By John Oxford
ONWith an important topic mentioned in a recent column as well as our latest podcast taking on a decent drag, this week we decided to dig a little deeper into what I call the social media imperative. You have to give people what they want right?
First of all, the social media imperative is threefold. First, it’s the challenge of what comes first, content or audience. Much like the old chicken versus the egg, should your energies as a marketer be focused on building a following or building content? One could argue that without an audience, the world’s greatest content is useless, much like a tree falling into the forest without anyone hearing it. (We are two to two today in terms of historical “imagery”.)
However, if we stick to another old adage, “Nothing kills a bad product like good marketing,” then showing an audience an empty cabinet of content is just as useless. The answer – duh – is both. You should be creating your content at the same time that you are building your audience as they go hand in hand. However, I would suggest that you don’t build the plane on-the-fly and at least prepare some decent content as you attract an audience to your social media channels. There is no official strategy for getting started on social media, but at this point it is imperative that you not only be on social channels but use them extensively as the top marketing delivery route.
The second part of the social media imperative is the challenge of building a social community. The strength of a strong and large social media following can be a powerful communication tool that goes beyond branding or product conversion options, even if they are great. Being able to communicate with large numbers of your customers, followers, and other interested viewers, if done correctly, can replace your reliance on news media to place your messages and announcements. It can also replace certain traditional advertisements, which translates into a cost saving.
For example, many news outlets no longer receive a press release promoting bank employees, recognition from nonprofit services, or other “good” stories from your bank. In some cases, we bank marketers run an ad showing a new employee with his arms crossed in front of the bank to save the world. And by some cases, we mean most of the time.
With a decent social following, you can bypass traditional media and promote this new big hitch without wasting your time putting the media on phone calls and emails that protocol means you often have to do even though you’re deep in the Inside know they don’t work to tell your story. In many cases, you can find the exact audience for your message while controlling the medium and engagement. In addition, unlike a print ad, you can get data on how well your press release or social media advertisement was doing, giving you some kind of ROI to prove the value of social media as a preferred marketing and PR channel.
That brings us to the third part of the social media imperative: depth of followers. If audience was key to social media success, then you can just buy an audience from bots or some other service that allows for an artificial increase in numbers. Building a really deep, engaged audience is hard work. It includes campaigns to track your brand, consistent efforts to post relevant content, nurture interactions, as well as track your post impressions, views, engagements, likes, and other vanity metrics that you believe will be used to define social success -Media strategy are relevant to your brand.
While it looks very nice to have 100,000 or more followers on your social media channels, it would be much better to have 10,000 followers if those followers aren’t engaging as a customer, prospect, influencer, or media company and reinforcing your message. That said, getting your community as big as possible is still a great idea, as long as it’s a real audience, and not bots or paid followers.
With the advent of mass intimacy in consuming content on social media, you can tackle the challenges we bank marketers face by building your content and audience strategy for collaboration, building a large social media community of followers, and those followers make face to a committed audience – what I call the social media imperative.
To learn more about our discussion on the social media bid, how targeting can be overrated now, and our preview discussion of the Super Bowl commercials, check out this week’s Marketing Money Podcast with Josh Mabus of the Mabus Agency and me.
John Oxford, Director of Marketing at Renasant Bank, and Josh Mabus, President of the Mabus Agency, are co-hosts of the Marketing Money Podcast.