The digital age has made marketing simpler by bringing all kinds of efficiency. Campaigns that were months in the making in the offline world can now be planned, launched, and ended in weeks, which is leading to a phenomenon called “impatient marketers”. There is a misconception among marketers (especially in social media) that if there isn’t an immediate and significant response then it’s deemed a waste of time.
However, before you come to a conclusion give your effort an honest assessment against these four basic criteria of effective social media marketing:
1. How important was your content?
There is a content flood all around us. Unless your blog or tweet or LinkedIn discussion is really important or phenomenal, it will get lost amid the flood of blogs, emails, videos, articles, tweets, and commentary. The worst case is it won’t get read or much less shared.
So what exactly is useful and important content? Any content from which viewers extract some sort of value. It can tell people something they don’t know that is relevant to what they do. Of course, there are other kinds of content usefulness. Tweeting to clients that you’ve got some free tickets to a VIP event is always a winner. First come, first served. If you’ve got a good job opening at your company (or heard about one somewhere else), reach out to your social communities and let them know. There is some information that clients will find interesting, like where they can find you at a tradeshow or a new service or product you’re launching. Keep it short, simple and beneficial.
Whatever you write, always remember to answer the question: “Why should people care about it?”
2. Does your content invite engagement?
Effective content compels the viewer to join in. It can be a discussion on a controversial industry subject. Don’t be afraid to use an old marketing trick and lob a really challenging question. People love to rise to the bait, especially when it directly calls their own companies into question.
Of course, you can create engaging content without controversy as well. Everyone wants to be the one who comes up with a solution to a problem. Peer learning is a really sticky content strategy that helps build and retain an engaged social media community.
Moreover, there is the classic call for war stories. “How far have you gone to win over a new customer or retain a current one?” “What’s your worst day in the business, ever?” You can add a contest to it: Win tickets or a gift certificate to a really good restaurant.
3. Are you giving up before you’ve really started?
Engaging content isn’t all it takes to build a strong social media community. Be patient. The old marketing principle applies to social media as well: “Just when you start getting sick of running that ad, your customers are beginning to notice it.”
Ask yourself how often you can realistically post, tweet, join in a LinkedIn discussion. Make time for it, just as you would any other marketing task, and follow through. Once the momentum starts, it will build pretty quickly.
If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, there are experienced marketing firms that know exactly how to work the social media platforms for you. They’ll supply the topics and the content, monitor and contribute to discussions, and even track engagement results for you. They know how to tell your brand story consistently and effectively, so that it builds awareness and credibility over time.
4. Are your metrics realistic?
Another reason that marketers give up on social media is that they expect a tweet or blog to instantly make the cash register ring. It simply doesn’t work that way. What you can measure is engagement. How about retweets, shares, LinkedIn discussions, and YouTube forwards? These represent actions taken, and they indicate a level of interest and awareness that goes beyond the simple impression. Today there are platforms such as HootSuite and HubSpot that help you automate, track, and quantify content engagements, so you can actually see your efforts working to build a community and affinity to you and your company.