How Big Brands Win at Social
Social media is a powerful tool for large brands to interact with customers in a more casual, give-and-take manner. Big brands that are part of an enterprise business model can win at social media and become more relatable through thoughtful, dynamic & real-time campaigns.
Marketing with enterprise clients requires focus, organization, and creativity. With the right digital marketing team, these strategies can achieve big results and drive new customers while building brand loyalty from existing ones.
Commit to a Social Media Strategy
Brands don’t develop a vibrant social media presence overnight. Social media marketing is a long-term commitment, that requires consistent posts, a coherent voice, influencers, and audience engagement. Think of your brand’s social media presence like growing a plant, from seedling to tall tree.
Staying the course is the most challenging part of a social media strategy. Many brands give up after just a few months, leaving Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles like a ghost town. The most successful brands realize that developing a strong social media following takes about 8 to 12 months. Part of this is understanding what kind of interactions resonate with your buyer persona and part is developing a “voice” that captures the values and mission of the brand.
Develop a Voice For Each Brand
Enterprise clients have multiple brands within the parent company, and while the overall goals of the company will align with the general goals of each brand, the brands themselves are distinct. Managing the social media marketing for an enterprise client often means dedicating a small sub-team to each brand, working to develop its personality, and how it relates to its target customer.
Establish the primary and secondary customer demographics, then determine how to best talk to and relate to them.
Popular brands on social channels have a personality, which leads to more followers. Social networks, especially Twitter, encourages a more relaxed interaction with customers, and more authentic, one-on-one dialogue. Plus, some brands can show off a sassy side, which leads to more views and shares, whereas Linkedin would lean more corporate.
Take fast-food giant Wendy’s, for example. Its Twitter account incorporates snark towards competitors juxtaposed with thoughtful customer replies and engaging contests that invite participation from followers. Another example of how creativity, wit, and a hint of sass can work for even the most staid brand is Merriam-Webster (yes, the dictionary)’s social media accounts.
Your brand doesn’t necessarily have to be the snarkiest cat on the block, but it should have a recognizable voice and consistent messages across all social media platforms.
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The Benefits of Social Media Management Software
Social media marketing tools can help a brand’s marketing team stay focused and organized. Some posts can be automated through sites like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, while other types of social media engagement require a human hand at the helm. Scheduling your posts and making them relevant upcoming events or holidays can help your brand stay on-target and remove the impression of a cookie-cutter marketing strategy.
There are several options for enterprise brands managers when it comes to social media management software:
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is designed for large teams to implement a scalable social media management strategy. It’s deliberately engineered for collaboration and has the capacity to scale as a brand’s social media campaigns broaden. Solutions for enterprise brands include social management, customer care, data and intelligence, and advocacy and influences, including brand perception.
Using Sprout Social, marketing teams can load scheduled posts and engage with users through a single dashboard. It makes dealing with customer complaints or service issues easy, allowing a public response and setting up independent follow-ups for responding to issues. Sprout also pulls reports and data about the success of different posts and the results of calls-to-actions (CTAs) from each campaign. This helps your marketing team fine-tune their strategy and quantify the success (and whether the expense is worth it) of different posts and short-term initiatives.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a Citizen & Customer Experience Management (CMX) platform incorporating social media and messaging channels as well as different blogs, forums, and review sites. This social media management platform is comprehensive and allows your digital marketing team to follow your brand across the internet, carefully managing the brand’s reputation and personality, and cultivating a cohesive voice.
Sprinklr makes it easy to listen to customers and learn more about their likes, dislikes, and needs. This, in turn, gives brands an edge when creating social media marketing initiatives, as they have a better grasp of what appeals to their buyer persona and how to best meet its needs. Sprinklr uses custom AI to take input from customers and followers to create data-driven reports, giving marketing teams greater insight into customer behavior in a quantifiable, actionable manner.
These results help markets develop more relevant content and improve results by offering more engaging content. Plus, the platform encourages collaboration among team members and is equipped for remote work.
Spredfast
Spredfast is another social media marketing platform designed with the needs of enterprise clients in mind. It creates data-driven solutions that allow brands to employ social media strategy using the science of data – taking calculated risks based on customer data versus unquantified initiatives. The advanced analytics are available in a formatted graph that makes quantifying each social media strategy easy.
This is a valuable tool for marketing teams working with enterprise clients, as getting C-level support can sometimes be tricky. Using Spredfast’s analytics helps when presenting the marketing budget.
It’s Not About Talking – Social Listening
The strength of social media marketing is in user engagement. Unlike content marketing, print ads, and videos, social media marketing isn’t just talking at the audience – it’s engaging with the audience. Monitoring social media accounts is a full-time job, as 80% of customers use social media to engage with brands.
You’ll notice that people use social media to voice complaints about service or a product or to ask questions about basic information, such as store hours or availability of certain products. The team or person tasked to be the “voice” of a brand should be someone who can actively listen to customer responses and craft friendly, yet professional relies to negative posts or customer concerns.
A couple of things to remember about customer complaints on social media. First, these are posted in a very public forum. Your response, or lack thereof, can impact the impression people have of your brand. Second, customers typically expect a response right away, due to the immediacy of social media.
Listen to your followers, read the comments, and respond to complaints quickly, acknowledge in public, then follow up with a private reply to the customer.
Performance Improvement
To determine whether a social media campaign is successful, you need tools to monitor user engagement and conversion rates. You can’t reach goals if you don’t have a way to determine if you’ve met them!
Gauging your social media performance improvement begins with deciding what you want each brand’s campaign to achieve. Are you building awareness of a struggling or new brand? Or do you want to direct users to a brand’s website? Maybe you have an established brand but you’re missing out on conversions.
The social media efforts within an enterprise organization vary by brand, and at any one time, these companies may have different objectives and strategies going on. Keeping the focus on each unique brand helps achieve the overall goals of the organization.
Running reports about which campaigns have the most user interaction and response and which don’t can help you hone your social media strategy and refine your brand’s personality.
Takeaway
Managing the social media strategy for each brand within an enterprise organization’s portfolio can be challenging. Developing a brand voice and outlining a timeline for social media engagement is critical to success. However, branding has a few common elements: be authentic and transparent on social media and listen and engage with individuals, followers, and fans. Social media gives brands a different way to market to new customers and build relationships with existing ones.
Enterprise Businesses Need Customized Solutions...That's All We Do!
Since 2009, we have helped many enterprise businesses grow strategically. Let us do it for you!