The Need for Integrated Marketing: It’s Not Just Social Media

“If only we went viral” and “If only we had a Facebook page and an Internet guru who knew how to make our RSS feed than we could get on the front page of TechCrunch” is something that is commonly heard.

The promise of social media was, to some, the magic promise of viral marketing.

It’s a false promise.

The fundamentals still matter.

Marketing is not about viral or social media – rather it’s about developing the proper strategy to meet your business goals.

What are you trying to get and what is the pathway to get there?

  • Brand Awareness?
  • Revenue Growth?
  • New Sales?
  • Thought Leadership?
  • Repeat Business?
  • Saved Customers and Recovery of Customers?
  • Introduce A New Program?
  • Donations?

Each goal has a different tactic to meet that goal.
Business Planning Class
Social media is not the answer, it’s a channel. One of my favorite strategic frameworks, Forrester’s POST Analysis, explicitly states that you pick the People (Audience), Objectives, and Strategy before choosing what technology to implement this with.

Before determining the tactic, you need to develop the strategy that maps the strategy and tactics to your goal. This, of course, requires knowledge of integrated marketing: branding/positioning, public relations, marketing, web development, SEO, and more. Yes, with the growing importance of digital platforms, technological literacy is a must for any marketing strategist, but it is not the goal – rather the tool to get it.

Jono Bacon, the Community Manager of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, has a good framework for how to map strategy with tactics in his book The Art of Community:

OBJECTIVE:

GOAL:

SUCCESS CRITERIA:

  • Item
  • Item

IMPLEMENTATION PLAN:

  • Item
  • Item

OWNER:

GOAL:

SUCCESS CRITERIA:

  • Item
  • Item

IMPLEMENTATION PLAN:

  • Item
  • Item

OWNER:

POST It: How to Develop a Social Marketing Strategy

As our president Josh Cline wrote, strategy is the most important component of any marketing endeavor. This is truer in the digital marketing arena. Inbound marketing and social media marketing are  strategic marketing tools. In order to succeed in your marketing efforts, marketing strategy is necessary.

In online marketing endeavors, because of its newness and freshness, there has been a tendency by some to rush into social media, talk about Twitter and Facebook, but have no real goals and objectives, understanding of its audience, or ways to measure success. This is not social media marketing, or any kind of marketing. This is putting the cart before the horse. As digital marketing is still a relatively new field (only 15 years old!), many of those who are most conversant with technology are least conversant with marketing strategy and many of the traditional strategists are not familiar enough with technology to understand and develop a comprehensive plan.

At the beginning of the social media era, it may have been acceptable to wade in the pool and experiment, even without a strategy, as the potential of social was still unknown and only early-adopters were engaged. Today, however, as social media has matured, social media marketing strategy is a necessity and not an option.

In order to be truly successful in any digital marketing endeavor – whether it is social  media, mobile, e-mail, or any other – the first thing that needs to be done – prior to talking about tools or tactics – is to talk about strategy.

Luckily, Forrester Research has developed a useful framework to develop a social strategy.

Forrester Research developed a strategic methodology called the POST method.

P is People. Don’t start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you’re targeting college students, use social networks. If you are reaching out to business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Just do not start social without first thinking about it.

O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you are done. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you will know where to begin.

T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.

POST Method

Lacking in strategy leads to companies abandoning their social media efforts too soon. Promised “to go viral” (which is not a strategy!) companies go about this process backwards picking the technology first, saying “We need a blog” and “We need to go on Twitter” and then give up after a few months.  As Scott Opplinger wrote, “They might not get the results they want because they had no idea what results they were trying to accomplish in the first place and in most cases had no clearly defined method for measuring those results had they defined clear goals.”