Mediaboss Marketing

Kristina: Kristina: What do brands need to change about their current presence on social media?

Ben Cockerell, Director, Global Marketing, Crimson Hexagon: For brands, social media should be used proactively - not just reactively. They often use social to respond to things like customer complaints, which is great, but there are ways for them to get ahead of these issues. Is there an incoming complaint that's starting to become repetitive? For example, airlines often see this with social media posts about delayed or missed connecting flights. By analyzing social media posts, they are able to identify a pattern - is it a certain airport where flights are getting delayed most? Or a specific plane? These conversations can then trickle down throughout the organization, from customer support to engineers, pilots, marketing, and so on. When social insights permeate an organization, crossing into different functions, that's when it's most effective.

Kristina: 4. What are your top 3 tips for brands to better use social media data to shape their ad strategies?

Ben: 1. Start every campaign with a question. Just like any research project, it's important to know what you want to get out of the data before you start running any analysis. Otherwise, you're left with a huge data set that will just leave you perplexed (and completely overwhelmed). 2. Don't just use the data to determine if your campaign was successful - make sure you apply it to future campaigns as well. Be sure to identify trends and patterns to improve not only your targeting, but your messaging as well. 3. Use the agile marketing method. Today, marketing is all about being in the present. With social media, consumers can react to campaigns instantly - meaning your ads can be rejected and ridiculed rather quickly if they're a flop. Instead, build campaigns with smaller, strategic goals that you can easily update.

Tags: advertising, Crimson Hexagon, social marketing, social marketing tips, social marketing trends

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Top 3 tips to a better social strategy - BizReport

Is social media marketing really dead? Thats one question business owners, marketers and leaders are currently struggling to answer. According to recent reports, social media platforms are losing their momentum, with the likes of Snapchat losing subscribers and Twitter losing the conversation appeal. This, in turn, is affecting the impact social media marketing has on business.

In a study of B2B buyers, only 19 percentof those surveyed said that social media played an important role in their discovery process. This report, among others from industry influencers, has sparked a new concern about the future of social media in business. But dont be alarmed.

Related: Social Media Matters in Marketing for More Reasons Than You Think

In reality, social media isnt dead. In fact, its not dying anytime soon. It is very much alive and remains an effective tool for marketing your products and services. This is why 78 percentof companies have dedicated entire teams to social media and others have reported more than a 700 percentincrease in social media sales from their efforts on social media.

If you are thinking of boycotting social media in your marketing efforts, think again.

Its undeniable the way we use social media today isnt the way we used it a few years ago. Due to the fast advancement of technology, more people are now online, and the amount of information available is enormous. Users, bombarded with a never-ending flow of information on different social platforms, can only read a fraction of it.

As a business owner, you have a challenge to reach your audience in the midst of all this information. To succeed, you need to:

Know where your readers like to hang out

Understand the type of content they like

Strategically plan your content based on that information

Its the only way you can guarantee readership and an increase in customer base. Thats why a company likeTED, known for its TED Talks, is winning on social media. The company has managed to leverage its content by turning those long videos into short, easily shareable viral videos. They found their winning formula because they understood what their users were looking for.

To understand why you shouldnt give up on social media, you need to understand how it works today. Some time ago, a business could easily go on social media to sell its products and services directly to consumers. Today, the landscape has changed.

People no longer appreciate direct sales on social media. They want to be enticed with interesting information or videos before they decide whether or not to buy what youre selling. Thats why an informational blog post will be shared more times than an advertisement. By posting easily shareable content like videos, images or posts, you will:

Achieve better online visibility

Improve your credibility as an expert

Increase your customer base

Related: 4 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Creativity Game

Through the data you are able to gather on different social media platforms, you can better understand the demographics of your followers, their preferences and their thoughts on your brand. This information can help you generate targeted content that will lead to improved readership, an expanded follower base and increased service inquiries -- all of which are good for business.

In addition to providing valuable insights, social media is a great tool for converting leads to customers. When you respond to their concerns or make them feel special in some way, they regard your company as more desirable. They also become more loyal to the brand and are more likely to recommend your products or services to friends.

