digital strategy
Social Media Strategy? Spare Me
A friend of mine quietly sent me a slideshare presentation yesterday. It was created by a long established advertising and interactive agency in town. She sent it to me quietly because it was entitled “Why You Don’t Need a Social Media Strategy”. I guess she thought I should know I might soon be out of work, if word of this got around.
I enjoyed going through the slideshow.. and I didn’t entirely disagree with its point. However, there is an “it all comes down to semantics” argument to be made against it. Let me explain.
The presentation stated you don’t need a social media strategy. Instead, you need an engagement strategy, or an influence strategy. My take on the presentation was that it was capitalizing on the nausea widely experienced when hearing the ubiquitous phrase “social media strategy”. Fair enough. However, in our shop, engagement and influence are key parts of every strategy. Doesn’t that go without saying? Perhaps what the slideshow was trying to get at is the fact that it is vitally important to venture deeper than social media when designing an online plan. Mobile, website content, optimization, online advertising are all important, sometimes more important than social media depending on the business objectives for the strategy.
There is no question “social media” is getting way too much airtime. But for people new to the concept of having an integrated online strategy, this term can really help get them in the right line of thinking, despite its shortcomings.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?
Tags: digital strategy, engagement, influence, Social Media, strategy
Social + Search = Marketing (Part 2)
This is part 2 of the Marketing basics series. After discussing the 4 P’s of Marketing in part 1, I thought it would be useful to talk about brand positioning. In particular, the basic T-C-B model is a good, simple framework to organize your thought process and approach when creating social media and search engine marketing strategies.
Brand positioning is an enormous topic in itself. Traditionally, companies tried to create a brand image for their companies through broadcasting marketing messages to their audiences through advertisements on TV, radio, print, etc. With the advent of social media, online marketing and engagement focused communications, it is suicide to sound like a traditional broadcast ad when engaging with your audience.
Traditional messaging approaches and the notion that you can define your brand for your audience do not carry over to online marketing. So it is important to understand your company’s brand positioning.
Even though you can’t tell your audience how to perceive your brand, your communications and actions do influence how they perceive it. What you say and what you do must be consistent with your desired brand image.
What is the T-C-B model?
I was first exposed to the T-C-B model while reading a Marketing book by Rossiter and Bellman. T stands for Target, C stands for Category and B stands for Benefit.
Target
It is important to understand who is your target audience. With social media, your target audience may be just one person or a small, special interest group you engage with. Whichever the case, you need to understand them on a deeper, more personal level than traditional marketing.
Category
It is also important to understand what category need your audience will get from your product, service or interaction with you. By category, I mean the type of product. For example, the iPhone’s category is a mobile phone. The iPod’s category is a MP3 player. The iPad’s category is…I’m still trying to figure out that one… If you cannot quickly communicate to your audience what your product does, why they need it or why they should care about your company, they will not pay attention.
Benefit
As touched upon in part 1 of this series, the benefit of a product to its consumers is the value your audience will receive from your product. If you understand who your audience is and what category need they desire, then the key benefit is the “thing” that will satisfy that need.
Try considering T-C-B before sending that next tweet. Who are you engaging with? What is it you’re talking about? What value will your followers get?
Victor Chan
eMarketing Strategist
Tags: benefit, brand, brand positioning, category need, digital strategy, engagement, internet marketing, marketing basics, online marketing, target audience
Future Digital Media Ninja at a Vancouver Internet Marketing Agency
The most interesting part of being an intern at Magnify so far has been participating in the process of ALERT (Assess, Locate, Engage, Respond and Track) for clients. Participating and contributing to the strategy from start to finish in all of its stages has been definitely a first for me. In my past experiences my tasks and responsibilities have been pretty much focused on one specific thing. It is very rewarding and refreshing to have a strategy, where one had a meaningful role in crafting and executing from start to finish, giving positive results for a client.
The most fun part of ALERT was participating in the team brainstorming sessions. It’s a great opportunity to get your ideas out there, as well as be exposed to new ones. Even when the ideas might not fit that specific client, they can be fine tuned and used for another project or client. The open nature of the discussions made it easy to engage other teammates and pick their brains on creative ways to use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
The less entertaining part of the process, but probably the most necessary would definitely be tracking. The procedural nature of tracking results and stats on a daily basis can get a little bit monotonous. However, one quickly learns that it is not any less important. Monitoring the performance of the implemented strategies will allow you to react and make the necessary changes to ensure that we meet client needs and project goals.
As an amateur web developer I have been able to observe firsthand the necessity of taking social media into consideration when developing a website. In order to be able to boost quality traffic and create online buzz, the site needs to have the ability to share content. The other interesting aspect is that the content needs to tap into online culture and add value to online conversations and interactions that occur on the different social media platforms.
It’s been an awesome learning experience working at Magnify for the past few months, and I can’t wait to learn some more in my quest to become a digital media ninja.
Tags: digital media, digital strategy, internet marketing, online marketing agency, Vancouver
