Mediaboss Marketing

Social media has come of age, but its troublesome teen years have forced platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to introduce their own rules and best practices around marketing. Have these stipulations killed the original fun that came from interacting with new (and sometimes famous people) in real-time digitally from all around the world?

Ahead of the big event later this month, The Drums Social Buzz Awards jury for 2019 came together to discuss the evolution of social media, as well as why (and how) the fun element has diminished over the years.

Questions remained about what this means for brands using the likes of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to generate fame too.

The group, which included brand and agency-side marketers, focused on the impact burgeoning Chinese app TikTok is making in generating engaging content to grow its audience.

Im watching the kids, said Kinda Jackson, managing director of digital for Brands2Life as to how she follows new trends.

When I watch how my two boys are using TikTok and [how they] follow their friends on social, [I learn] from them very simply how to tap into trends and memes and create content around what they are currently talking about," she explained, highlighting brands like Wendy's and Fortnite as ones that have been using TikTok in smart ways.

Picking up on engagement, and how brands can still tap into trends and conversations online, UKTV's director of communications Justine Bower underscored the importance of social listening.

Thats what TikTok is there for, its there to create and for the audience to have fun they are now creators," she added.

Immediate Future chief executive Katy Howell argued that social media has become boring with the industry seemingly forgetting the traditional rules of advertising and marketing still apply in this space too.

We dont entertain enough, she stated. We put out too much business as usual content. Social is so boring; its become mundane and most brands tick a box with someone putting out something every day.

"There is so much diarrhea out there. But the brands who are kicking it are the ones that are dealing with emotions and portraying something that is stand out or maybe risqu and they are tapping into older good quality marketing techniques instead of churning content.

Pointing out that creativity is not restricted by the rules set by each platform, but instead enhanced by the work that goes into working around those restrictions, was Bodgana Butnar, experience strategy lead for Karmarama.

We have to figure out how we want to deliver on the brand objectives that we have and have fun while doing it.

"If we are sticking with [only the ideas] the creators of social media give us then we will forever end up in the same place we are going to have to stop the deluge of brand communications that comes on those platforms by forming gateways where these are the formats, and if you cannot deliver across those formats, thats it, youre done."

Elsewhere, Rebecca Holmes, director of social media at Splendid argued that planning around business objectives (rather than finding ways to surprise audiences) was another factor taking some of the joy out of social media marketing.

Though she did admit those objectives were clearly important, she said it was in surprising audiences that brands would be able to cut through the noise.

If you look at the brands that cut through this year... they have made cut through because they've surprised people with their messaging which audiences didnt expect," she said.

"Its not about how to use native functionality on Instagram, its about surprising someone which is what it ultimately comes down to," she added. "And yes all of those things feed into it but we are [too] focused on all of that strategic laddering up to allow goals and objectives."

Adding that the two factors should not be seen as being mutually exclusive, Saskia Jones, data strategy director for BBH said she believes that the fundamentals of marketing should be adhered to but that the search for fame should be the desired outcome from social media activity.

If you go after fame then all of your other objectives will follow from awareness and profit, all of that will follow. Weve forgotten that, she claimed.

When I first started in social media and paid social wasnt a thing, you had to work hard to entertain people. As soon as you put paid behind it, people got bored and lazy because they could guarantee that a million people would see their post. But the platforms themselves have got us to a place where we are so adherent to their best practice that everything looks the same and everything is wallpaper.

Jones adds that she battles against media agencies who wish to follow platform format guidelines as breaking the rules can make a difference in successfully engaging an audience.

You can ladder-up and drive business results, but it is going back to those fundamentals. For so long social has been a thing we have treated as having different rules but all the best pieces of work we see on social adhere to everything we knew about marketing," she continued. "If it cuts through, its different and distinctive... then it doesnt matter what platform we are talking about."

As to how creativity can breathe on social under platform rules, Karmarama's Butnar believes it is easier to be creative as a result of such marketing restrictions. She also said platforms such as Facebook can't be blamed for clients' wishes to follow them.

