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 Organization
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
B2B marketers employ freelancers to execute ‘brand design’ tasks over and above anything else, new data published by 
