The Social Marketing Formula that Gets Results

Many organizations lack a coherent story about why they’re doing social marketing or what they hope to achieve. They may began their social marketing initiatives based on the belief that social listening, sharing, or engagement is a good idea. After all, their customers hang out on social networks. Yet, many of these organizations lack a concrete thesis around why these connections or engagements are valuable, according to Julie Hopkins, managing vice president Gartner for Marketing Leaders. Their programs have grown to more networks, more resources, more content, more tools – many still without a good thesis.

Everywhere, yet nowhere
As a result,  many social marketers today maintain too many customer dialogues in too many places and too many formats, managed by too many workflows. They are everywhere, and yet nowhere, all at the same time. As a result, unless they are also relentlessly pursuing a thoughtful measurement strategy, they struggle to pinpoint the value the organization is receiving for their social marketing investments, or which social content or tactics drive results. Even marketers who have extensive dashboards to track their social activities are often long on metrics, but short on insight. Our simple formula will help focus your social marketing strategy for greater success.

Test your strategy
To succeed with social marketing, you need to be able to articulate a crisp, complete story. To test your social marketing strategy, see if you can easily complete the following formula by filling in the parentheses with the appropriate response:


Fill in the blanks by answering these five questions:

Who do you want to engage?
Where will you find them?
How will you engage them? (What will you share that they value?)
What will happen as a result of your engagement?
How will you know you succeeded?
Turn strategy into campaigns
Take these two examples of companies that identified their audiences and then explored how to engage them with compelling content.

A beauty brand seeking sales might court user-generated video product reviews or usage tips from bloggers, and publish them in a common space (such as a YouTube channel or microsite), with links to purchase highlighted products.
A global coffee brand wanted to increase loyalty and repeat purchases. It sponsored a series of in-person events featuring master baristas. The brand captured their expertise on video, and in a series of “how to” articles and custom recipes, that could be published and shared in multiple formats. A closed community of loyal consumers of the brand’s coffee and coffee machines finds this a valuable “perk” of ownership. Content consumption in the community translates into increased consumption of the brand’s coffee and specialty equipment.
Define success
After determining who you want to engage, where, and how, it’s important to define metrics that will tell you if your social marketing investments are paying off. Often that means avoiding easy measures of activities on your social site such as counting the number of fans/followers/likes, or simple engagement with content, in favor of more telling measures of engagement. Those metrics should link to the business outcomes you prioritized.

For example, the coffee company in our previous example would want to measure the increase in repeat purchases by customers who engaged with the barista content. To get these numbers, marketers would have to:

Establish a benchmark for repeat purchases before the campaign begins.
Connect the customer across social and commerce channels.
Devise a way to attribute revenue to the social channel (e.g., social-specific offer code, cookie tracking across channels, or connection back to known customer record).
While seemingly obvious, it is often amazing how often “numbers we can get to” replace “numbers we need” for insight on monthly reports or performance trackers. Social marketing frequently falls victim to this, given the ease and transparency of “countable stuff.”

Set metrics in advance to ensure that you’re not throwing good money after bad, or optimizing toward an unprofitable outcome.

Gartner for Marketing Leaders clients can read more in the report Use this Formula to Focus Your Social Marketing Strategy.

The 3 Biggest Barriers To Mobile Marketing Success

Today, most marketers will state that mobile is one of their top priorities. However, when you dig deeper, you discover that many mobile marketing programs have yet to take full flight.

Based on hundreds of conversations with prospects and customers, I’ve learned that one of the main reasons for this stagnation is that many marketers make the false assumption that the success other companies are experiencing cannot be replicated. Too many marketers think that what’s working for Men’s Wearhouse or Pep Boys is unique to those companies and their situations. (Disclosure: Men’s Wearhouse and Pep Boys are clients.)

The reality is that mobile marketing success is not predicated on any particular business segment’s business model; any retailer can achieve significant revenue with mobile. Companies that impose these “mobile limitations” on themselves are missing out on a transformative opportunity.

Here are three keys to navigating organizational challenges to launch a successful mobile marketing program:



1. Team Up With Experts And Develop In-House Expertise
Compared to email marketing and other more established marketing channels, mobile specialists are much harder to come by, as the industry is still in a nascent stage. According to VentureBeat Insight, the second largest challenge facing B2B mobile marketing is that many marketing professionals do not sufficiently understand mobile marketing.

Since practitioners are in limited supply, and mobile marketing has its complexities, I recommend teaming up with a company that has a strong roster of mobile consultants and SMEs who have demonstrated expertise in this industry. That being said, you don’t want to just outsource this responsibility.

