Seven Deadly Sins - webdam.comwebdam.com/download-resources/7sins-of-social-media_guide.pdf · Guide 7 eadly Sins of Social Media Marketing webdam.com | [email protected] | ©2018

Seven Deadly Sinsof Social Media Marketing

Guide | 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media Marketing

2webdam.com | [email protected] | ©2018 Webdam

The road to social media hell is paved with good intentions.

Marketers want to create positive engagement, but a tone-deaf tweet or half-baked idea can burn a brand’s reputation in an instant. Remember the video with Kendall Jenner handing out Pepsi at a protest? It’s one of the best examples of how sideways a well-meaning campaign can get.

That said, spectacular fails are relatively rare, and rarely as destructive as the 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media Marketing. These pernicious practices cause the biggest problems because their effects are cumulative. Damage is done over time and can be tough to detect. Until it’s too late.

Most brands can stay in social media’s good graces by committing to a few virtuous practices. You might still have to ask forgiveness for mistakes, but as long as you’re working to overcome the bungles explained below, your efforts will be blessed.



There are over 2.5 billion social media users. That’s a lot of potential customers, but you can’t be all things to all people. The number one mistake brands make is not targeting a specific audience with a specific message. When it comes to social media marketing, if it’s not targeted, it’s not optimized. This means you’re either not getting content to the best potential customers or you’re spending too much to reach them.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn all offer powerful tools that allow companies to be unbelievably specific about who will be served ads. You can tailor for precise geography and demographics. For example, if you’re selling wetsuits, you might aim at coastal dwellers who click on radical surf videos. Since landlocked non-surfers aren’t likely buyers, there’s no need to waste resources on them.

You have to know who to attract and how to attract them. This is where buyer personas come in. They represent idealized customers, based on research and data from your real customers. There are several ways to create them. Interviews with actual customers, online surveys, sales info and any data related to your buyers’ habits and interests can help them become more effective.

Deadly Sin #1: Unfocused AudienceGluttony for customers can tempt you to try marketing to everyone.



Video is almost 10 times more likely to engage customers than text alone. Even if your content strategy is doing well, it’s possible to improve it by adding video. According to the experts at IMPACT, “Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.” Their research also shows video can increase landing page conversions by 80% or more. That’s huge.

Shooting and editing video has traditionally been expensive for brands, however, that’s changing fast. Smartphone cameras shoot high-quality footage and there are plenty of user-friendly video editing tools. Webdam’s clipping feature allows you to make quick edits on the fly. If you need a short 15-second clip for a Facebook ad, you can just make it on the spot without video editing software or expertise. Thanks to our integrations, they can be shared directly from our digital asset management platform to most social media sites.

Video editing services like Sightworthy can help turn raw footage, or even stale content, into short videos that get attention. For one of their clients, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, they recycled an old long-form video into several 20- to 30-second videos. After testing different versions, the final edit pulled in over a million views on Instagram.

Deadly Sin #2: Inadequate VideoAnyone who is greedy for engagement should be using more video.



Elias St. Elmo Lewis was the hottest marketing mind of 1898. Lewis is barely remembered today. But he created one of the most important, and still relevant, concepts in marketing: the AIDA sales funnel. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Social media is great at generating attention, interest and desire. Action is where many online efforts fall short. If you aren’t explicit about what someone should do, they aren’t likely to do it. Be clear about what benefits you’re offering and how to take advantage of them. A solid call to action, or CTA, can generate sales, and increase leads and conversion rates. CTAs should make sense based on the social media platform where it appears and it should be in a voice consistent with the brand.

And don’t forget the importance of social sharing. Asking viewers to share offers with their social network can be as beneficial as having them click on a link themselves. According to the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report, “83% percent of online respondents in 60 countries say they trust the recommendations of friends and family.”

Deadly Sin #3: Unclear DirectionPeople might lust after your posts, but they should ultimately take some action.

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Jay Baer, author of Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, says, “A lack of response is actually a response. It’s a response that says, ‘We don’t care about you very much’.” If you want your customers to think you don’t care about them, it’s simple, don’t respond to them. This can have a major effect on business.

According to Gartner, failure to respond via social channels can lead to a 15% increase in churn rate for existing customers. It’s not just the people who reach out who are affected. Conversocial, a customer service company, reported 88% of consumers will be less likely to buy from you after seeing unanswered questions.

To keep customers engaged and happy, have a plan in place to respond quickly to social comments and questions. A good rule of thumb is to reply within 24 hours, but the quicker you react, the faster you can solve problems. Make sure your team understands what the appropriate tone and messaging is. If the situation escalates, try and take the conversation offline to email or a phone call.

