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Social Marketing Campaigns: Engagement Matters More Than Publication

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For some time now the social marketing campaigns of most brands have consisted of scheduling out loads of content through Buffer or another social management tool and letting it run. Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer says your promotions, blog posts, and podcast episodes are undoubtedly filled with valuable insights, but a shift is taking place in the social media world that demands you modify your strategy. Users of social media – the very ones you’re trying to reach – are valuing the “social” part of social media more than the “media” part. In short: Engagement matters more than publication.

What does that mean for a brand? It means a new approach to social media is in order. To help us get our heads around what exactly that means, Drew recorded this conversation with Kevan and discussed the shifting social media landscape, how social marketing campaigns of the past must give way to genuine transparency and engagement, and how small to medium-sized businesses can do social right.

Sounds intriguing, don’t you think? Be sure you listen (click here to listen now.)

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What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Why hell hath no fury like a social detractor and why businesses need to use it effectively to listen, learn and engage.
  • [1:50] Kevan and the team at Buffer work in a fully remote team environment
  • [3:00] The reason Kevan believes writing is vital for marketers to learn
  • [4:26] The changes that have happened in the social media world: engagement matters more than publishing
  • [6:19] How the Buffer team markets Buffer through engagement: No ROI for social
  • [10:26] What does it mean to be “on brand” – the Buffer approach
  • [14:59] Brands that have been using social media effectively these days
  • [20:24] The biggest mistakes Kevan sees brands making on social
  • [24:33] Buffer’s transparency ethic and how it impacts their planning and engagement
  • [32:13] Kevan’s advice for medium-small businesses when it comes to social

Most social media activity is crap simply because brands feel they HAVE to schedule something to publish. Try on a new social marketing approach: Be active, be on brand, be engaged

As Drew and his guest, Kevan Lee, of Buffer spoke about current social media trends, Drew pointed out how much of what’s out there is the epitome of irrelevance. Most brands are guilty of adding to the noise instead of adding to the conversations already happening on social. Kevan responded by saying that a good social campaign these days involves being active (and he’s got an interesting definition of what that means), being “on brand,” and being engaged.  In this conversation, he shares clear explanations of how a small to medium sized company can pull off each of those 3 elements of effective social, so don’t miss this conversation.

If you don’t have something meaningful to say in a week’s time, your brand has bigger problems

The biggest part of being a brand that adds true value on social media is to only post things that are truly relevant and valuable. But because the “old way” of doing social marketing insisted that companies fill up their channels with content (relevant or not), many in the marketing department are scratching their heads about what it means to be truly meaningful. Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer says if you don’t have something meaningful to say in a week’s time, your company has a bigger problem than you realize. Find out what he means by that statement and how he proposes companies adjust their social media strategy on this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite.

Be among the 20% of brands who actually respond to mentions on social media

Engagement matters on social media, especially for companies. But Kevan Lee points out that only 20% of companies these days even respond when they are tagged or mentioned on social. It’s unthinkable when you realize that the person who tagged your company is likely a customer or prospect – the very people you’re looking to reach. So naturally, the most obvious thing you can do to increase the effectiveness of your social marketing is to be among the 20% of brands that monitor your social accounts and respond when you’re mentioned. Start a conversation, engage, solve problems. That’s the “social” part of social media, and it works.

Connect With Kevan

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

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Story-Driven Content Marketing That Drives Leads

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In her role as CMO of Tungsten Network – a leading global supply chain enabler – Connie O’Brien has taken on a huge task: she’s spearheading the first content marketing campaign for the company in a very long time, and she’s focusing on friction to do it.

How so? Through the collaborative efforts of a handful of agencies, including Renegade, it was discovered that one of the main places the accounts payable process experiences difficulties is through the friction that exists in the systems and processes involved. So the team Connie assembled set out to discover, from customers and prospects alike, where the key points of friction were and what could be done to smooth out those problems. THAT positioned Tungsten to custom-tailor solutions to the exact problems the marketplace was experiencing.

This conversation is a quick but deep dive into the process the team at Tungsten spearheaded to discover what customers really felt about the frustrations they were experiencing in their accounts payable process, address those concerns effectively, then use content marketing to get the word out about those solutions.

Connie’s brilliance is obvious in this conversation, as is her humility and desire to give credit where credit is due – to her team. Enjoy.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – or Podsearch

What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Urban gardening and content marketing: both require experimentation & work
  • [2:54] Who is Connie O’Brien?
  • [8:43] What Tungsten Networks does and what got them onto their current content marketing approach
  • [12:18] Engaging employees as advocates for the company on social media
  • [14:56] The decision to talk to customers in an unfiltered way
  • [17:32] The creation of the Friction Finder customer feedback and diagnostic tool
  • [19:51] How Connie manages a multi-agency team for content marketing
  • [23:10] Integrating storytelling into her content marketing strategy
  • [25:03] The difficulty of measuring the value of the campaign effectively
  • [28:23] The primary lessons Connie has learned: Listen & Watch Results
  • [30:02] A quick summary of what Tungsten did and the results so far

It’s not easy to get unfiltered feedback from customers or prospects, but Tungsten Network figured out a way to do it.

