Chanlder Garden Marketing: Finding your brand voice on social media

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Finding your brand voice on social media

Having a strong brand voice online is crucial as you grow a business. People look to your company's website and blog posts, as well as its social media outlets, when they are trying to get a feel for its missions and what it represents. Believe it or not, every social post helps define your brand for consumers, so it is crucial that you take each one seriously. Here are some tips that will help you establish a strong and cohesive brand message through the use of social media.

Defining your brand

Before you start posting pictures, blogs, and other content online, have a good idea of the overarching image you want to present. In this exercise, simplicity is best. Start by trying to describe your brand in one word. While it might feel as though you are oversimplifying a complex concept (i.e. your business and its mission), using a single word as a road map makes marketing efforts much easier. Before you ever post, you weight the value as it relates to that word.

Defining your brand in this fashion requires a great deal of soul-searching and a look into the future. How sustainable is your business model? If you see yourself branching out into many more directions, your one-word brand concept may seem significantly larger than your current business model. Do not let that concern you. Play the long game when you think of company branding.

Social media and your brand voice

Once you know your business and see a clear direction for your brand, it is time to put some effort into your social posts. Try to create value in every post in order to align with your overall brand mission. No matter what your goals are in your specific industry, you want to be known as a brand that takes itself (and the time of its followers) seriously. Always think quality over quantity with your social posts—even when you are squeezing them into 140 characters. Frivolously posting on Facebook or Twitter will lead to consumers ignoring future posts.

More importantly, figure out how to tie images into your brand mission and social media strategy. Photos get more page views and shares than posts that rely solely on words. Brands that specialize in design, fashion, art, or photography have it easy in this regard. For a business that has no ostensible visual angle, find a way to get images into the themes of your post. Law firms, pet adoption services, and food truck owners each have ways of making noise on social media with the right pictures.

Finding help from followers and advocates

When you are stumped on how to write about your brand, take a tip from the many social media users who already cover your brand in their daily activities. Social media followers who comment on your products and services can become brand advocates—a company's best allies—when you engage them in the right way. This give-and-take relationship with brand ambassadors and advocates also allows you to hone in on your brand voice. The response people have to your business should not be lost on your marketing efforts.

To engage followers and advocates more, consider offering them samples of new products to review or test while you are still developing them. You might consider reaching out to bloggers and journalists for their takes on your products, and for a measured review. These steps all allow you to gain more exposure while igniting conversations about your brand on social media. As long as you monitor and respond to the activity, you are helping differentiate your brand and present its voice to the public through direct interaction.

Nailing down a company's brand voice on Facebook or Twitter might seem like a tall order for a social media novice, but offers from partners in The UPS Store can help. Constant Contact social campaigns can push your posts out to more followers, expanding the reach of your company's mission.

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The 5 Business Processes of Marketing Resource Management (MRM)

Planning and Budgeting: - At the forefront of a successful MRM implementation is the planning stage. The planning of an organization’s marketing strategy ensures all 3 MRM components; people, process, and technology align. Although budgeting also plays an important role, the planning stage revolves highly around scheduling and resource optimization.Planning, and having an overview of all your ongoing marketing activities, increases overall campaign visibility and ensures uniform resource distribution. These resources are spread across campaigns in order of their complexity, priority, and allocated budget. These three key drivers will allow for more efficient marketing budgets across your different lines of business.Additionally, when it comes to mature MRM implementations, historical data such as past budgets, resource efficiency, and campaign ROI are taken into consideration.
Business Process Management: - Often misjudged, the importance of a robust process management system will ensure the success of an effective MRM implementation. An important component in this stage is across-the-board traceability of all marketing related processes and resources.Merging these elements together into a process management system is achievable with the use of workflows. These workflows provide an efficient way of consolidating tasks, resources, and creatives in a centralized location; giving executives visibility into approvals, milestones, and project completion.
Approval: - Approvals, another important part of a process management system, ensure proper accountability throughout the entire project. Large scale MRM systems will often require several stages of approval cycles. So whether it be creative, legal, or financial, most marketing collateral will go through multiple approval stages before moving into production.Predefined management procedures are the driver behind the definition of workflow steps. However, approval processes tend to vary across organizations and industries. Therefore, they usually are the reason for many cost and time efficiency gains.As an organization evolves and adopts a mature MRM approval procedure, a change management system can play a significant role in achieving even higher process efficiency gains. Through tracking changes, executives can maintain visibility. This encourages transparency and typically yields greater results with both your marketing campaign returns.
Reusability: - As a median MRM value, reusability is one of the best techniques for improving business processes. With today’s digital marketing world, marketing objectives gear towards personalizing and tailoring down communications. Consequently, this creates multiple versions and variations for each piece of collateral. When managing the high volume of creatives, along with their approval processes, it is important to have a digital asset management system integrated within the MRM solution. While we often associate reusability with assets, it also significantly improves the efficiency of various other marketing components like campaign briefs and financial information.
Measurement - A successful MRM framework depends on performance measurement methodologies to track the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities. These performance efficiency gains are tracked across resource, process, and budgetary levels. Measuring resource capabilities goes from tracking the role of a particular resource to managing entire marketing teams. To properly track these marketing activities, the measurement concept requires the use of metrics and KPIs. These marketing metrics and KPIs are defined by corporate objectives and vary depending on the industry. These represent campaign-specific metrics with ROI, response rates, the number of impressions, and offer conversion rates – amongst others.After completing this stage, compare the results to the estimates you initially identified in the planning phase. You can then feed those results back into the planning stages of future campaigns. These iterations will help with resource optimization and to ensure proper budget allocation.