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Summer signals the beginning of budget season. Before making marketing investment decisions, analyze this year’s three marketing must-haves: social media, content marketing and mobile. While aspects of these marketing formats may not have direct costs, they all require budget and resources.
1. Social Media
Social media provides platforms, enabling marketers to interact with their target audience. Social media involves more than a Facebook page or Twitter account. It requires an integrated social media strategy including a social media persona to ensure it’s an integral part of your marketing.
- Assess current social media presence. Is your brand present on appropriate social media networks? Are you actively managing your presence? Are there emerging social media platforms relevant to your firm, focus, or target market where you must establish your presence?
- Evaluate your brand’s portrayal across social media platforms. Is your brand consistently presented? Do your branding guidelines need to be enhanced?
- Determine the engagement level you need on social media platforms. Remember, you can’t rely on three tweets a day written by your agency. You need a human face behind your social media presence. Ensure you’ve got appropriate in-house resources to respond to social media requests.
- Create relevant content to feed social media needs. Assess requirements across content formats and social media platforms. Include formal content marketing as well as social media interactions like Facebook comments and Twitter responses.
- Support your social media presence with targeted advertising. Do you need to enhance your social media presence with related paid advertising? Consider the use of social media ads.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is promotion-free information that fuels social media and overcomes purchase decision hurdles. (Here’s an outline of content marketing’s basic steps.)
- Analyze content marketing needs. Assess the existing content within your organization. Then determine where you have content marketing needs and where you have holes in your existing offering. Specifically examine the entire purchase process and social media interactions.
- Integrate content marketing into an editorial calendar. Determine where content is needed, the format and topic required, and the timing of its creation based on your assessment. Incorporate this information into a plan across platforms to ensure it’s synched with your promotional calendar. Plan for content reuse to extend the life of each element.
- Acquire appropriate resources for your content creation team. At a minimum, you need an editor and a copy editor. While you can encourage employees and customers to contribute content, determine where you need additional support. Don’t underestimate the need for designers, photographers, writers and technology support. These resources can be internal, freelance or agency-based.
- Expand content marketing reach. Make it easy for readers to share your information with social sharing buttons. Where appropriate, use advertising to promote your content and build an audience.
- Ensure content marketing closes sales. Content marketing by itself can’t drive sales. It needs calls-to-action and related dedicated promotional codes. Further, create tailored landing pages and streamline the sales process to efficiently convert prospects to sales.
3. Mobile
Mobile is a must-have for every business with a retail presence or that competes with a business that has a retail presence since mobiles and tablets go shopping.
- Be present on mobile search. Mobile search is separate from web search. Local businesses that people seek on-the-go must be findable on mobile search.
- Build a mobile website. Don’t just assume people can read your web-optimized site on a mobile device. Create a streamlined mobile website focused on the information customers want on-the-go.
- Build a mobile phone number house file. If you don’t have a mobile phone list, start building one now.
- Optimize your emailings for mobile devices. Email is the primary content consumed on mobile devices. Ensure readers can easily read and take action on your emailings via a connected device.
- Assess need for a mobile app. In the past year, mobile app usage has surged ahead of mobile web, according to Flurry. Depending on your business, this shift may require investment in a mobile app.
According to IBM’s State of Marketing 2012, marketers face an array of challenges. Top on their lists are channel and device choice expansion and customer collaboration and influence. This is no surprise given social media’s exponential growth, increased smartphone usage, and the quick adoption of tablets. These elements require new ways of engaging and selling prospects and customers through content marketing and social media delivered via various mobile devices.
At a time when marketers need additional funds to test these emerging channels and platforms, more than a quarter of those surveyed believe their biggest challenge is financial constraints and ROI accountability. This is to be expected in light of weak economic growth. Many businesses using social media, content marketing and/or mobile are still testing these strategies and haven’t developed effective tracking yet.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, logorilla
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ClickZ is a Mashable publishing partner that provides marketing news and expert advice. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.
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Social media,content marketing and mobile is the best opportunity for investment marketing.its interacted the people with target the audience….My new blog please see here http://www.abloggingspot.com
Working on making our company more prominent on social media has basically been my job since I started here. It’s certainly not an easy task; couple that with being B2B and it makes it even more difficult to have appeal to the individual. But I like a lot of the points here. Looking human is definitely a must. Tweets and Facebook posts that look like a robot said them don’t exactly scream “interact with me.” Mobile is definitely the next frontier; a tough reality since Web 2.0 still seems so unexplored. It looks like the mobile web (web 3.0, 2.5, whatever we decide to call it) is already the next major shift in marketing. Thanks for the great article.
