The Play Book
social media is such an important component to the marketing body
My pragmatic approach in hypothetics
Let’s imagine for instance, if your client (YourFederalCreditUnion.org) needs to address one of the following:
- Imbalance of indirect/direct lending accounts
- Business imperative to increase deposits FAST
- Activate long-standing stagnant but high-liability accounts
- Conversion of existing mortgage holding members, to refinanced members
- Increase of small business loans
- Or perhaps converting HELOC accts, to an all-encompassing jumbo loan
- Acquisition of new customers
Any of the business imperatives outlined above can be marketed with SM to transition a member further down the funnel with the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Case example:
Picking one of the business cases from above at total random, allow me to draw up an example for “Activate long-standing stagnant but high-liability accounts” and how Social Media Marketing can help in this situation.
Quick and dirty:
“Activate long-standing stagnant but high-liability accounts”
Pen Air sponsors a program of ‘Free NFL Dolphins tickets for 2’ for every customer (who recvs the promotional offer) that has a total of $3500+ of deposits in a span of 3 months. *Deposits have to be in the form of auto deposits from work, Social Security, or other financial institutional sanctioned transaction.
We would design a campaign around this promotional offer by sending out marketing ads that were designed in-house to platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Ads, email campaigns. (*only those that are in the delta that we manually pulled from Pen Air’s database. We would post from the company’s SM accounts and pull marketing ad placement to the specific persons that we have contact information for.)
- Highly targeted SM campaign that displays ads to the segmented audience that we set as the ‘control’, and perhaps B-test to a different set of contacts for a diff ad.
- Utilize videos that Pen Air already has produced to our marketing AD
- LinkedIn is now on record as one of top 20 websites in the U.S. We need to ride that bandwagon, or we’ll lose our chances to attend the dance. (See attached document)
In summary, we would start off with getting a very hygienic delta of members that originates from the Credit Unions data warehouse. We would communicate to that Credit Union that we needed a very focused and segmented list of members that had accounts with no activity of any kind within a certain length of time. (‘activity is such a subjective word. We need to further refine this delta, by first defining what “activity” means. Does it mean no contact of any kind, even from the brick and mortar locations? Does “activity” mean no deposits, or no transactions of any kind whatsoever? Does “activity” mean 3, 2, or 1 deposit in the last 3 months or 3 years? Let’s define what we first mean by activity and inactivity. Do we also only include a certain locale and age demographic within the network of branch locations?)
The goal of this evolution is also to enable us to manage this aspect of the business with some standpoint of measurement to glean and strategize for new direction or adjustments; because ‘you cannot manage, what you do not measure’. Once the plan is in place we would take note of the current standings and readings of the metrics involved in this campaign so as to provision us an analog to compare our new data from which we can properly and easily glean where or what kind of tactical adjustments need to be made to achieve a more perfect execution. (The analog being – where we were before we staked our flag on the moon, and where we want to be in our space of ‘the win’.)
Facebook is still proven to be one of the top 5 Social Media platforms being utilized for the purpose of advertising. And dependent on what we are marketing to our partners, or our partners customers, we need to make fine-tuned adjustments on what we show, and what platform we use. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, etc are all very different platforms. Social media can be a different job-specific tool that could be better suited than some other tool in our tool chest. For instance, Google is geared more for people who are in the interest or decision phase of their funnel. (Think the Marketing AIDA model. ‘Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action’) Their SI (Search Intent) is motivated by getting to a solution to a problem they are already actively wrestling with. Facebook is different in that it typically serves for the ‘awareness’ phase of your customers funnel phase.
“Facebook ads are primarily for showing ads to a targeted audience who possibly don’t even know there is a solution to their problem or that your product exists. They may not even know that they have a problem to begin with. Google search ads are primarily for showing your ad to people who are searching for a solution to their problem or product need at that very moment.” -Ben LeDonni Forbes Councils Member
Google (Which has long been the number 1 most viewed website in the world) has lost a great deal of market share, specifically in Marketing Advertising space, to SM platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Yes, Facebook is on the downward trend, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook is now ineffectual. Quiet the contrary, they are still being used very heavily!
How effective has Facebook been in marketing, working with businesses on their quest to provide reach and conversions to their marketing goals? Some examples of FB’s effectiveness can be deduced by evidential significance with respect to Google updates; having made a great deal of changes in the way they serve up SERPs to its users, machine learning updates, hyper localized search components, and a myriad of other helpful ways Google tries to solve for ‘SI’.
What is Google doing to adjust its tactics to compete with SM?
Google is now making it harder for a user to distinguish an ‘ad’ or ‘paid’ link on organic SERPs, ‘snack pack update’, the ‘BERT’ update, the ‘Broad Core Algorithm update’ (and its effect on YMYL websites. See illustration below), etc. These major updates that Google has released just illustrates their efforts to change with the times and what is going on in the market as it relates to who and where customers/users are being served and the quality of that service rendered.
Social media disrupts Googles party
In 2019, Google has already released half a dozen very important yet highly effectuating updates in the way it runs its algorithms in their already highly sophisticated machine learning (AI), human PQ-Rs (Page Quality Raters), etc. Because Google is losing Ad market share, they’ve had to rebalance their efforts, strategies, logistics operations, and business focus so that they can better align for their users and regain some of that foothold that they lost to SM platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Utilizing Facebook ads or SM posts, Linkedin ads/postings, etc will enable and empower EAS to reach out to our partners’ customers by highlighting and bringing a connected and streamlined experience that aligns to the marketing campaigns that we design and originate from EAS. SM is just once facet of my Marketing strategy that we will manage and sell to our partners. It, I believe, is a very effectual component of our marketing strategies.
In summary:
Step 1:
We first need to understand the lay of the land. We need to listen closely to the partner and delve deep into what they are wrestling with. Outline clearly what their issues are, and then ascertain what their intentions are. Observe phase.
Step 2:
Digest the information and orient yourself in relation to the variables that you need to deal with. Take into account the timelines, resources, money budgets, what digital properties you currently use and the health of those systems and processes.
Once all of the above considerations above are taken into account, you’ll need to come up with a plan of action. Plan which platforms in SM you will use, and the tactics you’ll execute in your campaign. Orient and decision phase.
Step 3:
Then we execute. By the merits of having already clearly mapped out the way with carefully calculated and thoughtful reconnoitering, we launch the missile. Then we provide proof in the analog of the representations and proof of the distinct points of the dawning, day-day, and finally the sunset of our campaign. Finally giving proof (in an official report produced by the Marketing Team of EAS) of performance of our measurements to our partners, that not only give an outline of the work completed and the new paradigm of a successful and new reality, but to also serve to clearly evince our talents, hard work, and meaningful investments, in the Arts and Sciences of Marketing. Action phase.
