With summer nearly over, you're probably either congratulating yourself on achieving your ambitious fitness, nutrition, or other "get fit/hot for summer"-related goals or promising to re-commit to one last-ditch effort before you're stuck back indoors and headed for the food-filled holiday season. Just as you're evaluating your summer fitness goals, it's also time to evaluate your summer social marketing goals. While you may fall into the "re-commitment" category, there's still time for one last push to get those social marketing campaigns into shape. The CMO Survey found, on a scale of 1-7, only 9.9 percent of respondents believe that social media is "very integrated" with the firm's marketing strategy, while 15.2 percent believe it is not integrated at all[1]. Additionally, less than a quarter of marketers integrate their marketing campaigns across multiple channels, particularly social media[2].
When social media marketing is siloed from other campaigns, companies miss a prime opportunity to unify brand messaging and campaign creative among highly targeted and engaged audiences, as well as forgo the chance to leverage customer relationships across other channels, such as email or mobile. For example, by using integrated marketing analytics, marketers are able to identify attributes of the most active, engaged, or high-value audiences. Then, using look-alike modeling, they can reach similar audiences via email or advertising. Without this cross-channel approach, marketers risk isolating their audiences.
Below are key strategies for integrating social media within existing marketing campaigns to garner the most value from social:
Break Down Team Silos
Organizations inevitably have specific channel experts throughout their marketing departments. By sharing best practices, ongoing strategies, and new initiatives, teams can begin crafting true cross-channel strategies that weave social media through an entire marketing campaign and improve social interactions. Even if the channels don't directly include social, it's important to identify common goals to ensure all the brand's channels are mutually supportive.
To help bridge potential gaps across the organization, global media company Condé Nast has created a "social analyst" role to connect social data to other digital data sources and share multi-channel performance reports among all impacted departments and executives. Additionally, Adobe created the Social Center of Excellence in 2009, tasked with providing resources and training to a variety of business units that are deploying social media to increase efficiency, disseminate best practices, and gain a holistic view of social marketing performance across the business.
Build a Unified Customer Profile
A unified customer profile, sometimes called a master marketing profile, is a comprehensive, 360-degree view of a customer that includes both anonymous and authenticated data from multiple channels. It allows marketers to improve content delivery across channels, including social platforms, owned site, email, and advertising, using immediately actionable insights built from a deep understanding of the customer across demographic, behavioral, interaction and transactional data.
When talking about customer data, the most important thing brands need to do is establish trust with their audiences and ensure they're following the Terms of Service established by each social network. For instance, Facebook has access to a wealth of customer information, but if customers don't trust the type of data marketers are collecting and how they're using it, this type of cross-channel engagement can backfire. If brands are smart about privacy and customers realize brands are using the information they've gathered to deliver more customized offers and information across channels, they may be more likely to engage with the brand.
Less is More
Individual groups within organizations often want to create multiple brand pages for their products and services that span as many social networks as possible. However, these broad social strategies can create a number of issues: they can fragment an audience more than is necessary or beneficial, create inefficiencies in solving customer problems, and produce more work for the social marketer with an uncertain ROI. By choosing specific networks that best fit their customer base and business, marketers can focus on building meaningful relationships within those networks through unique, customized content.
Though Black Entertainment Television (BET) uses several social platforms to promote shows and live events, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare, Senior Director of Social Media JP Lespinasse has found that Twitter currently drives the most content engagement and audience insights for the network. It has been particularly useful in surfacing unexpected audience interests his team can leverage to optimize promotional strategy and drive viewership for the network's hit new show Being Mary Jane. Part of Lespinasse's strategy on Twitter has been to reduce the high number of Twitter accounts BET manages and roll those audiences up into a more defined group of interest-based accounts, such as BET Gospel.
Create Consistent, Cross-Channel Micro Interactions
As the success of Twitter, Vine, and Instagram have shown, bite-sized nuggets of entertainment and information perform very well on social platforms. If marketers can't capture their attention and communicate messaging via a picture, short post, or quick video, consumers will move on to the next post of interest. While it's important for marketers to break down content into bite-sized social posts, it's just as important that they sustain a social-friendly bridge to other channels.
Marketers can't expect a customer to go through a long, unrelated sign-up process or download at a website just because they clicked through a social post. In optimizing its social content and promotional strategies for Being Mary Jane based on social listening data, BET ensured its viewers had a consistent content experience across channels. When social listening insights revealed that Avery, a supporting character, was generating a surprisingly high level of conversation and engagement on Twitter, BET adjusted its strategy to incorporate Avery into more social memes as well as digital and TV advertising clips. The strategy paid off, as BET was able to demonstrate a definitive correlation between heightened social media activity and viewership for the first time.
Time for Change
It's not too late to start your summer fitness plan for integrating social into your organization's overall marketing initiatives. What are you doing right? And where do you see room for improvement? Start by bringing these observations to the table within your team - and others within the marketing organization (remember, break down silos!) - and start an open dialogue to create alignment. These shifts don't happen overnight, but you'll start to notice internal and external performance improvements that should help keep everyone motivated.
[1] Data from The CMO Survey's 2014 survey, "Who Has the Biggest Marketing Budgets?"
[2] Data from an Adobe/Econsultancy study, Channels in Concert.