Social media tools are simplified tools of content production and distribution. Consumers have adopted them wholly, leveraging the simplicity to participate in an explosion of content all over the web.
As marketers, we are just beginning to explore how social media can be used to facilitate strategies to communicate about our brands with consumers. Some things are apparent: Consumers are spending an increasingly large proportion of their online time on social networks, and the growth of personal content on the web is increasing the connectedness and engagement of people on the web with each other. That circumstance makes it ever more imperative that marketers evolve ways to engage and intersect with consumers on the social web.
The challenge is how to do that.
As we’ve expanded our marketing and product strategy at my company, NCI, to incorporate social media, we’ve learned a few interesting, first-stage lessons. I thought it might be useful to organize and share some of the learnings, to help others as they plot out their road
map to tackle what can at first appear like a daunting journey.
The circumstance is not that different from the early days of the open Internet in the first half of the 1990s. Consumers had flocked from closed systems like AOL and CompuServe out onto the web, where, using HTML and NetScape’s Mosaic browser, they were able to create content outposts. Web sites sprang up, audiences developed, and marketers struggled to find ways to translate their traditional marketing approaches to the new media.
The outcome of that transition is all around us: a web with increasingly organized information and highly professional marketing practices.
Obviously, the puzzle of marketing using social media will get solved. But what changes need to take place in how we approach marketing to generate clarity and momentum?
The answer is Content.
As marketers, we don’t focus on Content. We focus on Brands. We focus on Messages. We focus on creative approaches, media assets and ultimately, business activity and leads.
When we hear Content, we associate it with Media. Content changes. It’s variable. It’s creative. Media uses Content to attract an audience. As a marketer, we leverage that audience and their engagement with that Content to deliver our Message and enhance our Brand.
A web where Google in the primary organizing influence thinks differently about Content, though. Everything on the web is Content, in Google’s eyes. There isn’t differentiation between advertising, marketing or crea
tive content: it’s all out there. And the more content that is in one place, the more people that create it, the more people that share it, the more Google pays attention.
As we all know, Google’s attention drives business activity. In a fundamental way, that is the most powerful opportunity for a brand in social media marketing: Can you create content that engages people and that prompts them to act. For if you can, you’ll accomplish the main things that you are looking for from your Internet marketing: impact with Google and engagement with prospects and customers.
The thesis is simple enough. The execution, on the other hand, is a bear.
The basic impediment to executing a social media marketing strategy is that our overall marketing strategies are usually driven more by the format and production requirements of the communications channels that we choose, rather than the core story that we want to tell about our brand.
Developing the Brand Story
Great stories captivate us and make time stop. Great brands have great stories: Where they have come from, what they are striving for and where they aim to go.
Without a cohesive brand story, the entry into social media marketing ends up happening in fits and starts. The story gives you the framework to create all kinds of different content around your brand, and, in social media, marketing is content.
For our Apartment Finder brand, the creation of the brand story that has made the transition into social media marketing a relatively smooth and seamless process began in 2004, when we invited the agency TMG Brand Communications to work with us. [Shameless Plug: TMG is owned by my wife Tami. The focus on the power of stories to elevate brands is a family conviction. You can learn more about TMG here.]
The outcome of the work with TMG was a foundation statement, and a set of content and image guidelines, that were the filter for all the decisions that we made about marketing and product development. The foundation statement was a reflection of a series of core beliefs share by the team and reflected in our product and service. It was the framework for a brand story that we could believe in and deliver on.
Apartment Finder is the preferred choice of critical information for apartment shoppers. By constantly studying the lifestyle of today’s renter and adapting our strategies, we effectively connect apartment communications to the most qualified prospects.
From this foundation, we articulated four aspects of the brand that we felt were critical to communicate in all our marketing messaging, and which we believed would also prioritize and focus our business decisions and our product development.
For Apartment Finder, these four brand elements addressed our interaction with consumers, our approach to our product, our orientation to our customers and our goal for ourselves.
- Prospect-focused distribution
- Product quality
- Flexible service
- Leadership
Five years later, these foundation elements of our brand story remain as relevant and focusing as they were at their inception.
How to create your own brand story
To create a brand story, you need to move beyond a cataloging of your product and benefits and answer questions about your purpose, your identity and your position in the market.
This begins with a series of questions that you ask internally:
- Who are we?
- Why do we do what we do? What do we care about?
- What’s our purpose? Why do we matter to the people that we do business with?
- What would we want people to say about us when they are satisfied?
- What would we want people to say about us when they are dissatisfied?
- What will we absolutely not do?
- What are we most proud of?
The internal questions are followed by an examination of the external environment:
- Who are our competitors?
- How are we different?
- How are we the same?
- What is their story?
- What do people say about them when they are satisfied?
- What do people say about them when they are dissatisfied?
- What are the things that our competitors do to tell their story?
