Transcripts
1. Introduction: Social media gives us such a powerful
opportunity as marketers. We have our fingertips immediate
access to our audiences. They, in turn, can also have immediate
access to us. In this class I'm going to
share with you the art of meaningful communication
to ensure that we're delivering amazing customer
service at every point. [MUSIC] Good day. I'm Colin. I'm a marketing coach. Today's class is about boxing communications,
social media, and how they interact
to help you to deliver unforgettable experiences for your clients,
for your customers. We will be looking
at ways to create social media campaigns and objectives and
content to create, but we'll be looking at it
through a different lens. We're going to be
looking at it through the lens of our target audience. This class is for marketing professionals,
marketing teams, anybody that wants to create real-time interaction
with their audience. My goal is that with the skills I'm going to
teach you in this class, you can then apply
this to create wonderfully dynamic
and rich interactions with your audiences. [MUSIC]
2. Setting Your Objectives and Channels: Social media brings with it an intimacy that
didn't exist before. If you think about the way
that we used to do business, organizations and
brands with distance, far away thing, that we couldn't
really interact with. There's a revolution happening in the way that we communicate. We expect that
immediacy of response. As a marketer, sometimes
that can make you feel a little overwhelmed.
It's quite challenging. How do we get a handle on it? Well, that's what we're going
to go into in this class. I'm going to help
and guide you to identify the channels
that are important, the measures that
we need to take, and the types of things that we want to be doing and saying and how we want to
show up as a brand. There is a really powerful
tool that we can use, a template that we can fill in to consider the channels
that we're going to use and the goals that
we want to achieve on each of those channels
from different perspectives. It's called the Bagger
Lumley Hansel wheel. It's really powerful
because it's broken into segments and it's also
broken into layers. At the very core, we have the consumer layer, and then outside of
that we have our brand. Then outside of that
we have the channel. Then outside of that, we have our internal
organization. These are the people that
our team interacts with. Each of those layers are broken into segments of objectives. What does success look
like for the consumer, for the brand, for the channel, for the internal organization? Most brands have two
types of objectives; engagement objectives and
financial objectives. Engagement objectives
are likes and shares and reach and clicks and followers and all of
those kinds of things. Financial objectives are leads, conversions, sales,
revenue, profitability. Then we can follow the
wheel around and look at where are we right now
in each of these layers, in each of these areas. What do we need to do to drive that objective for the consumer? What do we need to do to drive the objective for the brand? Where do we need to show up? What channels do we
need to play on? Where are our audience
hanging around? How will we go about
implementing this? Because we're not acting on
our own for the most part, we interact with our colleagues, with different departments,
with different teams, with different locations, how will we actually make it work across each
of these layers? A really important question
that is often overlooked. How did we do? Did we get there? How successful were we? We have to be able to
measure those objectives. Armed with that knowledge, we can then feed
back into the cycle of our objectives
and where are we now and then we
follow on a process. This becomes a cycle of
planning for you to bring consistency but
most of all to make everything that you do
so much more powerful, so much more impactful. Your action from this class is to set some objectives around
what it is that you're looking to achieve with your social media efforts and choose the channels that
you're going to focus on. It's important that you focus on the channels where your target
audience is most active. This is about meaningful
relationships and being consistent
and showing up where your clients are
so that when they have that need to immediately
hear from you, you're there. You don't have to be
there everywhere, but you have to be there on
the channels that matter. Decide what those
channels are and then you have the starting
point for success.
3. Understanding Your Audience : It's interesting when we
look at how as marketers, we communicate with
our target audiences. If we look back to the original approach to
marketing communications, it was very much we
create messages based on what we understand to
be our target audiences. We push those messages out, but the voice of the customer
often was left unheard. There was no dynamic
interaction outside of maybe focus groups and research and questionnaires
and surveys, etc. Now because of this seismic
shift in how we communicate, there is a wonderful
opportunity that presents itself
to all marketers, to actually give voice to our
audience and allow them to shape the messages and to shape the products and
services that we offer. Let's start by looking at that
process of communication. We have a sender of
information and we have a receiver and the message is passed between the
sender and the receiver. The message passes in between, but the sender encodes
the message and the receiver decodes
that very same message. Now, if we were in
a perfect scenario, everything that
was said would be interpreted the right way. But you and I know that
that is not the case because we all have limitations, we all have beliefs, we all have bias, and we also have limited
levels of understanding. What can happen
often is the message that we think we're
sending out is decoded or encoded in a
way that causes confusion, that alters how our
message is received, so if we carry on in the old
paradigm, making messages, encoding them and shipping them out into the world, guess what? We're going to alienate
our customers, we're going to alienate the people that we are
sending those messages to, whether it's internal
teams, stakeholders, community, customers,
or any of the above. Giving voice to our customers in this process and allowing
this to be a back and forth to and fro of communication
really is the key to unlocking the amazing potential that is offered to you
with social media. The challenge we
have as marketers is to really allow that
voice to be heard, but also to utilize
that voice to the benefit of our brand and to the benefit of
everybody involved. How do we do it?