The best approach is to transition an existing team member or hire an individual who can become an apprentice to your contracted partner and build up his or her competency in mobile marketing. This way you start cultivating an in-house resource who can eventually lead your company’s mobile initiatives down the road.



2. Start Small And Scale Up
According to Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker, while people consume 20 percent of their media via mobile, only 4 percent of advertising spend is dedicated to this medium. According to the industry data, companies should be directing one-fifth of their budgets to mobile, but they don’t come anywhere close to that. Why? The reason could be the fierce competition within companies over the allocation of marketing budgets.

The right mobile marketing partner should help you overcome internal objections and hesitations from those who hold the purse strings. Look for a partner that isn’t immediately trying to lock you into a long-term commitment, but rather is flexible and offers tailored pilot programs and creative payment terms. If you only have $50,000 to spend for the remainder of 2015, then your partner shouldn’t be proposing a $100,000 plan.

Your first forays into mobile can be small — matching the form factor of many mobile devices. Trying to plan and execute a sweeping campaign before you’ve got your bearings will only lead to disappointing results.

Start small, and continue testing and learning through a handful of campaigns. When you have enough proof points that it’s working, that’s when it’s time to scale up and invest in a plan.

While you don’t need to break the bank, make sure you are carving out budget for mobile marketing. Forrester predicted that in 2015 most brands will underinvest in mobile — don’t be one of them.



3. Get Proof Points To Close The Loop
To show evidence of mobile marketing’s effectiveness, you need proof points, which may not be readily available for your business. Since data won’t just magically appear, often you have to assemble your own.

To do that, you should obtain data from your mobile marketing partner or internal team, your point-of-sale partner, your Web analytics provider, your business intelligence team and others — essentially all the sources that can help you close the loop and get the data out of silos into a unified, understandable view.

Because demonstrating ROI and financial business outcomes is key to securing organizational investments in mobile, these proof points can help you build the business case for mobile marketing. And it’s a strong case, indeed. Three Fortune 500 retailers that were new to mobile marketing (clients of Vibes, my employer) implemented mobile marketing plans and saw seven-figure business outcomes in less than 12 months.

Key decision-makers are looking for specific reasons to continue investing in mobile, and compared with traditional channels where ROI measurement is murky (e.g., direct mail), mobile marketing can drive and subsequently measure business outcomes.

A perceived lack of mobile experts, budget dollars, and proof points are the three primary barriers preventing companies from capitalizing on the mobile opportunity. No excuse is good enough, however, to not be reaching your customers on the most important devices available today — smartphones and watches.

Mobile marketing can move the needle in a dramatic way for your business — and now is the time to team up, scale up, and close the loop.

About author:
Jim Kreller serves as Vibes' head of mobile solutions, bringing two decades of technology business development experience to the table. Jim combines his expertise in mobile technology and strategy with an intuitive understanding of the customer’s needs. This allows him to craft technology solutions that directly address each customer’s unique business objectives. A leader and a builder, Jim guides the growth of our new business team – instilling a sales culture based on collaboration, creativity and transparency within solutions selling. This has driven year-over-year revenue growth and maximized Vibes' sales opportunities within the highly competitive mobile market.

Millennial Marketing Tips From 4 of the World's Biggest Digital Platforms Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Pandora execs weigh in

A quartet of executives from Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Pandora gave advertisers tips on how to reach millennials during a panel at ZenithOptimedia Group's Mobile Day in New York on Tuesday.

Marketers are constantly working multiple social media platforms and tweaking digital ads to target elusive millennials—adults ages 18 to 34 who don't respond to traditional advertising and are increasingly "cutting the cord." But instead of focusing on how young adults are turned off by ads, the speakers suggested spending more time analyzing how they use digital media, and then building marketing strategies around it.

"When we think about millennials, we don't think of them as a segment," said Trevor Johnson, director of Facebook's global agency team. "Millennial behavior is a thing that is really driving social and technology behavior going forward."

Here are four interesting insights the digital players revealed.

1. Get local

Steve Hwang, director of operations and strategy at Snapchat, said brands should think "local" when targeting millennials.

Granted, that's a sales pitch for his company's Live Story feature, which curates streams about nearby events that brands can buy full-page placements in. But the bigger idea is that Snapchat's core group of 18- to 24-year-olds hate feeling like they're being marketed to. Instead, they want to watch videos and look at photos their friends are sharing.

That approach is completely different than how brands use Facebook and Twitter to grow followers, a point Hwang later used as a jab against Facebook.