The process of answering these questions is very clarifying, albeit fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. The stressful emotions stem from identifying those attributes about your organization and your product that you may have focused on as key differentiators that are, in the stark light of a honest assessment, of minimal value to your customer and minimally different in the marketplace. As you work through the process, however, you see more clearly the power of your true points of difference, and as you develop the story about your brand, you end up in a place that is more powerful and extendable than where you began.
We had that experience at Apartment Finder, which was a promising but under-developed brand when we began, and which today has grown four-fold, is our largest business line at NCI, and has a strong position in a highly competitive market.
The relevance of the Brand Story to Social Media Marketing
The development of a concise and powerful Brand Story is helpful to any marketing organization, but has particular relevance in helping to extend into social media marketing.
In social media, marketing is Content.
Too strong a statement?
Think about how you lay out your branding and marketing program for the year. You have a product or service and a list of key features and benefits. You have a target market and a channel strategy. You have a pricing matrix, cost factors, and a goal in terms of volume of sales.
In order to drive demand for the product, you and your team will sift through which communications channels will give you the largest impact with your target consumers at the most efficient price. You reach out to professionals who facilitate delivering messages into the different channels: agencies, creative shops, communications firms, media partners.
Proposals come back, budgets get set, and then the process of driving the benefits and features into creative formats that fit the channels begins.
Language, image, emphasis: All are subject to modification due to the limitations of the marketing format that is being developed, whether it is sales collateral, a television spot, a magazine ad or a promotional event.
At the end of the processes, if you were to break down the costs of creating and distributing the marketing messages, you would find the largest amount of money was spent on the process of designing, producing and distributing the marketing piece.
The least amount of money was spent on creating the Content.
In social media, however, the Design imperative is low and the Content imperative is high. Content creation and distribution engines are already in place, in the form of blogging platforms, video sites like YouTube and social networks like Facebook.
The focus of your resources have to shift to creating Content. This is a challenge for most marketing staffs, which are highly skilled and enjoy the process of conceptualizing, creating and distributing highly-produced marketing materials. And many agencies have cost structures that are designed to profit from the production of these materials.
Without a clear Brand Story, it’s virtually impossible to change habits to generate the kind of Content that makes a social media marketing strategy work.
Creating and implementing a Content Marketing Strategy
The exciting thing about social media is that consumers are willing to engage with you and your brand.
The challenging thing is that they aren’t interesting in hearing all about you.
Good marketing is the combination of Image and Voice.
The Image of your brand is something that is fixed and controlled. You manage the perception of the image by the way you present messages, the media environments you use, the creative approach that you take. Image is key to a first impression; it’s feeling like you’re turned out and looking like a million bucks.
The Voice of your brand is what develops as a consumer interacts with you. It is the customer experience, the discrete and intuitive knowledge of your brand that comes from experiencing the product, trying to solve a question, having success with a service.
Voice is what develops when you spend time with someone, learn about them.
In Social Media, your voice is the dominant marketing element. If you build a marketing content strategy that is all about You — your product or service, the benefits, the successes — in general, declamatory ways, then you are going to create a voice that turns the consumer off.
The important lesson is that a marketing content strategy is not only about your brand. It is about things that are relevant to your brand.
This leads to the second question after developing a clear brand statement: What kind of content can I create that will be consistent with my brand statement?
What does this mean? Think of the content in three buckets:
- Things about my brand that communicate my brand position. These aren’t brand statements. They are examples.
- Things that reinforce my brand position. This is content that shows examples of the brand position at work.
- Things that by sharing with my target market will enhance my brand position. This can be related content that appeals to a consumer in a way that is consistent with how you have positioned the brand.
As we developed our social media marketing plan for Apartment Finder, we laid out a few basic goals for how we wanted the content we created to reflect the cornerstones of our Brand Story.
First, we wanted to share examples of things that we were doing at Apartment Finder that reinforced our four cornerstones.
Second, we wanted to share information about marketing, in the multi-family industry and in general businesses, that could help our customers be smarter.
Third, we wanted to share with our customers the things that got us excited — primarily our people and our customers, together and having fun.
And fourth, we wanted to make sure that when we found something that was important to a local market — a useful news development, an industry meeting — that we shared it with our connections.
In every instance, we are looking to share and to engage.
When you look over this list, only one of the four areas of focus are on the features and benefits of the Apartment Finder brand. The other three are extensions of what we believe are some of the most important aspects of our brand story — our flexibility, our focus on our customers and our desire to be leaders in any way that we can.
The focus is well outside the scope of a traditional marketing organization and requires rethinking and retooling in order to implement.
Creating a distribution strategy for your social media content
The logical next question as you follow along and assess whether this program could be implemented in your organization is: How on earth do we gather and distribute this content?
Unlike traditional marketing, social media marketing encourages wide and deep involvement from all the members of your brand team.
In order to facilitate that activity, you need to plan your distribution strategy as carefully as the content strategy.
