For many Australian business owners, the penny is finally starting to drop: social media is not a magic bullet when it comes to driving bottom-line growth.
In fact, handled poorly, it can easily become a time sink for employees and an impenetrable black hole when it comes to measuring return on marketing spend.
Put simply, as a business owner or marketing manager, it’s high time that you take the kid gloves off and start applying the same rigour with social as you would with any other form of direct digital marketing.
Let’s face it, the last eight years have been something of a free-for-all in the shiny new world of social.
On the plus side, the explosive growth of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest has opened up brand new doors to consumers’ hearts and minds. Coupled with the inexorable rise of mobile, it’s simply never been easier to individually interact with your target audience, wherever they happen to be.
To this day, truly toe-curling examples of social media misuse from even the biggest of brands are never hard to find.
There’s no denying that social is an integral part of the marketing mix and it would be a foolish company that ignores it. The days of simply flinging cash at a social wall and hoping some of it sticks are over however. It’s time to raise your social game.
This isn’t the first time we’ve been here as an industry of course. SEO, for example, has gradually morphed from the preserve of snake-oil salesmen and charlatans into a sensible, repeatable process involving technical competence, applied content strategy and online relationship building.
The world of SEM saw a similar surge of professionalism once the cheap clicks dried up and people realised the need for discipline, planning and accountability in their online campaigns.
When it comes to social, the stage we are at is that the tap has been turned on for a good while but the water is very close to being metered. Three trends in particular are converging:
- Social platforms are starting to turn the screw in terms of access to their audiences. Facebook are leading the charge.
- The impending mass arrival of ad blocking technology across the mobile ecosystem is going to apply serious pressure on both advertisers and platforms in the coming 18 months.
- Social users are increasingly sophisticated and picky in their preferences. Trawling for easy likes is not cutting it these days.
Put all those factors together and it’s not hard to see how social media is going to become an increasingly cutthroat arena in the very near future.
It also doesn’t take a genius to realise that, after a decade high on the hog, Australia is potentially heading into some pretty dicey economic territory. It will be a rare company indeed that can afford to be running under-performing marketing campaigns in the next couple of years.
Social media is set to remain a key part of the marketing mix for many years to come but the reality is that the rules of engagement have already fundamentally changed.
You need to be planning your campaigns strategically with aspects such as targeting, content creation, optimisation, analytics, and bullet-proof conversion tracking nailed down from the get-go.
If you’re looking to take your existing social media efforts to the next level, get in touch with our expert team at MediaSmiths and discover how we can help you avoid social media burnout and take control of your campaign strategy and implementation.
