Inside Indiana Business just published an excellent and straight forward article by Amy Zucker called “Social Media is Part of the Marketing Mix“. Amy is President and Founder, Synergy Marketing Group, Inc., an Indiana company. Amy eloquently and succinctly points out the value of using social media for business and also suggests some important strategies that I wholeheartedly agree with.
The part of Amy’s presentation that jumped out at me immediately is her bullet point #1 that encourages a strategic approach to social media rather than a casual one. Unfortunately, social media is very easy to use casually and in the long run, I believe that casual users will find less value in social media than those who plan and strategize their efforts.
In my opinion, social media efforts are treated casually for one of the same reasons that makes them attractive to begin with: they’re free. We pay nothing for Facebook, Twitter or your blog, so we don’t respect it or treat it as if we had money on the line. If we were paying good money for radio, television or print media we’d make darn sure that our presentation was on target, professional looking and that our message correlated directly with our sales programs and marketing efforts elsewhere. We’d make sure that we made a strong effort to get results.
That means that you need to treat social media in the same way that you’d treat a traditional advertising or marketing campaign. Essentially, you should be treating social media as it you were spending a lot of money on it!
At World Class Beverages, my overall plan for social media looks like something like this:
- Consistently post relevant content on Facebook and Twitter.
- Post timely content related to our current sales goals and objectives, which change monthly.
- Define monthly goals for social media that are directly related to sales (i.e. sell x amount of cases this month via social media).
- Measure results relative to monthly goals as accurately as possible.
Not all of these things are easy to define and that’s yet another hurdle. But in the end, I don’t think we’re being honest with ourselves where social media for business is concerned unless we are able to do all of the above.
Tags: alcohol, amy, beer, blog, business, content, facebook, free, indiana, inside, marketing, print, radio, social, television, twitter, zucker