-John Carrera
http://www.datavelocity.com/blog
very good – you’ve covered off on roughly 10% of a marketer’s budget. what are they supposed to do with the other 90% they’ve “invested” in?
I think for most marketers the point of Social Networking is missed completely, which is why many Social Media marketing efforts end up being a brand awareness exercise at best. Conforming to Social Media might be a better approach to achieving the holy grail – a viral interest in your product or service. Your brand maybe better served by being destructured and assuming a ‘social face’. Most social networking sites aren’t structured to be conduits for marketing your business! http://www.destructuro.us is a quick easy read, and explains destructuring brands to benefit the bottom line exponentially.
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Social media, Content and Mobile Marketing does most of the stuff of for branding, back links and achieve greater rate of ROI with consistent customers online. Still we need to use White Hat SEO to keep up in the form.
Invest in performance readiness not just widgets.
The biggest omission in this list has to be on marketing capability. All of the above act as tools but as the role of the marketer has evolved, so must their development.
If organisations know what they the future to become they must ensure their people have the capabilities, as well as the tools, to make it happen
Thanks for the insightful read. I appreciate the data from Flurry and it’s obvious the use of mobile apps continues to rise at an impressive rate…my only frustration is trying to understand how much of a user’s time is spent on branded/company apps vs. social apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I recently witnessed a digital agency attempt to sell a mobile app to my client based on the same data, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume this increase in time-on-apps will translate to a branded application. The stats seem skewed by the use of ubiquitous social apps. Any thoughts?
While I agree that all three items, social media, content marketing and mobile are critically important to creating successful customer experiences, but I do want to caution that each item is completely different from the other two; it is the classic case of apples, oranges and grapefruit.
Social Media has multiple facets of its own. First, it is a customer service channel by which a brand can interact with its customers, provide support and leverage the community to find solutions or new opportunities for the use of the brand’s products or services. Secondly, it is a channel for the distribution of content. Here the key is making sure the content delivered is relevant to the audience. And third, social media is a very powerful tool for understanding not only your customers, but the market as well. It it the use of social media to extract social intelligence that has the most value to brands.
Content marketing should be the means by which you deliver engaging, relevant and persuasive content to the right person and the right time. Content can and should be distributed through social media, but equally belongs to web experiences and traditional media as well. What makes content marketing successful is relevancy and relevancy is driven by context. So its not only that you need to have the right content to deliver to the right people, you have to understand when and where to deliver it and have the technological prowess to do so.
And finally, Mobile. There’s a lot of talk about mobile finally coming of age because of tablets and smartphones. However it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of mobile in terms of device and not in terms of mind set. It goes back to context and intelligence. To be successful at mobile marketing, brands need to not only be able to present their content on a mobile device, but they have to understand what the context of the user experience is for a mobile customer.
So, I fully agree with the importance of social media, content marketing and mobile. I urge marketers to think beyond the immediate buzz and realize what success looks like for each of the three categories.
Good reading, thanks for sharing… I think you highlighting “net new” budget ideas to complement existing marketing budgets. I would suggest social media and mobile are “channels” that require budget across the enterprise from marketing, legal, risk, compliance, customer service, line of business, field sales, etc. In my upcoming book about social media, “4sCommerce: be social, make money”, I have a provisional patent pending “M2M Framework” to help organize and prepare for the people, process, and technology changes coming to businesses as a result of digital transformation. Read at http://estesclt.blogspot.com/2012/03/demystifying-scommerce-its-just-channel.html#!/2012/03/demystifying-scommerce-its-just-channel.html
The big takeaway here is that while most businesses feel the need to set up the obligatory “presence” in Social Media, most do not realize that often “less is more” when comes to setting up various platform accounts and effectively managing them. It’s a real business commitment to stay engaged by providing compelling content; targeting, building and cultivating an engaged community; and following a well-planned and well-executed strategy that will establish your brand and eventally lead to conversions. Do not bite off more than you can chew. What you commit to, you must cater to. It takes lots of thought and always working smarter. It is better to be on fewer channels and give those you best effort. You can always grow your involvement as your capacity to manage them effectively grows in proportion. Never become a slave to Social Media and let your day-to-day business activities suffer.
Lets make it 4 must have marketing tools. GLIIF provides a bridge between digital and print. Low cost of entry with full analytics. http://www.gliif.com
We believe it all begins with content. The rest are platforms, very important platforms of course, but it really boils down to what we say… http://In-The-Flow.com
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