Social media is everywhere you look. Cafes and butcheries have QR codes in their windows prompting us to follow their 'gram. Tik Tokers can be found on every street monologging about their haircuts. We all have some form of interaction with social media, because it has long since become the new mass-media.
This does not imply that we all know how to use social media to brand and promote companies. Far from it.
Every business requires a bespoke approach to their social media marketing. It must be on-brand, scalable, show ROI and, most importantly, the creative work has to resonate with the target audience. Being able to create an account and post 'stuff' is not proof of expertise.
Recently, I discovered that a business that Social Brain met two years ago decided to handle their Youtube account internally. This is a great approach if you can hire the right people, and have sufficient checks and balances built into the team. They also decided on a creative approach that is a complete mismatch for their target audience.
The business is in the automotive field and they decided upon a series of cute, animated explainers to showcase their products. Social Brain had recommended (based on multi-regional work in the same industry) that they go with a 'real voices' approach. This encourages trust, relatability, and makes their service more of a real-world proposition than a hypothetical.
Add to this, a predominantly Australian male target and there is very little room for 'cutisie cutsie rubbish', I also suggested to underscore the gravity of going in this direction.
Last week I discovered that the company Invested in a suite of animated content and have been heavily promoting their hero brand video with Youtube ad spend for 6 months.
The public facing result: The brand video has 700k views, their other 4 videos have an average of 250 views, and their shorts have an average of 40 views each.
Anyone who is competent at running a corporate Youtube account can see instantly that their marketing department has wasted $10,000s (conservatively) and is most certainly doing harm to the brand.
I don't need to see the backend analytics to have a strong impression of the viewer drop-out on the hero video. If a video with this number of promoted views is not generating a flow through of 10% to the other content, the creative direction is, quite simply, wrong.
This is an issue with handling complex marketing internally- there is jockeying for budgets and fragile egos, and ultimately it gets difficult to call a fail a fail. And, importantly, if no one actually understands the platforms, it is easy for the social media manager to bury their head in the sand.
Youtube analytics are so good that after a few months an experienced practitioner can call an end to an approach and start testing another. You must have a team capable of making this call when you start dabbling in promoted posts.
But, as I see time and time again, the social platform managerial duties fall upon a very young employee because 'They must know what they're doing. They're a digital native!'.
Worse still, many of these social screw ups are perpetrated by agencies working outside their ken - social as an add-on service. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
Online marketing is highly targetable & quantifiable, and results are near instantaneous - of course, you do need to be able to to interpret the data, execute changes, and have the good will, internally, to be able to iterate creative approaches.
But one thing is for sure - if you can produce a better result by putting flyers in mailboxes, you should look for a role in another industry.
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