Social Media has revolutionized marketing. It gives brands direct access to engage with a diverse audience, but it comes with certain pitfalls. If your business has a frail, half-baked strategy, it’ll reflect negatively on your brand sooner or later. Here are few common mistakes that businesses make with their social media strategies.
1. Failure to set clear goals
A social media strategy should have clear and quantifiable objectives. Before executing anything, a brand must ask themselves the following questions.
· What message does the brand want to promote in social?
· Who is their target audience?
· Why would the target audience listen to the brand?
· What action does the brand want the viewers to take post engagement?
· What are the various measurability criteria?
Once answers to these questions are defined, a clear and concise action plan must be formalized. The measurability factors need to be put in place that will measure conversations, conversions much more and beyond increase in Twitter followers.
2. Failure to collaborate internally
Success is always a team effort. At times brands fail to understand this which leads to the digital media wing and related activities of the brand being operated in silos. The idea is for the sales, marketing, HR and all other departments to work together for a larger share of voice online.
3. Failure to collaborate with other brands/initiatives
Collaboration with competitors is an absolute No-No in the mainline advertising industry and hence the same extended itself to digital when it all started. But digital is changing. Brands should go bold and fresh in their approach and embrace the concept of collaborative ecosystem. They should create a shared industry database to identify such content.
4. Lack of long-term commitment
It often happens that we begin a new project with much enthusiasm but gradually slow down our efforts until the project comes to complete halt. Even when it comes to social media marketing (creation and maintenance of blogs, creatives, other content pieces), same behaviour is observed. Brands forget that social media marketing is unlikely to yield immediate results. Social media is basically relationship building. Every relationship suffers fatally when one part disappears suddenly. That’s why companies need to make sure that they have the stamina and the budgets for long term gains. Stopping a social media engagement suddenly and abruptly is much worse than having no engagement at all.
5. Lack of online-offline consistency
Customers don’t think in terms of PR, marketing, customer service, product development etc. They just see the ‘brand’. So, if a brand communicates with different content in TV, print and social media, consumers will get confused. Brands must ensure that their messaging is consistent across platforms.
In nutshell, success on social media requires a great amount of strategic thinking, a deep understanding of the brand and a thoughtful customer engagement route. A brand must take out time to develop the right strategy before going social.
