Fully Loded

Social Marketing Strategies for Your Brand: Let’s Talk

(originally published January 2008)

One of today’s hottest marketing topics is how to utilize social networks as part of your marketing strategy. Today’s market offers a unique opportunity to build communities around your brand, then use those communities to accelerate consumers from consideration to purchase. But there’s a lot more to social networks than putting up a MySapace page for your brand or adding ratings to your product page.

The Power of Social Marketing

Social marketing allows you to extend your brand communication from B2C (brand to consumer) into C2C (consumer to consumer) and expand your reach while improving your insights. It’s hard to find a better way to understand your consumers, learn how they use your products and move them to a sale quicker.

When the top two things 15-34 year olds would do with 15 minutes of their time are check out a social networking site and talk on their cell phone, your social marketing strategy has to meet them on their own terms. The Never Ending Friending Project, a recent study commissioned by Isobar and Myspace, shows that incorporating social marketing into your overall program can increase your advertising exposure more than 70%. It also improved purchase intent and a positive brand image.

Despite these numbers, many brands are still holding back from creating a social marketing presence. Since the current explosion in social media shows no signs of slowing down, the salient point to remember is this: Conversations involving your brand are happening whether you’re there or not. You can either:

            A. Pretend the conversation isn’t happening

            B. Try to control the conversation

            C. Join the conversation and look for ways to add value to it

 It’s too late for A, and B doesn’t work, which leaves you with C — crafting and executing a branded social network strategy that will reach, attract, and persuade the people who are already out there talking. This article identifies three vehicles for your social marketing strategy and three key objectives that can help you leverage the social space to create a unique brand experience.

 3 + 3: Vehicles and Objectives for Your Social Marketing Strategy

To craft an effective social marketing presence, you need vehicles to get you there and objectives to keep you on track.

 The three possible vehicles for your social marketing strategy are:

1. Advertising on social networks like My Space and Facebook
2. Embedding your brand in the social network with brand pages, widgets, video, and promotions
3. Building you own branded social network

For the fullest social marketing impact, these three need to work in conjunction with each other. Within these three areas you’ll need to keep these three objectives in mind: 

1. Design your brand’s persona so it drives value
2. Give community members a reason to meet, communicate and share
3. Provide relevant content that has value within the community