Photo credit: Sean MacEntee
□ Yes □ No
A CMO Survey of marketing professionals asked how effectively social media is linked to their company’s marketing strategy on a 1 to 7 scale, where 1 is “not integrated” and 7 is “very integrated.” The average level of integration was only 3.9. The level of integration has not changed in the past four years, and many companies manage social media as a separate activity.
Companies are not integrating social media into their overall marketing efforts, even though they plan to increase spending on social media as a percent of marketing budgets from 9.4 percent to 13.2 percent over the next year and 21.4 percent over the next five years, the study notes.
Integration won’t happen until company leaders share success stories throughout their organization to promote integration, say Becky Ross and Shannon Gorman, MBA students at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, in a post for CMO.
Benefits of Integration
“When social media is integrated with the company’s marketing strategy, the company’s management of its customer and brand assets is seamless,” they state. “The result of social media integrated into marketing strategy is improved efficiency and effectiveness in all aspects of the marketing plan.”
Here’s a synopsis of the pair’s recommendations to integrate social media into the overall marketing strategy.
Focus on strategy rather than the latest technology. Don’t jump on the latest gizmo or network. Consider your target audience’s demographics to match it to the appropriate network.
Identify a specific customer objective when employing social media tactics. One common approach is for marketers to use social media to help move customers into and through the purchase funnel.
Create social media toolkits. Include templates for Facebook and Twitter posts to a) create a more cohesive brand image across geographies and platforms and b) to reduce the time and resources required to develop social media content.
Put social media experts on brand and customer teams. Social media experts should be closely linked to the brand and customer teams to involve them as soon as communication objectives are established. Social media experts know what approaches generate interest from current and potential customers.
Balance in-house expertise with agencies. Many companies outsource social media activities to multiple agencies. That threatens the social media integration because agencies rarely understand completely a company’s entire marketing strategy. Because of that, some companies have moved more social media activities in house or formed deeper partnerships with their agencies.
“Effective marketers are now working with their sales and communications teams to integrate social as one whole part of their online marketing strategies,” writes Krista Bunskoek, content marketer for Wishpond, for Social Media Today. “To make marketing powerful these days, you need to use social to gain leads, nurture prospective customers and get the sales for your business.”
Organizations, she points out, can employ many strategies to integrate social media into broader marketing campaigns, such as hosting a lead generation promotion on their website or Facebook page, promoting a landing page through social media cross-promotion, or using online advertising.
Bottom Line: Integrating social media into the overall marketing strategy can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire marketing plan.
Please share below techniques for integrating social media into the marketing strategy.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