One of the primary things that enables effective customer analysis is the power of an honest answer from the end user. Those kinds of answers aren’t easy to get because not only do people simply want to be “nice” when asked direct questions about service and satisfaction, they also can’t always remember the details of their frustrations on the spot. That’s why Tungsten Network went about it a different way – by creating a free tool that offered real value to people they wanted to hear from, whether they were customers or not. It’s called the Friction Finder, and in less than 2 minutes it allows you to assess the extent of the friction in your accounts payable process and provides actionable insights into what you can do about it. That saves you time, money, and eliminates a lot of stress. Find out more by hearing Connie’s description of how Tungsten’s extended team came up with the idea, how they implemented it, and the kind of results it’s provided.

The “official” social media marketing your company is doing may not be enough. Here’s how Connie O’Brien engaged employees to compound the company’s efforts

When you stop to think about the way social media marketing works you’ll quickly realize it’s about a couple of things: compelling content, shared broadly. Each of those has its own challenges, but the broad sharing feels like something you as a CMO or marketing leader can’t really control. Or is it? Connie O’Brien realized that some of her best advocates for the company’s new campaign were the people working on it – her employees. In this conversation, Connie shares how employee involvement on social media helped the campaign’s reach and how she was able to get them to buy-in and be involved. As a result, the company’s ability to do effective customer analysis was increased dramatically. You don’t want to miss this part of the conversation.

Managing a multi-agency team effectively in order to reach the goal of better customer analysis is tricky business

As part of the team that came alongside Tungsten Network to build the Friction Finder content marketing campaign, we here at Renegade saw first-hand what it takes to manage a multi-agency team, and Connie O’Brien did so beautifully. During this conversation, she admitted the challenge but also pointed out that it’s much easier when you work alongside true professionals who know their piece of the puzzle backward and forwards. The end result? Tungsten was able to do the kind of customer analysis needed to create the solutions their prospects needed, and sales are climbing. Listen to the entire conversation. There’s a little bit of something for every company that’s looking to up its content marketing game.

Connect With Connie:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

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Building Beautiful Customer Loyalty

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In episode 10, my guest Ryan Linders provides a rare glimpse into the initial phases of building a customer loyalty program from scratch. You’ll learn how Linders got the program off the ground and how Sally Beauty provides value to customers and gets it back in terms of membership fees and on-going purchase loyalty.

What’s particularly instructive is how Sally Beauty uses email with a genuine sensitivity to customer needs. While the tendency of the direct marketer is to push out offers at a heavy frequency, Ryan and his team temper their efforts to make sure they aren’t overwhelming their valued customers and or interrupting their natural purchase cycle.  Part of the solution here is to make sure in addition to email address, you have purchase data that will allow you to segment the database and increase the relevance of each interaction.

Building a Powerhouse Content Studio

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The notion of having a large-scale content studio in-house would be radical for many brands but that’s just the opening scene for David Beebe who “set out to establish [Marriott] as the largest producer of travel lifestyle content.” A veteran of Hollywood, Beebe has turned Marriott into a content powerhouse by “not asking for permission all the time” and by focusing initially on “really premium storytelling.” Noting that successful content needs to be scalable, built around a community and have a commerce component, Beebe advises, “You’re not making a commercial, you’re not talking about yourself and your features anymore.”

Reinventing Your Brand

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Lamenting the fact that the healthcare industry “says the same thing and blends into this mush,” Arra Yerganian is “working to change the conversation” about Sutter Health. To achieve this goal, Yerganian is “leaning in when others lean away” and seeks to “embrace the digital experience and create one-to-one relationships for the 3.5 million people that we serve.” Believing that this promise needs to go deeper than marketing, Yerganian works in “really close partnership with Sutter’s patient experience folks, executive leadership and operations” to “lay the foundation for a new [customer] experience.”

Rethinking Luxury Branding

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With over 70% share of the premium tequila market, it would be easy for Patrón’s CMO to rationalize a conservative marketing approach. Instead, Lee Applbaum believes that success can only be found by “challenging long-standing norms in luxury and in spirits marketing,” and by “always staying ahead of the curve.” To these ends, Applbaum is focused on showcasing Patron’s authenticity as a handcrafted tequila via advertising, influencer programs, social media and an innovative Oculus VR experience.