How do we do that? Think about reactive
and proactive. Reactive is the negative
review that pops up on Facebook and we have
to do something about it, we have to react to manage
the reputation of our brand. What would proactive look like? What would it look like
if we were to Canvas up front and have a forum and have an open discussion about
areas for improvement. I want you to think about these questions just to prompt you in the
right direction so that you can make some useful and actionable decisions
as to how you go about showing up on social and how we can actively
manage our reputation, actively manage the engagement, if we can preempt
and be proactive, that's the best approach. But there does need to be an
element of social listening, there needs to be an element of understanding what's
going on so that we can be active and an integral
part of those discussions. What I would love for
you to do is to look and consider the areas
where you are active, where your clients are active, like we mentioned earlier. Once you've got a
list of channels, I'd love for you to brainstorm some questions, some polls, some types of content
that you could create to push out
into social to be proactive in your approach
to customer service. Take out a pen and paper
and start to map out some proactive approaches to this whole realm
of social media.
4. Planning Paths of Communication: There are multiple
forms of communication. There are three that we need
to concern ourselves with. The first communication
is one-way communication. We may create content that
tells the story of our brand. We may share success
stories from clients, share how their experience has been amazing with our brand, creating content and pushing that content out into the world. Then we have two-way
communication where we are beginning
the process of interacting with
starting to give the voice to our audience. This is where that begins to be a dialogue between two parties, so we share content,
they respond. In social, it can be engagement, it can be commenting, it can be all manner of things, but also it can be them
beginning the conversation. It's not just a one-way
thing, remember. They can start the conversation. This is where it becomes really
important for us to have mechanisms in place so that we can listen to those
conversations. People are nine times more
likely and probably more to vocalize a negative than they are to
vocalize a positive. Imagine we get complaints about a product and we have a system of responses and processes for actually dealing with that. Now version 2.2 of our products no longer
has those issues. You could set up a
TweetDeck, for example, that monitors and listens for every time that your
brand is mentioned. You can use sentiment trackers
and online tools to keep an ear to the ground for
mentions of your brand. Remember, we talked about
proactive and reactive. We always want to try and
be proactive where we can. That's how you're going to get the best results
from your efforts, from your energy,
from your attention. Then the third form
of communication is real-time on live streams. For example, our job
as marketers is to accommodate any and all
forms of communication, good and bad because
it's by fully embracing all forms that we're
able to make the most. When it comes to communicating
on social media, we really want to be thinking
about behavioral change. Think about the think,
feel, do framework. When we're creating content, what do we want people to think? How do we want people to feel? What do we want people to do? Think and feel are two streams. We've got the
rational, the think. I think this product will
work for me because, and then we have the
feel, the emotional. I really feel like this is
the best solution for me because and then the do is
where they can't converge. What do we want them
to actually do? What's the action? This is where as marketers, we are critically
aware of the CTA, the call to action. We're always looking to
drive action. What next? I want you to ask the question of all the content
that you put out. So what next? That's critical in all of this. Our job as marketers is to accommodate the
whole spectrum here, from one-way communication
being intentional, covering all of the basis of how we want to elicit
that behavioral change, crafting messages that really convey the values of our brand, accommodating the problem side, the two-way communication. This can be positive
and negative, having a consistent approach and a thoughtful approach
to how we deal with that really will pay
dividends for you.
