Getting Social Media Marketing Content out of the Silo

In recent years, we’ve watched as social-media marketing has evolved from a task often given to interns into an integral part of most business strategies, strongly tied into most businesses’ goals. Today’s consumer interacts with your brand across multiple channels and expects a consistent, unified experience. However, delivering on those expectations is challenging when internal marketing teams are siloed, failing to communicate or collaborate across channels. When social, onsite, display, and advertising don’t talk to one another in an actionable way, how do you provide a consistent and engaging experience for the customer?

The Challenge: Social-Media Marketing Content Is Siloed.
Marketing departments often employ lean methodology — the build, measure, learn, feedback cycle. Yet, when silos are created, each department runs through the cycle independently. The social team builds content, measures its performance, and learns from it; but each person works autonomously with nothing to connect the channels. The challenge? Siloed social content makes it impossible to provide consistent messaging — whether onsite, in display advertising, or elsewhere.

From an organization-wide perspective, lack of integration between social media and larger marketing initiatives hinders the ability to tie social objectives to business results. Worse, it can result in disastrous outcomes. Remember the infamous McDonald’s social campaign, #McDStories? Scores of customers used the hashtag to share horror stories about the brand and their food — a perfect example of what can happen when social strategy isn’t properly integrated with the marketing mix.

The Solution: Create an Optimized Customer Experience.
How can breaking down barriers around social empower an optimized customer experience? As social content becomes more integrated, and the right messaging is delivered and measured, introducing a common language across teams can dissolve the walls that exist within silos.

Three key words that are useful for connecting departments are assets, analytics, and audiences.

Using this common language to connect the various departments results in the feedback loop looking dramatically different. The social team continues to build assets; but now, the impact of this content is measured by the analytics team. At the same time, a team working with audience management can augment the knowledge and data from other sources to gain a more complete picture of social-customer reactions.

By employing this common language, it’s possible to activate a multichannel customer experience that’s consistent with what the customer first saw. Defining assets, analytics, and audiences is far more effective than maintaining siloed teams, drives internal efficiencies, and is key to delivering consistent, optimized customer experiences.

The Takeaway
Organizations that make the transition to a more unified place build teams that function well using a single platform. Accountability, measurement capabilities, and visibility improve, allowing companies to visualize the impact social-media marketing is having on the business. Connecting social assets with analytics through a common language makes it easy to compare apples to apples when looking at different marketing strategies, resulting in simpler measurement and more effective planning.

In today’s experience-driven world, forward-thinking companies are making an organizational shift toward convergence by creating, delivering, and measuring cross-channel social content. Those companies that are successful have learned to break down the walls between marketing and communications, empowering optimized customer experiences with social content that’s consistent, tracked, and optimized.