If you are short staffed and can’t answer everyone quickly, consider using social media management tools like Hootsuite. It brings your social networks together and integrates with hundreds of business applications, including Webdam. You can use it to find responses quickly and monitor ongoing conversations, which is a huge help when managing multiple platforms.

Deadly Sin #4: Slow ResponseIf you don’t respond to customers when they connect with you, you’ll feel their wrath.



Social media is all about timing. Having the right content on hand, at the right time, allows brands to post better content more quickly. Because of intellectual property laws, companies can’t just grab anything they want from the internet and post it, unless they want a lawsuit.

Brands with large social media presences can have thousands of digital assets such as video, audio, pictures, or even GIFs and cinemagraphs. Since each platform has its own requirements for file sizes and formats, you often end up with multiple versions of each asset spread across a number of machines and platforms. If you aren’t storing them correctly, you can end up with a huge, unsearchable mess.

Digital asset management (DAM) can help organize all your social media files so you have immediate access to them. Using metadata, the information used to describe an asset, helps searches. For example, if you need a picture of a summer party that happened back in 2016, users in a DAM might search for “summer” or “pictures” or “2016.” Metadata makes it easy to find what you’re looking for.

DAMs are also helpful for managing content. Creatives can set assets up for specific platforms and store them in specific folders. Permissions allow access to assets to be restricted. This is useful when materials are time sensitive or have expiring licenses.

Deadly Sin #5: Inaccessible AssetsWhen it comes to managing your creative, sloth can cost you time and money.



AdWeek predicts 84% of all marketing communication will be visual by 2018. That means your brand, more than ever, will have to rely on its visual identity to stand out. But that doesn’t mean post whatever loud image gets clicks. Visuals are an extension of your brand promise. The more consistent they are, the more effective your marketing will be.

Consistent visuals allow people to identify your brand and know what to expect from it. Though, you should still try to surprise and delight them because novelty is tremendously important for social media. Once you have built a reputation through the consistent delivery of your brand promise, you have permission to evolve and expand. Having a baseline look allows you to evolve offerings into even more options for potential customers without confusing them.

Your brand guidelines can help inform the color palette, photos and copy tone you use for social media. You want to make sure your guidelines are accessible, but also easy to update and share. Brand management applications, like Brand Connect, are useful for this.

Deadly Sin #6: Inconsistent VisualsCreatives who take pride in their brand never let its look become chaotic.

CREATIVE BRIEFS



This is perhaps the biggest social media sin of all. If you’re boring or uninspiring, you will be ignored. And that’s probably worse than anything. This doesn’t mean you should be off-brand or tone-deaf. But you should try to be creative. Collaboration is key.

Start with well-written creative briefs. As projects develop, use digital proofing tools to make sure everyone is working in the right direction. Workstream, our project management platform, is built specifically to enhance the creative workflow. It focuses on assets, adapts to the way your team works, automates approval paths and makes reviews and markups simple for designers and non-designers alike.

Once you’re working efficiently, you can begin to think bigger, like Elon Musk. Tesla is famous for having a $0 marketing budget. But that doesn’t stop them from lighting up the internet. When Musk’s SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket into space, it sent a Tesla Roadster along for the ride. Video footage from the car’s cockpit earned over 15 million views within two months.

Deadly Sin #7: Lackluster CreativityBe the envy of your industry by focusing on good design and compelling content.


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If you don’t have rockets, there’s still Twitter. In 2017, KFC’s creative agency, Weiden+Kennedy, had the chicken restaurant’s Twitter handle follow exactly 11 people: the five Spice Girls and six guys named herb. A random social media manager, named Mike Edgette, finally figured it out it was a nod to KFC’s secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices.

His Twitter exploded with over 700K likes, 318K retweets and 4.6K comments. The story spread to the mainstream news cycle, earning millions of dollars in free advertisement. As a reward for figuring out the Easter egg, KFC sent Edgette an enormous portrait of himself riding on the back of Colonel Sanders.

If you avoid the 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media, you should be able to work miracles like Tesla and KFC. Or at the very least, keep yourself out of trouble. If you’ve committed any of these social media sins, you are forgiven. But now that you’re in a state of social media grace, it’s time to start producing great content.

Documents

Seven Deadly Sins - webdam.comwebdam.com/download-resources/7sins-of-social-media_guide.pdf · Guide 7 eadly Sins of Social Media Marketing webdam.com | [email protected] | ©2018