Through personalized customer service and regular interaction on social media, your business can gain new customers and retain existing ones very easily.

In todays digital era, the importance of website traffic cannot be overstated. More traffic to your website means more subscribers and more potential customers. You can later convert these subscribers into buyers, increasing sales.

While website traffic can come from different sources, including organic search and links from other websites, social media is a great component of it. When you post clickable content, people share it among their circles, and the cycle can be endless.

At a time when more people are online at one particular time, you can expect increased website traffic from increased social media presence.

Related: 3 Ways to Master Social Media Content Marketing

The reality is social media isnt dead. Is just changing and requires businesses to adjust accordingly. You have a shorter time than before to reach your audience, communicate your intention and draw them to whatever service you provide.

According to research, only 16 percentof your Facebook followers are able to see your company posts organically. And on Twitter, only 10 percentof your followers can see your tweet when its posted. To reach the right users, you need to make sure your content can be found. You can achieve that by sharing the right content at the right time and on the right platform.

Ayodeji Onibalusi is an inbound marketing expert and advocate of high quality digitalmarketing. He has over five years of experience helping companies create winning contentdistribution strategies. You can check out his company...

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Don't Believe Those Reports You're Hearing About the Death of Social-Media Marketing - Entrepreneur

Cheryl Cook's Social Scene

Dell EMC partner marketing chief Cheryl Cook is keeping her foot firmly on the accelerator as she brings new tools and strategies designed to make partners' marketing efforts simple and seamless to a growing number of solution providers.

Cook launched Dell EMC's Partner Marketing Institute little more than a month ago, and so far it has attracted nearly 2,000 solution providers. The turnkey site gives partners access to a full suite of marketing resources and training and provides tools to seamlessly make their marketing efforts an extension of Dell EMC's. With that, Cook is building plans to help partners maximize the effectiveness of their MDF dollars and go-to-market strategies.

Ultimately, Dell EMC wants partner marketing to become self-service for solution providers who can turn to the vendor for collateral materials and resources to carry out unified, comprehensive social media marketing campaigns.

Having Dell EMC's social media acumen encapsulated for easy digestion by partners means those partners will come to rely less on Dell EMC for lead generation, instead becoming self-sufficient while using a standard, Dell EMC-sourced approach.

What follows is an edited excerpt from CRN's conversation with Cook.

Read more:
CRN Exclusive: Dell EMC's Cook On Partner Marketing Momentum, Social Media Traction And New MDF Initiatives - CRN

Lithium Social Media Management Now Supports the Most Social Ad Integrations in the Market, Adds New Listening and Competitive Benchmarking Capabilities

Lithium Technologies announced a series of significant enhancements to its social media management platform. Lithium Social Media Management will now integrate with ad automation tools Brand Networks, Nanigans, and Smartly.io to give marketers the ability to manage paid and organic content together. Additionally, the social media platform also announced integration with social listening platforms Netbase and Synthesio that empower marketers to make intelligent decisions; all-new competitive benchmarking; and sophisticated mobile publishing capabilities for Android and iOS.

Lithium was recently listed as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017. Currently, Lithium is expanding its next-generation product to help brands centralize and scale their social marketing and engagement efforts.

Currently, Lithium has a massive digital footprint with approximately 480 million new digital interactions analyzed daily, 100 million monthly visitors across its online communities, and 850 million online profiles scored through Klout.

Rob Tarkoff, President, and CEO at Lithium, said, Marketers know they must provide better digital customer experiences, but its becoming more and more challenging with the multitude of digital channels, the fragmentation of tools to manage those channels, and increased noise from competitors. With this next generation of our social media management product, we want to make things simple for brands to manage digital at scale within one unified, integrated platform.

Integration with Paid Ad Automation Tools Offers Marketers More Choice

Lithium now supports the most ads integrations on the market, giving marketers more choice in their preferred ads partner and enabling them to schedule and analyze paid ads alongside organic content. Ads integrations with paid ad automation tools Brand Networks, Nanigans, and Smartly will make social media analytics more refined.