"Authenticity is really important, and I don't mean in terms of pretending to be [someone's] Facebook friend," Hwang said. "There's a ton of opportunity for brands to be involved on a more local level in the real world."

2. Less is more with video

It's no surprise that autoplay video has taken over Facebook, but that doesn't mean brands are building the right type of social clips for the platform.

Facebook's Johnson advised the room of brands and agency execs to make four-, eight- and 10-second videos that grab young people's attention in a news feed. Once people tap on a video, the sound automatically kicks in, which helps hook them to watch longer clips.

"You have maybe the first three seconds to stop people in their feeds to get them with a piece of content," explained Johnson. "After that, they can either watch five seconds or 10 minutes."

3. Find social's new celebrities

Vine stars are hotter than Hollywood A-listers for millennials, said Stephanie Prager, agency development lead at Twitter.

So those are the people that brands should try to emulate or work with when posting videos, photos and GIFs to the microblogging site. And with the acquisition of social talent agency Niche earlier this year and the launch of live-streaming app Periscope, Twitter is likely to make influencer marketing a bigger part of its pitch to advertisers in the coming months.

"We see these influencers with followers and a social graph that is far bigger than any celebrity out there," Pranger said.

4. Data-backed creative

Despite all the talk about mobile's lack of creative, Pandora's svp of consumer packaged goods sales and strategy, Tamara Bedrosian, argued that data should determine what an ad looks like.

For example, women ages 18 to 34 like to listen to YouTube violinist Lindsey Stirling on Pandora. They're also overwhelmingly listening to her from the music-streaming company's app (80 percent of Pandora's 80 million active users listen on mobile). Those nuggets of information can shape a campaign and determine if it should run on mobile or desktop.

"We don't go out with mobile-first or mobile-only strategies," Bedrosian said. "Tailor your creative message to the environment and mindset."

The Top Cities For Marketing Jobs Right Now

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryndill/2015/07/10/the-top-cities-for-marketing-jobs-right-now/

the companies providing the greatest available opportunities for marketing professionals,
But which cities are offering marketing whizzes the greatest wealth of opportunities?

To find out, Forbes consulted with job search site Indeed, which reviewed all postings for open marketing jobs, as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET OnLine application.

The information listed here does not reflect a precise number of available jobs, as an opening can be listed more than once or remain online after it’s been filled. Still, the numbers indicate a strong gauge of current national hiring demand for marketing jobs.

“Those cities are becoming hubs not just for the marketing jobs but also for marketing talent, especially people with skills and passion around this new era of digital marketing,” said Paul D’Arcy, senior vice president at Indeed.

Topping the list again are New York and San Francisco. Together, the two cities are home to some of the world’s largest agencies, much of the media industry, and a hefty slice of the tech sector. Despite an increasingly agile workforce. D’Arcy says they show no signs of diminishing their hold.

In pictures: The Top 10 Cities For Marketing Job Openings

“Now, increasingly what we find is that the jobs are where the talent is. While mobile might make it possible to work from everywhere, companies that want to find technical or creative skills are going to the hubs where there are critical masses of people with those skills.”

But D’Arcy also noted that cities other than New York and San Francisco are known as hubs for particular types of marketing talent. Number three on the list Chicago is still known as the place for finding the geniuses of the consumer packaged goods marketing sphere, while entertainment and media marketing is still concentrated largely in number four Los Angeles.

For great tech marketing talent, he added, San Francisco is the obvious choice but Seattle and Austin also provide

Whatever city or part of the industry job seekers may be focused on, however, those looking to secure a marketing gig in today’s economy need to be tech savvy as well. As D’Arcy told Forbes yesterday, “The days of marketing being about just creativity are over. Now you need a combination of math and creativity to be a great marketer.”

The Top 10 Cities For Marketing Job Openings

1. New York, NY — 2382 job openings

2. San Francisco, CA — 1313 job openings

3. Chicago, IL — 759 job openings

4. Los Angeles, CA — 597 job openings

5. Boston, MA — 585 job openings

6. Seattle, WA — 503 job openings

7. Atlanta, GA — 441 job openings

8. Washington, DC — 384 job openings

9. Austin, TX — 381 job openings

10. Dallas, TX — 368 job openings

Don't Forget About "H2H" in Email Marketing

It's time to think less like a marketer and more like a human.

Everyone talks about B2B and B2C when talking about marketing campaigns. And while these distinctions are still important, we can't forget about the “human to human” (or H2H) component of marketing. However, it seems like many marketers have. Today's marketers are rushing to talk about analytics, mobile applications, or customer journeys. But in all of these strategies, what we're really trying to do is answer the following question: Who is our customer?