"Everybody is trying to get to the same place, but [social networks] must have best practices. If [as advertisers] we're thinking that those rules don't allow us to be creative, then were wrong."

Howell says that the quality of the content being produced is the fundamental ingredient towards success, and that it doesnt need to be complex.

Print advertising hasnt changed much over the last 50 years yet you have some absolutely outstanding examples there," she said, highlighting that skills like copywriting and art direction were being lost in the "rush" to get everything out on social.

"We've gotten lazy we have this format, this carousel, we want to hack this channel but the reality is the fundamental bit is getting your copy right. A one-liner works brilliantly for that market and audience, and your visuals are impactful whether they are six seconds or seven minutes long.

Finally, Deborah King, head of paid social at Essence revealed she feels frustrated when deliberating over whether social is still fun. Advertisers, she argued, need to go back to basics in terms of who the target audience is and reaching them through quality advertising creative ideas.

Our team is always looking at how our best practice isnt killing the creativity but enhancing it and we are getting to the point now where we have people who understand the craft of creative and content but also the algorithms," she said.

So social media can remain a fun environment despite the imposed restrictions brands face when utilising the platforms, it seems.

It just takes good old-fashioned ideas and a strong tone of voice in order to form a community that wants to be surprised and amused by a brands work.

The Drum's Social Buzz Awards winners will be announced on Wednesday 27 November at The Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square, London.

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Social Buzz: why isn't social media marketing as much fun as it used to be? - The Drum

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful platforms. It provides high brand exposure. There are more than 3.5 billion people available on social media platforms. With the help of social media, businesses are gaining great opportunities to easily communicate with people and create brand awareness, promote products and services in an effective and efficient manner.

One of the great results of social media marketing is that you can easily reach the audience you are targeting. Keep communicating with them, give the response to their doubts and issues swiftly and keep monitoring the social media pages of your competition.

By Piyush Jain, CEO of Simpalm

Here are the top 5 positive effects of social media marketing for business-

1 Multiple Touchpoints Between Customer and Business

Social media is the main platform to interact with customers and gain attention. Research shows that there are 42% of people who expect to get a response through social media within sixty minutes. There are different social media platforms available in the market. These platforms include Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram. These are very powerful media channels to engage and easily communicate with your customers.

Such multiple touchpoint customer service plays a very important role in business growth.

2 Reach A Bigger Audience

According to marketing experts, social media has completely changed the way business works. Social media has increased business traffic by 75%. It is one of the best platforms to improve brand awareness and stay connected with customers.

Social media is one of the most important sources for people to know more about business and its workings. They get knowledge about the business's latest products and services, promotions, deals, etc.

With the help of a social media platform, a business can easily share its business news. They can post the photos of their workings and share products and services which they provide. This will help to build customer trust and gain more potential and permanent customers.

By Micah Solomon, Customer service expert

3 Effect Brand Awareness

Social media platforms provide wide opportunities for brands to show some creativity to others by promoting and running social media campaigns. It is one of the best tactics to engage with the audience, grab their attention and improve brand awareness.

One cannot build a brand easily. It takes a long time, dedication, and constantly proving the customers that they can trust in our brand. There are many tactics which are going to help you build brand awareness by using social media platforms.

Social media will allow you to connect with a large number of an audience where you can create good and attractive content, use of attractive infographics and good quality images will gradually help your brand to build in the eyes of the audience.

4 Improves Customer Service

We have seen so many times customer posting complaints and feedback on social media platforms. This has completely changed the face of customer service. Nowadays, people prefer to post on social media instead of talking at call centers. People are posting problems on social media to gain instant attention from the brand.

Brands are getting instant feedback about their work and services on social media platforms. This helps brands to improve their services instantly. Every comment, post related to the services are helping in brand development. Brands are also working hard to get good comments and positive replies from their customers on social media. This is helping them to get more customers.

Business should always try to provide good quality of services to its customers and never take their complaints and feedback for granted. They can make you or break you.

