For B2C Marketing Professionals
October 24, 2018
Real-Time Processes For Real-Time Social Marketing Processes: The Social Marketing Playbook
Set Up Protocols To Serve Always-On Activities That Require Hyperquick Turnarounds Certain always-on social marketing activities require even more timeliness due to their higher risk or reward profile. To achieve even greater speed-to-market, implement additional protocols for these efforts: ›› Crisis management when your brand’s reputation is on the line. Crises do not abide by a 9-to5 work schedule. Proactively define a SWAT team and circulate names and contact information to involved parties, especially for off-hour situations. Identify a social administrator empowered to take quick action, such as removing posts. SapientRazorfish worked with a prominent consumer packaged goods (CPG) client to address a health issue concerning one of its products. The brand activated its SWAT team of marketers, agency representatives, PR agents, and lawyers, and all hands on deck worked through the weekend to respond to the crisis in an appropriate and timely manner. For further detail, read Forrester’s recommendations on how to manage social crisis.15 ›› Timely cultural moments that allow for brand relevance and potential breakthrough. Legal approval and too many cooks are often holdups for quick responses. Activate a pre-identified legal representative to fast-track creative and media approvals. Identify which stakeholders you can bypass to publish content faster. “Some organizations aren’t designed for real time and require multiple sign-offs from executives, but social content has a very short shelf life,” explains Josh Rickel, former vice president, product marketing at Spredfast. Establish A Separate Process To Master The Campaign State Brands and agencies incorporating social into brand planning must rethink the entire campaign process instead of treating social media as an afterthought channel. Travelers Insurance’s digital marketing team worked across the organization to develop integrated marketing plans in these steps: identify business objectives, distill audience insights from all channels, create a narrative for business units to deliver content, develop a channel strategy that includes social media, and plot a master editorial calendar before moving into review and activation stages. Campaign activities vary from planned social posts to full multichannel communication efforts, but the process to implement those activities in a social media environment remains the same (see Figure 3): ›› Plan using social media for insights, testing, and distribution. Don’t think of social media as only a place to push content. James Gross, cofounder of Percolate, says: “Marketers are coming out of treating social as a customer service channel and trying to move it to brand marketing. Ultimately, a marketer’s goal is to move social into the strategic part of the overall planning process.” Use social media to vet ideas and better understand your customers. Test different messages with a small budget before committing bigger spend. You may even realize that social media is not the right place for this particular campaign — and that’s OK.
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