At Apartment Finder we have a national brand that has local teams in more than 100 markets around the country. Our customers are organized locally, regionally and nationally — we have more than 12,000 in all.
In order to make a social media marketing strategy relevant and effective, it needed to be both consistent, flexible and local.
Our solution was to leverage several different social media tools in order to create a central point to distribute content and local points for content creation and distribution.
In developing this plan, we were sensitive not creating too many technical requirements in implementing the local content program.
The core of our social media marketing program is a national brand blog — The Apartment Finder Blog.
We use this platform to create each of the four different content elements that were described above. The blog is a collaboration among the top management team for Apartment Finder, not the output of the marketing group alone. We try to have each member of the management team contribute one blog post a week. We want to share our business successes. And, we want to share the incredible activity that is out in the field.
The blog is set up on the WordPress Multi-User platform and requires relatively light maintenance, which is handled internally.
Once we’ve published content into the blog, we immediately distribute it into the Apartment Finder identity on Facebook and our @AptFinderNews identity on Twitter. We also send a summary each week of the content that was published on the blog to the field.
In order to give each market the platform for creating and distributing their own market-specific content, we encouraged them to establish market-specific Facebook pages, as well as Twitter identities. These were in addition to the broad personal networks that they had established.
Currently, we have over 80 local fan pages and groups with more than 7500 connections across the Apartment Finder brand.
We decided to use the Facebook fan pages because they give our local markets a tremendous amount of flexibility in producing content without requiring a significant level of technical skill. Our research showed us that about 70% of our customers were on Facebook, so the platform would give us significant reach into our target audience. Our research also showed us that about 80% of our customers’ customers were heavy users of Facebook, so that by drawing our clients and prospects into Facebook we were helping them get acclimated to an environment widely populated by their residents.
In looking at how to develop a distribution strategy for your brand’s social media marketing program, consider the following:
How much content will we create and in what format?
How many people associated with the brand will be contributing content? What is their level of technical comfort?
How many tiers of brand representation should we have? Will it be one national platform? Multiple platforms segmented by geography, sales channel or customer group?
What social media platforms does the audience I want to reach use most frequently? How can I distribute content into those platforms easily and without significant extra work?
In creating this kind of flexible distribution strategy to complement a focused marketing content strategy, you are able to ENGAGE frequently and with impact.
A word about control. When thinking about extending their marketing program into social media, many executives get uncomfortable with the idea of opening up their marketing dialogue. The idea of giving customers the tools of production that allow them to intersect with marketing content is discomfiting. And the idea of the entire company having the ability to contribute to a marketing content strategy feels contradictory.
My personal perspective is that your comfort with this openness and freedom is driven by your confidence in the resonance and simplicity of your Brand Story. When you have that confidence, you can feel good that the expression of your Brand’s Voice — the communications that all of your people are having every day with customers, and that your customers are having with each other — will be consistent with your Brand Image. Not relentlessly aligned: that is not realistic in the human condition. But consistent enough in tone and content so that when people think about your brand, they are convinced of its authenticity and its relevance.
Social media marketing is accretive, not explosive
A final observation about the relationship of social media marketing to your traditional marketing programs: the pace is different.
Traditional marketing is event-driven: an ad breaks, an event happens, a promotion occurs. Social media marketing is about creating networks of relationships, connection by connection. These networks build slowly, but gain velocity as they grow.
It’s in this engagement that you are able to create powerful business outcomes. You’ve converted your standard marketing approach to a content strategy, and have given people who are interested in your brand a way to interact with you on a regular basis. If you’ve honed your content approach effectively, the way that consumers interact with your brand in a social media setting will be familiar and trusting.
What are the business benefits of this program?
The first benefit is in the connection and the conversation that you are able to have. You will improve your retention, and, if you are listening closely, your increased understanding of the customer experience will help you improve your messaging and your conversion of new customers.
The second benefit is the ripple effect of distributing marketing content through your social media strategy. This content will be saved, distributed, shared and repurposed in many different ways. With each of these actions, your brand is promoted a little more widely and a little more intensely. From this expansion of brand awareness, you’ll generate the kind of increase in market receptivity, and ultimately sales, that is awarded to a market leader.
And finally, you’ll drive Internet traffic. A well-executed and frequently updated blog, along with widely distributed and acted-upon content links, will improve your PageRank with Google, helping you capture a larger portion of the relevant searches 
in your market. And, many experts believe that over the next several years, nearly as much traffic will be driven through social media links as will be driven by search results. The only way that your brand can participate in this activity is through implementing a social media marketing strategy.
That’s what we’ve been building at our company. It started with solid brand stories, and it is rapidly expanding into a pervasive marketing culture that is helping to enhance our business in a particularly challenging time in our markets.
I hope that you experience some of the same impact. At the very least, you owe it to yourself, your company and your brand to try.
Coda: Here’s the final messaging presentation that TMG gave to the Apartment Finder team in 2009. It is still remarkably apt and relevant.
