As a company, you’re looking to better connect with your audience. Perhaps you’ve spent years going the traditional media route. With a descent TV spot costing upwards of $300,000 for production alone, return on your investment is a pipe dream at best. TV’s great, but it’s a little like paddling a boat out into the middle of the ocean, dropping a hook in, and hoping the fish that you want happen to be swimming near you at that moment. Out on the horizon, you see social media as a marketing free-for-all that’s virtually free. So how do you make the most of it?
At this point, what most companies do is hand it over to an intern with a pat on the back and a “You’re in charge of our social networking.” But is that the best approach, trusting your company’s online identity to someone who knows little about your brand and even less about marketing, itself? Not always. So some companies go the opposite route and leave the social media driving to the owner, the one who knows every aspect of the business inside and out. More often than not though, owners often know too much about the product, not enough about the brand, and very little about the social realm.
Social media is a forum in which you, or your brand’s representative, can carry on a dialog directly with your current and potential customers. Instead of dropping a hook in a vast ocean, it’s heading to the seafood counter and saying, “That’s the fish that I want.”
But here’s where social media can quickly become anti-social media. How well do you trust the intern to carry on such a dialog, to speak on behalf of you and your brand? In the other example, does the owner, who’s already working 80+ hours a week trying to keep the business humming along, have the extra free time to trumpet company achievements, generate buzz, and also respond to customer concerns online? Get it wrong in social media, and you’ve created a negative image of your brand in a space that has a significantly longer memory than TV. Get it right, and you’ve created customers for life.
It’s easy to get it wrong. But how can you ensure that you get it right? Leave it to the experts. Sure, you could go out, buy a camera and shoot a TV spot yourself, but you don’t. You leave that to the experts. It works the same in social media. You’re better off seeking the help of people with a clear understanding of marketing, branding, and of course social media — like Greg Feist, your pal the social media expert. I can help you raise your brand’s voice among a sea of competitors.