For B2C Marketing Professionals
October 24, 2018
Real-Time Processes For Real-Time Social Marketing Processes: The Social Marketing Playbook
employees, the brand was able to capitalize on a customer tweeting, “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”7 Wendy’s quick response: “18 million,” propelling #NuggsForCarter to most-retweeted-tweet-of-all-time status.8 ›› Unsuitably long lead times. Marketers who are accustomed to traditional media’s prolonged processes may have difficulty thinking in accelerated social time. Multiple approvers outside of marketing who can’t move at social marketing’s speed exacerbate the problem. One social media agency told us that stakeholders “who have not had their ‘gears greased’ don’t understand that social has to be up and running in a matter of days instead of weeks,” which creates bottlenecks and delays. ›› Divided attention. Social marketers find their priorities split between managing inbound communications versus planning for outbound content. Companies ill-equipped to handle a large volume of incoming messages default to reactive mode, pushing proactive mode to the back seat. “The inbound volume is daunting if you don’t have the right resources or right structures and processes in place to manage that day in and day out,” states Andrew Caravella, vice president of strategy and brand engagement at Sprout Social.
Establish Distinct But Interdependent Processes For Social Demands Marketers must implement workflows that can handle unpredictability and react quickly while still facilitating future planning. To achieve this balance, branch social marketing workflows into two separate but connected states: always-on versus campaign processes. We define these as such: “Always-on” social marketing processes are a steady state of activities that are unpredictable and customer or industry initiated. Examples include customer inquiries, brand mentions, cultural moments, industry breaking news, and crisis management. “Campaign” social marketing processes are time-bound efforts that are planned and brand initiated. Examples include integrated branding efforts, regularly scheduled social series, new product launches, contests/promotions, holiday/seasonal messaging, and live events. Consider a fictional shoe brand, “Kicks,” that builds separate but related processes to handle both always-on and campaign social marketing needs fluidly (see Figure 1).
© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
3
