The strategic win for social media and content marketing

Where social media marketing misses the content opportunity

I've been thinking about the key elements of ongoing inbound marketing activities - with the goal of driving sustainable interactions beyond one campaign.

Our agency, First 10, played a part in a small and successful campaign this week to help promote a local, Leeds based homeless charity called Simon on the Streets, and it's this that got me thinking.

Largely promoted via Twitter, the campaign has been great for the charity - and done with zero budget and no media spend. The content was creative images from a promotional campaign run by their creative agency, McGrath O'Toole. Aside from zero spend, the approach to the campaign echoes questions and enquiries that we get asked regarding digital media marketing campaigns - the requests tend to follow a familiar line:

• Create a digital campaign to leverage a piece of existing content that already exists
• Optimise that content, help make it findable in natural search
• Support it with PPC and social advertising, email and online PR
• Use the above to drive traffic and awareness, and measure that

The problem with promotionally orientated acquisition

The questions above follow an acquisition mind-set of creation and optimisation of content, layering on paid promotion, social engagement and then measuring that.

Though this can be really effective, especially when supported within social media channels, it has a stop-start problem, since each campaign requires re-starting and re-thinking. Bigger brands and campaigns require even more promotional spend, the benefit then quickly dying out as the competition take-over. There's little compounded benefit.

Even the award-winning Old Spice guy social media success made this mistake, by ending the first, highly successful campaign and loosing the momentum, before re-launching it again. The expectation with the fan base was created, lost and then re-created. Sure it grows the network, the fan-base, but it's expensive, and slow?

A customer orientated process of content and social media marketing

So, what's the alternative? I feel that a more strategic approach would be beneficial - albeit using the same content and social tactics, the mind-set is very different. An important point here - when I say content, I mean any mix of content (text, video, audio, webinar, game - anything):

1. Focus on the pain point, unmet need or problem of the target customer audience. Obsess about this so much it inspires creative content ideas that help solve those problems, pains and needs - align this content to the needs of any particular promotion.
2. Understand where this audience are online, of course they're probably on Facebook - but where else? You need an understanding of how that target segment behave online.
3. Know your brand voice in this space, you want your brand to be authoritative and credible as well as have creative and valuable content - that's value in the mind of the customer. Where's the intersection of your brand voice with that of the customer audience?
4. Social resources are then aligned to the target customer audience as well as any relevant thought leaders, consider this influencer audience need in terms of content. They're different to customers, they're in the middle space between everyone - it needs to work alongside the customer based marketing.
5. Promote these creative, social or content objects through social networks, targeted outposts, optimise them for natural search to ensure you're content is findable. Layer paid media and placed media to amplify the impact you already start to have.
6. Crowdsource interactions - get people involved (I gave 5 ideas on this last week). It could be that you create something unique on your site to take the engagement with the customer audience a level further - the more involved the audience, the better the experience for everyone. This will also be important when thinking of lead and data capture.
7. Measure and improve. This is a cycle not a one off. Grow the channels, your reach and the size of the network and monitor what works, learn what creates and amplifies growth.

Incremental and sustainable growth

Who does this well? As described above, I am honestly not sure. We're not there yet with our clients. I've seen great content from B&Q but it's not very well shared and promoted in the social space, and it's pretty awful in natural search too. We know companies like Dell and Gatorade do amazing jobs reacting to consumers, distributing content via an ever expansive network. American Express do a good job with Open Forum focusing on business start-ups, though that feels less promoted and shared at the moment, the content feels like it's got lighter of late, too.

What do you think, could this process work for your brand or organisation?