as you work at building your email list, you should invest time and resources in growing your list of quality followers, fans and likes.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to tackle it, you can outsource this task to social media experts. For example, we built up a client’s Twitter following to more than 500 in a matter of weeks. For another client, we grew the quality and number of followers gradually over several months, from around 400 followers to 1,000. Here, I’ve been able to increase our followers (@MarketingIntel) during the past year to over 2,500 as of this writing.

5. Obsessing about the score.  Yes, metrics can help you track your progress, but
don’t focus too much on them. Your social media presence should be making an impact and contributing to the success of your marketing campaigns.  Sure, pay the proper attention to your Klout and other metrics delivered by your social platform, but don’t go overboard. They’re just numbers after all.

Don’t make these 5 mistakes in your social marketing. Build your social media plan and constantly fine-tune it based on what works and what doesn’t.  Get help from experts to optimize your social presence and invest in growing your target audience of followers, fans and likes. It’s smart to keep an eye on key performance metrics but stay focused on improving your content and increasing the engagement of your audience.

What other tips would you add to this list of social marketing pitfalls? Would you please share your experiences and perspectives on social marketing?

 

How NOT to Choose a Marketing Agency: 13 Rules You Should Break

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As a marketer, choosing an agency is probably one of the hardest but most important decisions that you’ll make in your career. Choose well and you’re a rock star in your boss’ eyes. Choose poorly and it could ding you on your next performance review.

It’s not just whom you choose that matters. It’s just as important how you choose. With that in mind – and in honor of this week’s dreaded Friday the 13th, we’ve assembled our 13 favorite rules for how NOT to choose a marketing agency.

1. Choosing a marketing agency that “can.” Today’s agency landscape is crowded with candidates who say they “can.” As in, “We can do branding” or “We can do social media” or “We can do PR.” But there’s a big difference between “can” and “has.” Remember, your brand will live or die by the experience (or lack thereof) behind it. By way of metaphor, would you want a surgeon just out of med school operating on you? Sure, they have the M.D. next to their name. But wouldn’t you rather have the most experienced pair of hands repairing your hernia – or, in this case, doing your branding and messaging?

2. “I just need my website redesigned.” Sure, a website’s design may be tired and outdated. However, the more important question is: How is the site performing for you? Are visitors converting to leads? Does the content reflect your current positioning? Have you optimized your landing pages? Have you integrated social media into your site beyond just sticking up some icons on your homepage? What about your offline brand — does it need sprucing up, too?

3. Branding a la carte. Your brand isn’t just a logo or a website; it’s the sum total of positioning, messaging, awareness, visual identity and the communications architecture of a company. Be sure to choose an agency that understands this core principle and can skillfully build and integrate a brand across multiple disciplines from inbound to outbound marketing and offline to digital. If you take the a la carte approach, you’ll pay for it later in a splintered or fragmented brand.

4. Wow, what a pitch! Sure, the pitch is important. But are the people pitching going to be doing the work after the contract is signed?  In many agencies, the senior-level deal closers move on to close other deals, while the junior account people step up to do the work. See rule #1.

5.  The people you will work with don’t have a clue about your business. Be sure that the people you’ll work with at the agency have at least a solid understanding and interest in your business from the start. If they’ve done their homework, it will show in the questions they ask and the presentation they give. If not, move on to the next candidate.

6. I really, really like them. Chemistry is important. But don’t pick an agency because your friend works there or just because they just make you feel good. Choose the best agency partner because they have the best experience for the job and can deliver results for your company.

7. Don’t tell the agency candidates your budget. If you don’t at least give the agencies competing for your business a ballpark idea of your budget, they’ll probably come back with very different, hard-to-compare proposals. Why not set clear, upfront expectations of what you’re looking for? That way, when the proposals roll in, you can focus on choosing the right partner, not just the lowest bidder?

8. Set impossible deadlines. Tell the prospective agency that you want a web redesign in a month or a direct mail campaign printed and in the mail in 3-5 business days and you’re probably setting the project up for failure or less-than-stellar performance. Why not try to speed up corporate approvals while putting specific deliverables on parallel tracks? You might be surprised how quickly you can get projects delivered – on time and on budget!

9. They don’t speak the language of business. The world is full of creative people who like to design, write, shoot videos or get PR hits, but many of these people don’t really consider themselves business people. Nothing wrong with that if all you want is just pretty good creative, nothing more. But if you want marketing that truly delivers, choose the agency that talks business – the one that talks about building messaging that resonates with buyers or creating campaigns that drive more leads and increase sales.

10. I can just hire an intern to do social media. To do social media right, you should hire an agency that knows how to integrate social and track results as part of your integrated marketing campaigns. Social doesn’t belong as a siloed sideline; it should be part of the mix.

11.  We can do content in-house. Good content is critical to your branding. If you don’t have good writers and content creators in-house, then trust outside experts to help you get the message right. Good agency content marketers and copywriters know how to develop content for different target audiences and different communications. Without good content to support the entire buying cycle, all you have is well-designed brochure or a good-looking shell of a website.

12. Sorry, but we don’t do X. A good agency may not specialize in SEO or PR, for example, but more often than not they will have a healthy Rolodex of strategic partners and colleagues they can call on to help you create a video, get press or help you build a new mobile app. Do they have a can-do spirit or do they just care about what they want to do – not about meeting your overall marketing needs?

13. But the agency is a big-name agency that has won lots of awards. But will you be an important account to them – or merely a minor account that will be shuffled off to the most junior account team that takes three times longer to do half-baked work? Think twice before you choose based on name alone.  And, if they talk more about their awards than how they’ve helped clients achieve their business goals, then they probably can’t help you achieve yours either.  Move on.

It’s not easy choosing an integrated marketing agency for your company. But if you know the pitfalls, you’ll have a much better chance of selecting the right partner for your organization.

What are your personal rules of how NOT to choose an agency partner? Please share your experiences and tips in the comments below.