When I talk about digital marketing strategy I often get that far away look to begin with. They understand the words, but aren’t sure how they go together. As soon as I break it down into it’s component parts and mention those two words – social media – suddenly they are very informed, opinionated and in many cases experts on the subject.
This in itself is part of the problem. Due to the fact that people have heard about social media and more than likely have some personal accounts on at least one of the platforms, they ‘know social media’. As they ‘know’ social media, it’a an element they feel they can implement quite easily for their personal brand, and then for the brand they happen to work for. The other side of that coin is that a business has heard of social media, is not really sure what it’s all about. They are sure though that the younger generation know all about it, so recruit a social media manager straight out of University and effectively put them in charge of their companies brand communications online. ‘They’re young and therefore must know all about this social media.
Not always the case, they may well be able to actually set up an account and post on your behalf, they may even be able to organise the content into a monthly content creation schedule. But do they have any idea about business and business communication? Not really. Have you made sure they are on point with your company’s voice, tone and message. All of which are supporting the overall business objectives? Too busy to find the time to do that right?
And so we end up with points that we can learn from. I wanted to keep this particular post quite short, as I wrote a piece for SME info quite recently, titled – Five common social media mistakes smes make – and whilst it references SME’s, it’s actually applicable to all businesses. Have a read of the full article but the 5 points are below;
1. No Strategy
2. Trying to sell on social media channels
3. Doing it for the sake of doing it
4. Deleting negative comments or feedback
5. Not claiming your virtual real estate
I decided to write this little post, because today I also came across an article written by Heather Smith on Jeffbullas.com that went on to highlight 15 social media mistakes to avoid which has some additional great pointers in there.
What I did notice and wanted to connect the dots to. Was that both mine and their number one mistake was the lack of strategy behind social media activity.
As I said at the beginning, people don’t really understand digital market strategy as a phrase, but they certainly are familiar with social media. Social media marketing has been a buzz phrase for the last couple of years and people have jumped on the band wagon and suddenly become exceptionally busy ‘doing’ social media marketing.
But when many companies are actually questioned on the ROI of all the social media activity they are doing. It seems that they either aren’t measuring it at all. Or they are measuring it and the results are ZERO. This is because without a clear strategy with milestones and objectives you can as Heather Smith writes, ‘have the best content on the web and still receive no engagement. And this is still the fundamental problem with social media marketing being executed by those that don’t really get it.
It’s not about Likes or Followers, it’s about engagement, reach and driving traffic.
