Modern Marketing Equals Social Engagement

Key Takeaways

• ​Thanks to social media, marketing is everyone’s job.
• Successful social marketing is the result of a well-structured social business, which requires organization-wide buy-in, employee training and an evolved infrastructure.
  
• The end goal—transparent social marketing—may be simple enough, but this goal must be consciously woven into the very fabric of an organization’s values  to ignite a workforce of engaged brand ambassadors. 

Thanks to social media, marketing is everyone’s job. Social media now is a prospective buyer’s primary research tool ahead of purchase. The brand best equipped to provide useful content about a product or service and engage individual prospects through authentic brand ambassadorship is far more likely to win that prospective customer’s business. 

Such engagement requires specialized knowledge about the product or service in question, which often means that the employee, team or department responsible for a specific product or service also is the best-suited to talk about it. On one hand, this is a fantastic opportunity for the public to get information directly from the source. On the other hand, asking more employees to engage the public as part of their jobs inevitably means trusting people who aren’t trained marketers.

These are the needs of modern marketing, and it is important that businesses and marketing departments invest in the cultural infrastructure necessary to meet this challenge. This, of course, begs the question: If marketing today is everybody’s job, what does the modern marketing department look like?

Some worry that marketing departments will get absorbed, get outsourced or simply go away. Fortunately, we’re not seeing any of those options play out. Instead, social business leaders such as IBM, Adobe and Dell have redesigned their organizational models to prize employee empowerment through social training programs and increased access to useful branding or product information. 

Marketing may be everyone’s job, but someone still needs to be there to show them how to do it properly. And brand ambassadorship in social media depends on transparency and authenticity. While there are attendant risks, the potential rewards are far greater. 

Marketing in a Transparent Organiz​ation 

Transparency is, in some ways, both the problem and the solution. Today’s social marketing department must be much more involved in all aspects of the business than before. These employees may not have direct control over every outbound marketing channel, but they have a responsibility to empower social employees to represent their brand consistently through those channels. Members of the marketing team should be seen as leaders within an organization, as coaches for social engagement and as invaluable branding resources.

In fact, this is precisely what’s starting to happen within organizations that are a little farther ahead on the social adoption curve—and this change is being driven in the C-suite. According to a study of 524 CMOs released by IBM in April 2014, organizations with chief marketing officers who are considered “digital pacesetters,” or drivers of social business, were 60% more likely to be “outperformers” in revenue growth and profitability compared with industry peers. 

This data speaks to the power of leveraging a brand’s marketing message through both internal and external channels. And never has communication been more important at the executive level. According to the data, organizations in which the CMO and CIO “work well together” were 76% more likely to be outperformers. Further, 63% of CEOs actively involved their CMOs in business strategy decisions, making the CMO the second-most consulted executive behind the CFO (72%) in influencing such decisions.

Plotting a Course

Although the marketing department, led by the social CMO, is coming to have a more central role in business decisions, these changes do not happen in a vacuum. They must come about as part of an enterprise-wide effort to maximize the value of both social strategies and technologies. Even with organizational buy-in, adjusting to the marketing needs of the social business doesn’t happen overnight. 

In many organizations, a gap exists between aspiration and implementation, or what a marketing team wants to do versus what present organizational infrastructure is set up to support. The IBM study’s findings show that 94% of CMOs believe that advanced analytics will help them achieve their goals, yet a full 82% say that their organizations are not prepared to capitalize on this opportunity.

The question, naturally, is how to address this considerable gap. And the answer carries with it the idea that social marketing is an organizational value. Successful social marketing is the result of a well-structured social business, and a well-structured social business requires organization-wide buy-in, employee training and an evolved infrastructure. In other words, a commitment to social marketing means a commitment to a much larger process. A brand cannot communicate externally unless it first learns to communicate internally. A company’s external branding success, then, is merely a reflection of a successful, thriving employee culture.

So how does an organization plot a course for social business? It starts with commitment from the C-suite, including much-needed input from the CMO. The next step is to launch a pilot program, which can be structured around the following framework:

1. Discovery and insight gathering: Establish a task force to determine what organizational assets are available, define and prioritize organizational needs, and outline a strategy to begin moving forward. Identify employees interested in becoming social business evangelists and seek their input.

2. Social media policy: A 2013 Altimeter report found that while 85% of organizations surveyed had at least a minimal social media policy in place, only 52% had guidelines for engaging through external channels. For social marketing to succeed, employees must understand and internalize a set of organizational guardrails that will empower their actions.

3. Employee and executive training: Employees at all levels of a social business need to have at least a basic understanding of how organizational policy meets day-to-day practice. Employees interested in taking their training further often have the opportunity to become social leaders within the company.

4. Social and collaborative platforms: Organizations must remember that “social media” doesn’t just pertain to externally facing platforms. How social employees engage, share information and collaborate within an organization is even more important, and a variety of tools are available to meet organizational needs. 

5. Metrics and alignment to goals: Companies are increasingly coming to find that they’re able to measure just about anything, but the tricky part is knowing what to measure. For every push to justify ROI, there should be an equal push to justify ROC: return on human capital.

Naturally, organizations will approach their pilot programs differently, but however the details shake out, the results will reflect an organization’s commitment to the process. The more the marketing department is engaged in this process, the more these specialists are ready to act as branding coaches for the rest of a company’s employees, and the more authentic all employee interactions across an enterprise will become. The end goal—transparent social marketing—may be simple enough, but this goal must be consciously woven into the very fabric of an organization’s values in order to ignite a workforce of engaged brand ambassadors. 

Ajeet Kumar
PGDM 3rd SEM