Some businesses go to great lengths to participate in hard-to-measure, tired marketing campaigns that do not align with their brands and yield questionable results. It’s the business of those marketers to demonstrate ROI with often opaque metrics. And it’s the prevailing demeanor of most businesses to swallow the “cases” made with those metrics hook, line, and sinker.
Why?
Magic. In the wonderful world of marketing, for many years, where there has been smoke, there has also often been mirrors. Granted, there have been some truly wonderful products and campaigns since the early days on Madison Avenue, but there have also been some real stinkers.
Of course clients have hired and fired firms over the years. And of course some consequence has been brought to bear for less-than-effective products and campaigns. But becoming the agency of record for a significant account has long relied on the ability of the agency to portray the possession of some level of intangible, mysterious skill that gives it the ability to convince the public to go forth, quickly, and buy the widget in question in droves.
Many are hesitant to admit it, but social marketing and media have changed all of that.
Why?
Metrics replaced magic. There is still plenty of room for a talented pitch, great creative, and strong and compelling content, but the intangibles are mostly gone.
As products and campaigns exist to a larger and larger extent in binary, marketers’ ability to measure their ebbs and flows becomes increasingly responsive and the data grows exponentially. No longer are we bound to spend time constructing complicated ROI metrics – to defend our existence by creative fiction. The facts are tracked, and impressions can now be measured by the minute.
Social marketing is doing great things for the brands that embrace it, and those things aren’t relegated to the bottom line alone.
Social tools are great vehicles for managing your brand. Monitoring the conversation gives you insight about your apostles and your critics. That insight informs potential course corrections to be made, giving you the chance to address the criticisms directly or take steps to change a negative sentiment.
Staying engaged with the customer through social platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn without actively engaging them via a call or direct email gives you the opportunity to monitor your brand-situation. That ability allows you to “keep in touch” – should you need to intervene directly you will have the means. You’ll also have gathered a trove of valuable information about your brand’s external identity in the interim.
The ability to connect directly in the social space, when combined with the immediacy of data available, makes brand management extremely responsive. Testing multiple campaigns was once an opaque and nearly impossible undertaking – it was extremely complicated a few years back. In the social sphere it’s relatively easy to engage customers, so testing different messaging, language, and tactics costs only time, and the results are immediate.
So why isn’t your brand engaged?
The most common reason I come across, beyond simple fear of the unknown, is that brands are afraid that they won’t be able to “control the message.” Well, I’ve got news for you – you never could.
The beauty of today’s social platforms is the responsiveness, and with that responsiveness, you get to enjoy the benefits of engaging your customer on a deeper, extremely tactile and even intimate level.
So find someone you trust, get your story straight, and get moving.
Your world awaits. Why not engage?
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