Social is often the first, and sometimes the main touchpoint that most customers will have with your business, the front door to your brand if you will, whether you like it or not.
It’s where a lot of customers (actual or potential) hear about you, form their opinions, and decide whether they like and trust you.
And yet, shockingly, some of the biggest, most recognisable brands still run their social presence with a skeleton crew of overworked, underfunded marketers.
This isn’t just “a Malta thing”, although it definitely is an “also in Malta” thing.
C-level executives love to talk about brand relevance, customer engagement, and digital presence, until it comes time to actually pay for the people making it happen.
At this point, do we really still need to prove that great social content impacts your bottom line?
Are we seriously still debating whether the channel where most customers first experience your brand deserves proper resources?
Honestly, we (as in, marketing people) are probably a little bit to blame here too, because we got obsessed with attribution this, attribution that, and for years we all sold clients this unrealistic attribution expectation, but the world isn’t on/off, black and white.
You can’t attribute everything.
In fact, I’d argue you’d be lucky to attribute anything.
There was a time when you switched on the campaign, you tagged the links, you set up the funnel, and hours into going live, you could track from ad view to click, to landing page view, to add to cart, to purchase, to payment confirmation, and boom, money in the bank.
Those were the days before smartphones and internet everywhere all the time, and before GDPR and privacy and Apple devices and performance cookies only, or no cookies at all.
Nowadays it’s not like that.
Today it’s all multiple touchpoints.
You rarely, if ever, see an advert, click on it, and boom, buy the thing right away.
Even if we could track you through the internet like it was 2008, social still rarely acts as a direct sales tool.
That’s just not its job.
What is its job then?
It’s one of the best ways to build an audience, and build trust with that audience.
Social media marketing was never about 100% clear attribution; it’s about building brand recall and repeatedly hitting the customer with your message, wherever they are, and in a variety of different ways.
It’s about staying front of mind, so that when the person in the audience is ready to become a customer, you’re already in their head because you’ve been around and helping shape the conversation.
It’s about back and forth with customers, where you can quickly gauge sentiment about you or your products or your latest communications.
And it’s about staying in the conversation, even if yes, sadly, sometimes it can feel like you’re just adding to the noise.
If you don’t want to be just adding to the noise, drop me a line.
Together we can do social for your brand that rises above the din and isn’t just average.
