Realtime social

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.

Produce unique assets for each social network. Do not subscribe to a one-size-fits-all mindset where TV commercials are repurposed for Facebook as is. To maximize user engagement, assets should be unique to each social network. This requires foresight in early production stages (e.g., photo or video shoots). Brands also need to create templated assets for dexterous campaign use. Global beauty company Henkel created a principal story that served as a master asset template for the duration of a certain campaign. From there, Henkel’s local marketing teams could pull from the pre-produced templates and adapt creative assets to fit the social channels important in their local markets.