Todd Taplin, CEO of Brand Networks, mentioned, Our customers have longed for a partnership that replaces the siloed approach to data gathering with a holistic social media strategy. Interoperability like this is key to achieving next-level efficiency and performance. Our best-in-class social advertising platform, paired with Lithiums engagement platform, will streamline how marketers drive real business results through social.

Peter Caswell, CEO, NetBase, adds, Top brands and agencies deliver superior customer experiences by listening to their customersacross channels globallyand acting on it in real time. Our strategic partnership with Lithium marries leading intelligence capabilities with in-the-moment, strategic action, that drives immediate impact to the business.

By integrating with social listening and intelligence platforms, Netbase and Synthesio, Lithium allows marketers to sharpen their campaign strategies, act upon trends and intelligence, and better manage brand health. Moreover, marketers will be able to access the Social Impact Ranking a new competitive benchmarking capability, to measure how their campaigns stack up against competitors in areas like influence, sentiment, audience and more.

Comprising social media management and communities, the Lithium engagement platform enables brands to manage multiple digital touch-points, facilitate millions of conversations, and drive smarter decisions through data connecting customers, content, nd conversations at the right digital moment.

See the original post:
Lithium Unifies Paid, Earned and Owned Social On a Single Marketing Platform - MarTech Series (press release) (blog)

Every organization needs a social presence, right? Yet, because a significant number of SME owners struggle to glean quantifiable results or sales from their social media efforts, it must be asked if it is really worth the effort for them.

While many spend significant time and money to have staff or outside agencies maintain their social media accounts hoping to lure new clients, theyre missing the fact that selling on social media channels doesnt work. Only about 10 per cent of the clients of my digital-marketing firm actually manage to convert leads into sales through social media.

The exception is large brands that have huge media followings (Apple, Coke), companies that started, target and thrive on social media (Luxyhair.com is another of many examples), and specialized service providers such as consultants or event organizers. In the latter case, they might use social media channels to promote a speaking engagement or a new book.

Unless your business falls into one of those categories, stop trying to sell. Yes, SMEs need to maintain a social media presence because that is now the go-to communication platform for clients across age demographics. But social media as a tool for building brand recognition is only one tool. Use it that way but broaden your wider marketing strategy to include such other tactics as advertising, public relations, content marketing, speaking engagements and other initiatives that can help boost your bottom line.

Remember that its also highly transactional, in the sense that no organization owns the followers they maintain on their preferred social media channels they rent them. Whether paying for Facebook ads to promote your business or sharing links to articles, youre paying people in some way to engage with your brand. Those rented followers will come and go, and theyll only go faster if you try to work a hard sales pitch.

Why? We know there are four stages of a customer life cycle:

Social media is best utilized during the contact and care stages, but SME owners and their CFOs still want to use social to convert a follower to a sale. Thats like painting with a hammer. You can do it sort of but it obviously makes far more sense to use a brush. This is particularly true when attempting to engage cynical Generation X clients or advertising-weary Millennials and Generation Zs.

They dont want to be sold to. They want to hear your story. They want to know whether you share the same values and have a solution to a challenge they may be experiencing. They want to know how you can improve their lives in some way.

No matter their age, virtually anyone who engages with your brand on social media wants to get to know you. So, dont expect them to buy expect to build a relationship over time.

For existing customers, surprise and delight them with exclusive access to your products, promotions or information they may find relevant.

If youre an actuary, for example, tell stories of how quitting smoking will lengthen your life expectancy. Explain how your job is crucial in deciding pension benefits. Talk about trends in the industry and how they might impact your target audience. But never try to sell.

In addition, if your organization gives back to the community or supports initiatives that align with your brand objectives, tell your followers about all the wonderful things youre doing for others.

Just dont expect them to buy. That will only happen when you establish a level of trust with them. Sometimes that happens right away. Or it can take months, even years.

The hard sell has (thankfully) fallen on hard times. This is the hard truth of marketing in the social media era.

Dave Burnett is CEO of AOK Marketing, a Toronto-based firm that helps traditional offline businesses get discovered online.

Twitter.com/aokmarketing

Original post:
Stop selling: The hard truth of social media marketing - Financial Post