Everyone who reads our blog regularly will know that we are all about joined-up marketing. It is about using all the appropriate tools available to communicate your story and proposition to your target market in a consistent way that increases the likelihood that when they have a need for your products or services, they will contact you.
In other words, joined-up marketing is about generating business leads.
When you are using email marketing joined-up with your website, the process is quite straightforward. You generate the content (i.e. write a story/produce a graphic or video that helps tell your story), post it on your website and then send an email newsletter to your contacts to get the message out there.
Even in isolation, this process is pretty effective at building your profile within your target market, but it is really a tool for engaging with those people who already know you, and who actively want to receive your information. But what about those who don’t know you? In the age of data privacy, using email to target the wider market is a challenge and not good business practice, but we live in the age of social so, there are other options for targeting these people.
Your target customers will often be using social media, so this is the obvious place to engage with them
The process of bringing the social angle into your joined-up marketing involves 3 steps:
- Select your social media platforms
- Set up your profiles
- Get Social….
Selecting your social media platforms
There are new platforms being launched all the time so it is impossible (and unwise!) to try to give a comprehensive list. This said, the 4 platforms that have made the most impact on SME marketing are:
I am going to focus on the three most important to the significant majority of our Business to Business clients this is Twitter and LinkedIn, though for anyone operating in more consumer markets, Facebook is also key.
Set up your profiles
I am not planning to go into details of the technicalities here as there is plenty of good stuff already out there:
From a joined-up marketing perspective, the key considerations are:
- Profile/account name – Make sure these are consistent, and fit closely with your company name. For example our Twitter name is @bsamarketing and LinkedIn address is /company/bsa-marketing. Even if you are not planning to use a social media channel right now, it might be worth setting up accounts, simply to secure the most appropriate name.
- Look and feel of your account home page – The look and feel of any social media presence should fit with the design of your website & emails. Where possible use the same logos, fonts, colour palette etc.
- Message – most importantly make sure that the message you are portraying through your social media presence, is totally consistent with your broader marketing message
Getting Social
Once everything is set up, it’s time to get social and launch into the world of social media, building connections & followers, and using these networks to support the communication of your message; as always, in a joined-up and sustainable way.
Don’t Dismiss Advertising
Marketing your business through Social Media has changed quite a lot over the past few years, and whilst it used to be possible to get great results from organic postings, although this is still a key element of marketing on social platforms, great content is in longer the only thing to consider.
Realistically, to be effective today, you need to consider adding advertising to the mix (Especially when looking at Facebook), but the data available ensures that marketing can be highly targeted, and the stats and analytics available allow careful monitoring of activity and results ensuring that advertising spend is used effectively.
We will be looking at this subject in more detail in future posts, but if you can’t wait and would like to explore the potential of joined-up social for your business straight away, please get in touch with us
