Social Media

Social media is an essential digital channel to engage an audience and distribute your content effectively. You just put it out there, you know? It can be seen as an outbound channel where a brand pushes their message out there. However, it does become an inbound channel once a consumer starts engaging, and that’s a key differentiator. But let’s actually look at some considerations when we’re thinking about including social media a part of our media mix. Okay, the first one is cost. Obviously, cost is top of mind. What can we do? What can we get? The main cost of engaging with consumers via social media include time actually.

You know, from the length of time it takes to create and curate a community to actually producing the content and the assets required to nurture them again, and again, and again. It takes a lot of time to do that stuff. It’s our first cost. Our second cost is resources. So, social posting software, content production, media budgets, all of these are main resource costs. How can we get that into the mix and how can we deal with this? And finally, it’s really important is staff. Managing a social channel, managing the community, briefing designers, gathering content, reporting and demonstrating the value of the channel requires specific skills and a dedicated person to do it effectively.

They’re all costs we have to consider but it’s all achievable and it’s all doable within the digital marketing context. An important consideration now for any social media strategy is consumer mindset. So, it’s essential to recognize that consumers are in different mindsets when they’re on different social networks. For example, the mindset of someone on LinkedIn is really professional. They’re thinking about jobs and that kind of activity. Whereas the mindset of someone on Snapchat is lighter and fun-filled. Two very different mindsets we must consider when choosing our channels.

And, when deciding what channel to choose as part of our social media mix, you must take the type of the tone of the channel into account just to determine if it aligns with our brand and our campaign messaging. It might not be the right fit or it might be the right fit. We have to figure that out ourselves, and we do this by stress-testing if a channel and the message encourage social media users to react to your campaign or content in a valuable manner to either engagement or conversion. So, just sense-check this. Sense-check your choice. Simply be asking a couple of questions. Firstly, is this the right channel for my audience and my brand? That’s a key question to ask.

Is this the right consumer mindset from my objective? Is the ad messaging and tone right for this audience? All important questions.

Key to successfully engaging an audience is the ability actually to identify your audience’s personas based on their value to the business. This is an important driver – their value to the business. Personas help you focus your efforts because it allows you to create the kind of content an online social media experience that will be most relevant to your high-value personas; again, the ones that are worth most to your business and your bottom line. So, this streamlines your workload. It streamlines your workload and allows you to prioritize the activities that will most useful to the highest-value audiences. Again, focus on business outcomes.

And, when creating personas, just consider how this translates into social media channel behaviors in terms of…well, actually, what content is likely to deliver on your KPIs or your objectives? Because, again, we’re always object to focus activities. This is especially important really when creating content for awareness or conversion goals because they’re very different. What goal is it? Always verify the appropriateness of your content and delivering your KPIs really just against those valuable personas. That’s your sense-check, that keeps you on track, and that keeps you focused on those core business goals and opportunities.