Every company has different marketing objectives each year. Products and services change. Competition changes. Consumer needs evolve. Depending on the size and scale of your marketing team, marketing objectives must be prioritized and budgets allocated accordingly. For the next year, is your company clear on its top priorities for marketing? More importantly, is your company making marketing through social media a company priority?
Placing the Duties of Marketing Through Social Media in the Wrong Hands
If you are a part of senior leadership at your company, we certainly hope you’ve graduated from the common mistake of placing an inexperienced staff in charge of your brand’s social media marketing. Business social media and personal social media are completely different in so many ways. Would you ever trust your company’s entire operations on an employee whose only prior experience was being an assistant manager at the gas station? Certainly not. Then why would you trust your entire brand story and sales funnel to someone whose only prior experience was being a barista at a coffee shop? Sounds ridiculous, but for one reason or another, social media marketing sometimes gets relegated to the wrong people at well-funded startups and mid-market companies.
We decided to make light of this epidemic in a video we shot to explain the services of our social media agency entitled, “SocialSuckitis.” This video was our way of showing the type of content we like to create to tell brand stories, and at the same time, provide a satirical warning to companies that don’t take marketing through social media as seriously as they should. We hope you enjoy our company video!
Social media is only a marketing tool. It is only as effective as the team behind the scenes managing that tool. Social media requires a team of true business strategists, creative marketers and talented content creators. Smart brands understand that social media can be an extremely powerful tool, but only when supported by the appropriate resources at a company.
What Are Your Company’s Top Marketing Objectives?
When marketers were asked about the top marketing objectives at their company by Hubspot, the below data was compiled. Does your marketing department have similar priorities?
With the right creative team to produce professionally-produced video stories combined with the right social media team to optimize its delivery, each and every one of the above marketing objectives can be fulfilled. Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these marketing objectives:
Marketing Objective #1: Converting Contacts / Leads into Purchasing Customers
Depending on the size of the budget allocated to marketing through social media, your social streams could have anywhere from a monthly video to a weekly video. Obviously the more consistently a company can release high-quality video content, the stronger the community it will build. There is no better way to maintain an ongoing relationship with your leads than through offering them continual education such as new product videos, user experience videos, customer testimonials and more sophisticated scripted brand entertainment. Maintaining a certain level of brand awareness at all times is paramount to converting leads into revenue.
Marketing Objective #2: Growing Traffic to Your Company Website
How often have your personal purchases been driven by a friend or colleague who’s made a recommendation in person or a mention in one of their Facebook posts? You’re always more prone to trust someone you’ve built a relationship with. Social media relationships with brands work in much the same way. Over a period of time, companies develop trust and credibility by creating and promoting consistent content which truly respects its audience. When this content is combined with a strategy to drive the most interested people to strategic pages of a brand’s website, amazing results occur. Social media has and will always be a major traffic driver to company websites. Higher conversion rates depend on how committed the brand is to building a relationship prior to that click to their website.
Marketing Objective #3: Increasing Revenue Derived From Existing Customers
Profiling users on social media has gotten so good. There is no better way to remarket to those customers that have already purchased from your brand than marketing through social media. This type of remarketing system does however require true social media expertise. When the storytelling strategy is in sync with the right tracking systems, increasing revenue from existing customers becomes a well-oiled machine.
Marketing Objective #4: Proving the ROI of Marketing Through Social Media
Is marketing ROI a big mystery at your organization? Unlike many traditional marketing activities such as industry tradeshows, print, broadcast and direct mailers, proving ROI with marketing through social media is much clearer. Both video and social media marketing is steeped in rich data collection. From tracking which people are the most interested in your products to tracking all the way to conversion, huge amounts of data is being collected that can inform on your present and future efforts. This level of data collection tells a story in and of itself. Why keep marketing the same way time and time again and expect a different result. Social data encourages an iterative process of optimizing directions that are working and eliminating those that do not.
Marketing Objective #5: Empower Sales by Marketing Through Social Media
It is common for marketing departments and sales departments to never be on the same page. The blame game ensues. Marketing blames sales for their inability to convert the leads being sent into sales. On the flip side, sales blames marketing for sending them the wrong type of leads that are cold upon arrival, making them difficult to efficiently convert. Again, investment in quality video storytelling and a social media strategy sends not only qualified leads down your sales funnel, but sends leads that have been warmed up and informed by the educational strategy. There is nothing more gratifying then discovering harmony between a brand’s marketing and sales departments.
Marketing Objective #6: Reducing the Cost of Leads and Customer Acquisitions
If you’re like many companies that have dedicated a large portion of their digital marketing spend on Google AdWords campaigns, you know quite well how expensive it can be to acquire customers through this strategy alone. Regardless of the high-cost of your current keyword campaigns, your leadership might be apprehensive about reallocating some of those dollars towards content creation and social media management services. Many brands have become dependent on this paid web traffic to sustain its present level of conversion, regardless how low the ROI actually is. Depending on the company, industry and the type of products, it may be financially advantageous to take a video and social media marketing strategy and integrate it with your AdWords strategy. In our experience, combining forces increases conversion overall through an effective cycle of remarketing from one strategy to the other and vice-versa.
How to Begin the Process of Marketing Through Social Media
Building the right social media community to support your brand on social media requires the production of relevant, high-quality video stories and a professional management team to optimize content distribution.
Below is a link to our wide array of content creation and social media management solutions. Select the plan which best describes the marketing objectives of your company and we’ll schedule a phone conversation to explore whether we are a good fit for your brand.
