You Ask, I Answer: New Marketer Social Media Guidance?

In today's episode, Alessandra asks, what do you want to see in social media guidance for new marketing professionals? Ooh, I mean, there's so much to unpack when it comes to the kinds of information we would like new marketing professionals to have about social media. I would say number one, be clear on your goals. Know what it is you're trying to accomplish. The easiest way for any marketing professionals to clarify this is to ask your supervisor or stakeholders of the powers that be, hey, what am I getting my bonus for this year?

Right? And if the answer is nothing, like might be time to update that LinkedIn profile. But on a more serious matter, knowing what your goals are, knowing what you're trying to achieve is essential, right? What problem is social media trying to solve at your organization? Do you have an awareness problem?

Do you have a trust problem? Do you have a lead generation problem? Do you have an e-commerce sales problem? The answer to that question will dictate how you use social media, at least if you're going to use it effectively. Some channels, awareness builders like YouTube, other channels, conversion builders like uh LinkedIn.

And of course, this varies from company to company, client by client. So you got to be clear on your goals. Second, and this should be no surprise if uh if you've been following me for any amount of time, you've got to be clear on how you're going to measure success, right? What numbers are you using to measure whether or not you're moving closer to or further away from your goal? If you're reporting on a whole bunch of things that don't have line of sight to your your goals, your outcomes, you're gonna be at best really frustrated and at worst updating your LinkedIn profile because no one will have any idea what it is that you do for the company.

So that means getting away from spitting up numbers and measures just because it looks good on a dashboard because you've got to have something to report. You've got to have a measurement strategy that reflects the goal you're trying to achieve. So if you have brand awareness as a uh a measure, then certainly things like audience growth would be important, right? Uh showing a mathematically statistical relationship between your social media work and things like branded organic search, where people are searching for your company by name, asking for you by name. Uh that would be an excellent awareness measure.

When you look at things like lead generation, if leads are your goal, um, you'd better be able to show through source medium tracking that social channels are at least getting people to uh the lead generation opportunity, if not getting them to convert. Ultimately, you have to be able to look at the measures you have, the activities you have, and connect the two and say, we did this, which resulted in this, and that result feeds into the goal like this. The easiest way to do that is to develop what my uh friend and partner Katie Robert calls uh user stories. As a CMO, I need to prove the ROI of social media so that I know how much budget to get, and from that story, you can unpack it and turn it into you know real measures. You clearly outlined ROI, which means return on investment.

So now you know that you need to go find your investment in social media, and you need to figure out what the return, the money you earned uh is on that. So those would be the big things I would say for social media guidance for marketing professionals. Be clear on your goals and know how you're gonna measure them. After that, the best advice I can offer is use social media, particularly organic, unpaid social media, in a way that fits your brand, right? That uh adheres to your brand style guide, that adheres to uh the tone of voice that you want to have, the personality to the extent that you there is one.

And if you don't know what that is, take the time to solve for it, to write it out, to think it through, and say, Yep, this is gonna be our strategy. So for example, uh at Trust Insights, we have a sort of very matter-of-fact tone of voice. We just publish stuff and we leave a lot of the um attraction of new audiences and personality to the individuals on the team on their personal accounts to be able to attract audiences and then uh direct attention towards the the the more of the company style stuff. Um that has traditionally been sort of how we've approached it, and it seems to be working reasonably well. Uh, for myself, uh, I approach social media as a way to share stuff with people that has value uh that they can get some benefit from, and then ideally, if people receive enough value over enough time, they may ask to hopefully to say, well, how can I provide value back?

In which case, say, hey, buy some stuff from my company. So those are kind of the general strategies. But that's the guidance I would give to any new marketing professional who's interested in social media. Be clear on your goals, be clear on your measures, and then know how you want to approach social media and use it in a way that fits the brand of the company and document all that stuff. I know it's a pain, it's not fun to document stuff, but in order to have any kind of continuity, in order to be consistent, to have consistency, you gotta have stuff written down.

So good question. Uh there's a lot more to unpack here, but let's see what questions you have about this social media guidance, and maybe we can dig deeper into any areas that are of interest to you. Thanks for watching.