How Marketers Can Be Proactive In New Marketing Channels
Marketers and Sisyphus have a lot in common. Most marketers start the day with the goal of growing a stream of high-quality leads, which can feel a lot like rolling a boulder up a hill. And as the number of new marketing channels continue to multiply and diversify, it’s easy to put your head down and power through content creation, data analyzation, and channel management day after day in an infinite loop.
While routines are a natural part of the work day, stagnation can easily become synonymous with your marketing strategy. Before you know it you could find yourself posting robotically on the same 3 channels without even noticing that your core audience isn’t there anymore. The general public’s content consumption preferences are constantly shifting, so your marketing strategy should have a degree of malleability to keep pace with your audience.
This all stems from the fact that modern marketers exist in the midst of an interesting shake-up in corporate and consumer relations. The expansion of social media channels has created a unique marketing environment where companies are interacting directly with individual users who are incredibly savvy and often much more creative and innovative in their use of new social networks. For marketers, this means that it’s simply no longer enough to push out traditional media, and even if you do explore new channels, consumers can tell the difference between stale campaigns that are redundant across all channels and those that are tailored to suit each platform’s unique quirks. So before you just open an account and start posting away in a newer content channel like Vine, put in the effort and do some serious reconnaissance work.
Image via Search Engine Journal
Here’s a starter checklist of points to consider along with helpful resources to reference as you plan to launch in a new channel:
- Schedule: How often do people post? Do people regularly check it first thing in the morning, on weekends, during work hours, or all of the above? Does posting more often increase your posts’ reach? Do posts have a time decay? For some help, check out Buffer’s Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails, and Blog Posts at the Best Time.
- Visuals: Is the use of images or videos common practice? If so, you should be using them, and they should look good. Find out the optimal size and/or file type. Here’s a handy breakdown of social media image conventions courtesy of Social Media Today.
- Advertising Channels: Most social networks have ways to promote post or pay for native ads, so make sure you know what they look like and how to manage and target your ads to make the most of your marketing spend. Here’s a basic breakdown of New Ways to Advertise on Social Media courtesy of Inc.
- Etiquette: You’re exploring a new content channel to be ahead of the curve, not to look like a Luddite. So put in the time to learn the lingo and rules of interaction on every platform. That means knowing what RT means on Twitter, and staying committed to individualized responses.
- Benchmarks: Learn the metrics for success on each platform (i.e. shares and likes on Facebook; retweets, favorites and followers on Twitter) and research some benchmarks based on popular players or comparable brands. Hint/shameless plug: TrackMaven has a slew of competitive insights to help you benchmark, track, and improve against your competitors.
A proactive attitude towards new channels is vital to maintain a fresh, relatable brand presence. Each new channel has a nuanced audience that could bring brand awareness to a different subset of leads, or engage them at different points of the sales cycle. This is especially true for marketers who are inheriting existing accounts and campaigns, or those undergoing rebranding efforts. Since we can’t personally give each of you an inspiring locker room speech about diversifying and orchestrating your campaigns across new channels, we’ll leave you with these 5 takeaways.
1. Personal and professional blend across most social media channels.
Don’t be afraid of social channels diminishing the professionalism and legitimacy of your brand. In fact, only 7% of marketers say they don’t use social for business. Just take a look at GE’s Instagram presence — they’ve managed to highlight the stunning engineering feats and innovations that are the calling card of their brand on the same platform that features Rich Kids of Instagram. Odds are you can find a way to tell your story in a different way that uniquely optimizes each channel’s social environment.
2. Address customer/audience pain points.
In the battle of content creation vs. content curation, more often than not you can find a better way to address the needs of your audience if you’re creating content yourself. Sharing others’ content is great to raise awareness and establish a network with fellow thought leaders, but nothing beats the ability to tailor your own content to the specific needs of your customers.
3. When it comes to new channels, an arsenal of original content is a gift that keeps on giving.
You can repurpose and link back to your previous work for multiplicative effects across various channels — so long as you aren’t just constantly duplicating the exact same content with the exact same copy on every channel. Use different platforms to your advantage to pitch and highlight your original content in different ways.
4. Identify your audience by buyer personas…
Your target audience likely has a variety of functional areas, levels of expertise, and reasons to adopt your product/strategies. Not only should you be identifying channels based on the typical personas you’re targeting, but you should also be tailoring your messages on each channel accordingly to reap a higher percentage of qualified leads.
5. And keep demographics in mind all the while.
Is your brand’s reach centered around age ranges or geographic zones? If so, then consider your content channels accordingly. YouTube, for example, reaches more 18-34 year olds in the U.S. than any cable network. If that’s not your target audience, then don’t waste your time and energy.
Ultimately, should you decide to expand your brand presence into a new channel, then make sure to approach the endeavor as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. It is up to you to keep your customers and potential customers engaged by hitting them with the right content, at the right time, on the right channel. So drop the Sisyphus routine, and keep innovating!
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