By Blake Morgen, Customer Experience Consultant

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How Social Media Marketing is Impacting Your Business - Promotion World

I recently had a phone conversation with one of the worlds most influential CMOs to get her views on modern marketing. We discussed social impact responsibility, fighting slavery in the supply chain, expectations for CMOs, B2B vs. B2C marketing, and consumer data and trust. In her own words, heres how SAPs Alicia Tillman described a few of the top challenges and priorities that come with leading one of the worlds largest tech companies:

Alicia Tillman, CMO of SAP

On brands social impact responsibility:

When you work for a company the size of SAPover 100,000 employees, over 480,000 customers, with locations across 180 countries we are absolutely in a position to impact change. We have the resources needed to make a difference, and frankly weve always believed its our responsibility given the breadth and depth and the scale of our company to do so. When we look at whats driving todays headlinesclimate change, diversity and inclusionbusinesses predominantly hold the top spot in these headlines be it good or bad. And as the world around us transforms, and people are getting more comfortable with their voices, they are speaking out. They are calling for change, and they're looking for companies as one entity and their leaders to lead through that change.

We support and use the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals as the framework in which we look where SAP has the resources and technology to impact across the SDGs. Working to end poverty, protect the planet, fight diseases, ensure prosperitythis is what the UN SDGs are all about.

On fighting slavery in the supply chain:

If you think about one of the greatest issues in the supply chain, its forced labor conditions. This is modern slavery that is a problem created due to a lack of transparency in the supply chain.

Weve partnered with an organization called Made in a Free World. Made in a Free World is focused on understanding where in the world there are known forced labor conditions. If you look at our transactional data, we have an ability based on where transactions are happening to see if it is in one of these areas of the world that Made in the Free World is tracking.

So we now have an ability to say, Look, some of the subcontractors or suppliers that you are buying from, when we follow the transaction data, we are sensing that there is perhaps some activity happening in a part of the world where there are known forced labor conditions. So we now have an ability to bring them that transparency, which is one of the SDG goals that is there to help create fair and equal rights and equality from a labor conditions standpoint.

On ever-evolving expectations for CMOs:

Youre required to be so much more than a marketer; you really need to be a well-rounded business leader. You need to understand every facet of your company: what each functional area is working to achieve, how they measure success, what the future roadmap is for the company, the way in which your CEOin my case, I have two CEOs nowthe things that are important to them and the strategic counsel that you need to be in a position to be able to lend to them. And to take that role and truly lean in on the business strategy.

On B2B vs. B2C marketing:

Regardless of the job title you hold we're all human beings, and there is so much that has evolved today in what drives the buying processin particular, that emotion. We need to be able to understand the feelings of our customers so that we can ensure that we're both marketing in the way that's going to be emotionally relevant to them in addition to speaking to the overall value and challenges that our technology helps solve within a company. I think the lines are beginning to blur even more, and that will continue to happen. As marketers at a B2B company, which has historically only targeted a decision maker, if youre selling technology you only talked about the capabilities of a product. Its broadened so much, and the direction its mostly gone into is to think like a consumer and therefore market like a consumer because thats what the consumer population expects from us today.

On consumer data and trust:

We operate in a marketplace where there's a tremendous trust deficit. Consumer trust is at an all-time low, and a big part of what has driven that trust deficit is misuse of data. There are many companies over the past few years that have found themselves in headlines, due to this very fact, that they have misused data without the consent of their customers. We also have a tremendous gap in perception of experiences between consumers and brands they interact with.

There was a study by Gartner that showed 80% of CEOs believe that theyre delivering an exceptional customer experience whereas only 8% of consumers agree with that statement. So that has created a tremendous experiential gap that gives us an opportunity to look at data. When you read the research, consumers are more than willing to allow companies to use their data if it's going to enable the company to deliver them a better customer experience, but the customer has to be aware of that. Regulatory actions such as GDPR have enabled this privacy and regulation thats been needed, and weve adhered to the highest level possible. Transparency needs to always be priority No. 1. And that always needs to be grounded in building an incredibly solid infrastructure to enable the protection of the data and to use it in a way that enhances the experience of the customer.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Read Also:

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SAP CMO Alicia Tillman Talks Social Impact, B2B Marketing And The Trust Deficit - Forbes

Having been a CMO at multiple high-growth companies prior to my current role as CEO, I have refined a critical playbook to manage growth for customer acquisition and retention with use of data in our organizations. It is imperative that marketing organizations prioritize data as the core of any successful marketing acquisition or retention program for a company. I break this out into three critical elements attributes, access and visualization or what I call "data 360."

