In an industry that’s moving at an incredible rate, can social media marketing ever be taught ‘textbook and exam’ style?
From new technologies to the latest Snapchat update, we open our emails every day to be flooded with digital marketing mailers - from which we always learn something useful and new.
That’s why we jumped at the chance to attend Social Media Week in London this year. As we sat in the Southbank cinema waiting for the Social Media in 2020 panel, we wondered whether we would come away feeling inspired by simply surrounding ourselves with fellow social media folk and ‘chatting about stuff’.
Looking around the room, Ben Shaw (Head of BBH Live) was right. We couldn’t see many bearded ‘Shoreditch’ hipsters. Digital marketing in 2016 looks very different to that four years ago. With the integration of social media in all departments and the importance of having an online strategy high on the agenda, Jack Foley at KFC suggests the social media kid in the cupboard has become a marketing professional, managing metrics and handling big budgets!
Guy Norwell of Experian spoke about the decline in organic reach, saying he wish he could have predicted the shift to a broadcast model. If Guy knew about the proliferation of video, he would have geared up his production team in preparation. As a communications agency, Crowd have recently hired a motions graphic designer to meet our own video demands. This is a decision many organisations like ours have made or will be making in the near future.
Paying to play, as the panel discussed, comes with many challenges and here at Crowd we can understand where they’re coming from. From persuading our clients to part with money for paid ads to the creative challenge of producing quality video content fast, we found ourselves nodding along to their social media woes.
So how do you persuade a client or board member to invest in social?
Claire Hoey of Barclaycard spoke about optimisation. In social media marketing, budgets don’t have to be set in stone and testing content routes and different media play a part in the process. From our experience, no client is the same. Different business objectives will require different campaign objectives and the measurement of goal specific metrics. We often visualise this approach for our clients, describing it as a dial we can turn up and down.
“Now you can optimise, learn, and track as you go,” said Claire. We too find that this robust method helps our clients trust our strategies, as we can make decisions based on real data and results.
Hot Topics at Social Media Week
Snapchat was also a focus of Social Media Week and as with all opportunities in social, there are hurdles we have to overcome. Trying to convince clients to invest in disappearing content, as Guy explained, is no easy task. But Snapchat’s numbers speak for themself. The network now has over 60 million daily active users in the US and Canada alone – a statistic that brands targeting a younger audience really can’t ignore.
Aside from the talk being cathartic, as Guy laughed about from the start, what did we learn from this Social Media Week session? We came away from it feeling motivated by the fact that other industry professionals have the same thoughts that we have, face the same challenges that we face and they are just as excited about the future of social media as we are!
In answer to our original thoughts, no, you can’t teach social media by the book because as a ‘21st century industry’ it’s far too new and fast changing. What you can do is knowledge share and take inspiration from others, no matter how much experience they have in the field.
As far as social gurus go we discovered that we’re all specialists, optimising as we go, learning from our mistakes and taking risks.