5. Putting Social to Work for You : When we know who our
target audience is, and we understand how we want them to think,
feel, and do, our behavioral action
is in our content, we need a framework
that we can implement across all of the social
channels that we operate on. It's a simple model
that talks about acquiring attention,
encouraging participation, whether in the channel or outside of the channel or
in different channels, and driving, sharing,
and engagement. How are we going to
acquire that attention? What are we going to use
to drive participation? What mechanisms are
we going to put in place to encourage engagement? Also, what content would create that shareability,
that virality? Consider also the brand voice. What's appropriate
for your brand? All of these things
need to be thought through and be congruent. I encourage you to
feed these back into the planning circle that we shared at the very beginning, so that you can build a holistic and complete
plan of action, and how you're going
to potentially embrace new technologies, new ways of engaging. Will you consider
these newer formats? Will you consider
live, for example? Lives give you such
great potential to engage in a very
meaningful and real way. It has an energy to
it that gives you such great opportunity to truly connect with the audience. How will you deal with
comments and questions? Will you be available 24/7? Will you have office hours? Is there a department? Is there routing for
specific types of inquiries, specific types of engagement, and who will be
responsible for that? Also if you're responding
to negativity, it's important that you
have a plan for that. Don't be afraid to be open and transparent as far as possibly you can be to win that customer, to win that conversation, to win that heart, to win that relationship back, because it's your
integrity in the way that you show up that
goes such a long way. Even in the face of mistakes, even in the face of failures, we all make mistakes. The key for you is in
owning those mistakes and going every step of the way that it takes in order
to put things right. Who will manage this
activity? Will it be you? Will it fall on your shoulders? Will it be team members
and colleagues? Will it be other departments? Will you outsource the
whole thing altogether? How will you make sure that
everything is on brand? The best thing
that you can do is make a plan and
stick to the plan, be consistent in
how you show up, and that is what will yield the best results
possible for you. These are considerations
that I'd love you to ponder and fill out
the question prompts, and then feed in those answers
to the planning wheel. This way, you have
a complete approach to making this work for you.
6. Measuring Success: Measurement is crucial. If we don't measure
what we're doing, then we have no
way of being able to demonstrate the efficacy, the efficiency, how
well it's doing. It's super important that
you take this planning and this preparation
and all of this stuff that we've been
talking about so far. That you take those objectives, those measures of success, and you create a dashboard. You can use tools
like analytics. Most social channels
have their own in built insights and
dashboards and analytics. You can monitor engagement, you can monitor views, you can monitor clicks, you can monitor comments. It's the objective remember that determine what you
need to measure. Because if we're going to increase the traffic
to our website, what are we going to measure? We're going to measure traffic. Traffic is a generic ones, so we want to measure traffic. I just want to give you that
as an example so that you appreciate the objectives
of what drive the measures. The measures are answering the
question, have we arrived? Your measures need to
reflect the objectives. They need to show us
that we're making progress towards
achieving our goals. What I'm inviting
you to do here is to consider the methods
of measurement. You've got analytics, you've got on
platform analytics, you've got external dashboards
that you can setup. There are things like
sentiment trackers. You can create monitors and Google Alerts for
mentions of your brand or a whole host of
ways that you can set up monitoring and listening. If we are promoting
a specific offer, we can use UTM links inside of that campaign so that when we drive traffic
from that campaign, it's directly attributable
to that campaign. I use a beautiful software
called Funnelytics. Funnelytics allows
you to see traffic flowing from specific
campaigns, from certain pages, from certain channels, and
taking those milestone steps so that we can measure
conversions, traffic engagement. Consider the questions of the channels that you're
going to be active on, the methods of
communication that you use in across
those channels, and then the
measurements of that. How will you measure? Will you have a
unified dashboard? Do you have software to do this? Will it be a spreadsheet? Will it be something
like Funnelytics? Will it be a combination? If it's a combination of on channel insights and analytics
and your own analytics, etc, then it may
make sense that you collect these into
a single dashboard. This way you're
able to communicate quickly across the department upwards and downwards and in every direction in
the organization, but the most important
thing in all of this is to have measures that are going to answer the
question, have we arrived?
7. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] We started our
journey together looking at your objectives and
goals for social media. For the channels that
you would show upon, for the things that you're
looking to achieve. We played with a
beautiful diagram, that allows you to
map out your plan. Who is our target audience? Where are they hanging out
and how are we going to show up in those
places to meet them, where they are at? We looked at the all
important part of this, which is about eliciting a
motivation to change behavior. We looked at ways of driving
engagement and sharing, considered customer
service and how we may be both proactive and reactive. Who we're going to set up to be responsible
for these things. Then finally, how are
we going to measure? How are we going to know
that we've arrived? This completes the
entire cycle of plan, do, evaluate, and redo. Take these prompts, implement the things
that we've talked about in your circumstance
across your organization. Then measure the results
and proactively adapt and amend what you do moving forward so that you are
continually improving. You're continually improving
your skill as a marketer. You continually improving
the communications of your organization, both inside and out. You are giving voice
to your audience, whether that's the
customer or whether that's an internal customer,
really doesn't matter. Remember, the principles
are universal here. You are creating an environment where everybody gets to elevate, and not where you
are truly utilizing marketing communications
and social media, a maximum customer satisfaction. Thank you for
watching the class.
Colin Scotland, Marketing Coach
