Social media marketing. The big burst is dead. Long live the drip-feed.

Marketing through traditional media (and I count digital in this) has long been structured around the campaign approach. But quarterly, seasonal or annual campaigns based on when the consumer is most likely to be interested in/purchase the product or brand doesn’t work for social media.

Social media is always on, brands can’t spend 9 months of the year making limited effort with the consumer only to launch a big Christmas campaign because that’s a big selling time for them. By the time it gets round to Christmas, the smart brands which have been properly engaging with the consumer throughout the whole year will own the relationship. The big burst campaign approach brand will no longer have the consumers attention.

Easy to say but this throws up two critical questions: ‘what’ and ‘how’ – what will maintain consumers engagement; and how do you deliver it.

The what.

Content that engages, starts a relationship between brand and consumer, drives interaction and ultimately moves the consumer down the purchase journey.

So what is this content? A steady drip of information, updates, competitions, quizzes, exclusive offers and opportunities to interact. In plain English – tell me exciting and interesting things I don’t know, give me the opportunity to see things before others, the chance to win things, ask me what I think and respond to me. Make me feel that I’m getting something out of me becoming and staying your fan. But – and importantly, don’t think you know what I want. Serve up a cocktail of content, interactive promotions and offers and let me choose which bits I interact with.

The how.

So how do you effectively and efficiently deliver a drip-feed to your consumers. Well, you can either put together your own social media team including designers and developers, pay an agency to manage your social media marketing for you or bring in help in the form of technology. Much is made of how technology is developed to make our lives easier, to free up time or simply to help us. In many cases, that has proven to be a double edged sword – smartphones have turned people into ‘always on’ workers – but the ability to put together and publish competitions, coupons, flash deals and offers, schedule content, republish consumer generated content and track the behaviour of not only your fans but how they are helping spread your campaigns and content to their friends, all from one platform, will help you get results in a cost and time efficient way.

Build a promotion, schedule campaign messages to help drive traffic, activate auto-prompts for entrants to ‘share’, choose refer a friend incentives to encourage invites, define next best actions to drive the customer journey or cross promote offers to participants, select the data and permissions you wish to capture from consumers – all in 45mins.

So if one person can build an interactive promotion in 45mins, imagine what they could do with a whole day, or week, or month….

Getting smart on social channels involves being active with promotions, quizzes, competitions, contests, offers, games and exclusive content – all the while giving fans opportunities to share your promotions and branded content with their friends. Your job is to facilitate that and EngageSciences has made it simple and time efficient to do so.

But don’t take my word for it – go to www.engagesciences.com and look at the case studies and testimonials form brands such as play.com, Speedo and Nokia.

Welcome to the drip feed approach – made easy.

Shared by Richard Jones