But before I dive into data 360, I want to share some thoughts on current marketing approaches that may lead to challenges with successful outcomes. Over the past several years, all the buzz has been on "MarTech." Great tools are available for email marketing, marketing automation, web analytics, digital advertising, social listening, social influence, SEO and more. The challenge is that none of these tools work well if you do not have data 360. Many marketers find they might select great tools but fall short on execution when they do not have the data needed for a successful outcome. At the core, a marketer should take an inside-out approach to get set up. Select the appropriate database, a CRM, as your single-truth data for customers and prospects. Organize this data. Identify gaps in your data. Close the gaps in your data. And now, we discuss data 360.

Data Attributes

As the first step to data 360, a marketer must identify a data schema appropriate for their marketing activities. A data schema could be the parent-child relationship of customer accounts to members all the way down to the profile data associated with an individual customer or prospect. Within this schema construct, it is important to account for metadata attributes such as geographic, demographic, marketing campaign and behavioral information and ongoing hygiene of data, such as the ability to manage duplicates, identify missing data or keep data up to date, especially the ability to append data ongoing with third-party validation. The data attributes should be managed by the marketing team no differently than the advertising campaign, identifying which data needs updates, appendices or cleansing.

Data Access

The next step for data 360 is to procure access to the database and data attributes to leverage effective distribution of the data to appropriate tools for channel management. These tools would be your email marketing/marketing automation platforms, CMS/e-commerce applications, digital advertising platforms such as AdWords, Facebook, etc., APIs for use with potential channel partners, etc. This is probably the most ignored step in the process. Many companies and marketing teams find really interesting marketing tools that promise the moon. Then, the thought is, "Wow, if I just had that tool, I could do XYZ." "XYZ" could be things like personalized targeted search by IP address with remarketing automation. Wow, that does sound cool! However, if you don't have data attributes and data access set up, none of these tools can be effective. In fact, email is the most effective to utilize with access. Marketing teams should be able to dip into highly segmented data and track results. Also, if you're interested in going multi-channel, direct to consumer, business or partners, data access is critical to make sure marketing data can be procured and properly distributed into each channel.

Data Visualization

The final step for data 360 is data visualization. So you have done all the hard work to create, manage and access the data. Now, it is time to view the data in a format that is easy to synthesize and make decisions. There are many data visualization platforms on the market. Many function the same but differ depending on how you want to manage the platform in your company. If marketing is going to manage this data, it will be critical that IT only needs to set up the ETL for data sets, and then marketing can create any report possible. At one of our businesses, we have created a waterfall of KPIs that go through the customer journey, from web traffic to clicks to conversion to renewals. Flying the plane will never be easier than when all the data is at your fingertips to synthesize.

In the end, the data 360 method enables marketing teams to be more effective not only with tactics but also with prioritization. When teams can create limitless campaigns with a full line of sight to ROI for each tactic, the priorities are very clear. In addition, monitoring the organization's marketing data further enables a team to find opportunities and further synthesize priorities.

Originally posted here:
How Your Marketing Team Can Make The Most Of Data - Forbes

There are only 43 days left until Christmas, and 49 days left in this year. No doubt you have a range of tasks you want to get done before the holiday season is in full swing, and then another list of ideas for your 2020 planning - but getting to them can be tough, especially with the 'always on'focus of the modern business approach.

To help with this, the team from NetCredit have put together a guide on how to actually get started on those tasks that you really should get to, along with some tips on how to avoid distractions and boost your productivity.

And while these tips are not digital marketing-specific, all social media and digital marketing managers are spinning a lot of plates -and as such, these tips will likely come handy.

Hopefully they'll help get your process on the right track.

More here:
A Guide to Starting That Task That You've Been Avoiding [Infographic] - Social Media Today