Never doubt the value of a social media audit

Is your brand reaching the key performance indicators you first established when you began on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? Is it reaching your target audience through the right channels? Are your followers becoming customers?

If you’re finding a lack of reward from your investments in social media, then maybe its time to re-evaluate how you’re using it to strengthen your brand and business.

Approach your brand’s social media audit step-by-step in the following order:

Inventory. Does your target audience for each platform actually align with the general demographics of users on those platforms? The Pew Research Center provides helpful data on the latest social media trends in users by age and gender. Use this information to pair your brand’s messaging with the platform used most frequently used by your target audience.

Policy. Who creates your brand’s narrative? Who is tasked with posting messages on each channel? When do you respond to users who tag your brand in their own social media posts? How do you track KPIs? Your brand’s voice will likely be loudest on social media, so planning ahead and answering these kinds of questions are key to ensuring brand consistency.

Activity. Examine information that each platform provides about your social media channels such as audience size, user age and gender, geographical location and engagement frequency. If you have social influencers pushing your brand, then determine the channels where they spend the most time and energy. Determine if visitors to your brand’s social channels prefer watching videos, listening to podcasts, or reading blogs. Find the messages for your brand that draw the largest positive responses and repurpose them to reinforce your narrative.

Compare. Regularly monitor the messaging your competitors are building for their brands as you would your own. Learn who the closest competitors are to your brand and how they’re sharing messages on social media channels, including the keywords and hashtags they most frequently use. Observe follower growth and impressions.

Analyze. If you follow the process above, then you will find all the pieces you need to reveal what the puzzle shows: the current state of your brand and the possibilities for the future. Set new goals for your KPIs, establish a target date to reach those goals, then perform another audit. You’ll see whether or not your brand is on the right track for success.

Outside Agency Services in an In-House Agency World

Allstate, the insurance giant, announced that they’ve formed a 200-person internal creative team and it plans to take more marketing services in-house.  The brand is maintaining relationships with its external agencies including Leo Burnett, which has had the account for 62 years. This has become a common theme in the marketing world and many agencies are considering it a setback to the advertising industry as a whole.  The Association of National Advertisers reported last year that 78 percent of its members have an in-house agency. 

The trend is strong and it will continue as long as the media landscape continues to proliferate at warp speed.  In the recession, in-house agencies were a brief phenom driven by cost cutting in a tough economy. Quickly, clients realized the strain to produce solid work coupled with the constant overhead was not the way to go.  Today, it is a completely different landscape. The amount of work that needs to be completed in a real time digital world has created more than enough work to go around. The primary reason clients have in-house agencies is “knowledge of the brand” according to the In-House Agency Forum.  In-house doesn’t mean they do not use external agencies.  Many companies believe that having knowledge of the brand and being able to integrate a message to a wide variety of contacts in the digital world is the reason to take it in-house.  VWA believes external agencies have an opportunity to work with in-house agencies for the following reasons:

Creative Chops:  Many in-house agencies are set up as production hubs getting all the materials produced and placed in a timely and cost efficient manner.  Clients with in-house agencies often go out in the market to get a fresh perspective on their brand and look for agencies to bring ideas. Isn’t that what we are in the business for anyway?

Digital Experts: The changing pace of digital and the technology that comes out everyday keeps even the most nimble agency hopping.  CMO’s recognize this and often rely on agencies to help set up digital processes and consult on analytics.

Partnership:  An agency that is able to work collaboratively with an in-house agency will be able to find a place with the client that is productive and will end up improving the work for the client and agency.  Even if you bid work against in-house agencies, you should look at it as an opportunity to enhance client knowledge and produce better work. A smaller agency that can react quickly can be a life saver to an in-house agency.

Cost: In-house agencies are set up as cost centers and charge between $50 and $175 per hour to the client’s production budgets.  This is calculated with and without an overhead factor. Assuming the $50 is a without overhead number, smaller and less bureaucratic agencies should be able to negotiate a rate that is within this parameter.  Often you can come in as a savings verses a cost to the client. 

Is Your Website ADA Compliant?

You may have read about the recent class action lawsuit against Beyonce’s Parkwood Entertainment, LLC alleging its website discriminates against the visually impaired.  The woman, Mary Conner says the star’s website is not designed or accessible for the visually impaired and doesn’t give blind fans a chance to buy tickets , merchandise or read about Knowles. The suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, cites the ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act, states, “ requires places of public accommodation to ensure access to goods, services, and facilities by making reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities” The suit requests an injunction requiring Knowles’ company to make adjustments to make the site accessible for blind fans and browsers.  Conner also requests payment of “compensatory damages in an amount to be determined by the court” 

Web compliant litigation is becoming a more common issue as websites are increasingly the main communication a consumer has to interact with a business.  The ADA guidelines for a compliant website are:

• CertainCertain business make accommodations for people with disabilities.

• Businesses that fall under Title 1, those that operate 20 or more weeks per year with at least 15 full-time employees, or Title III, those that fall under the category of “ public accommodation,” are covered by the ADA

• Web content should be accessible to the blind, deaf, and those who must navigate by voice screen readers or other assistive technologies

• There are no clear regulations defining website accessibility

• Failure to create ADA-compliant website could open a business to lawsuits, financial liabilities and damage your brand reputation.

The interesting part is that there are “no clear rules”, but a company is required to have a website that accommodates people with disabilities.  Websites should be built from the ground up with ADA compliance as part of the architecture. However; existing websites can be retrofitted with ADA compliance, but that can come at a significant cost.  The best place to look for for ADA compliant websites is government websites. Here are a couple of ways to address accessibility issues for a website:

• Create text transcripts for video and audio content: Text transcripts allow the hearing impaired to interact with your site.  It can also increase your Google site rankings.

• Identify the sites language in header code: This helps users with text readers.

• Offer alternatives and suggestions when users encounter input errors: You should always offer an alternative for users who are having a hard time with you site.

• Create a consistent, organized layout: UX design of your site should clearly layout the site so that it is readable and clearly organized for the impaired.

• Create alt tags for images, video, and audio files: Alt tags give the users the ability to read or hear alternative descriptions of content they might not otherwise be able to view.

The cost on non ADA compliance can be quite steep.  Not only are you giving up a chance to build relationships with a potential lucrative customer base, but fines can be up to $50,000. 

This area is still very subjective and at VWA Atlanta we believe a reasonable effort to offer  accessibility for users with disabilities can help companies avoid legal action until hard and fast rules are put in place.  If you would like a free ADA Website Compliance review please reach out to VWA at avanwinkle@VWAAtlanta.com.

MARKETING AT THE SPEED OF PERFORMANCE

One stat that will stick with you for the rest of the day is that 90% of the worlds online content was uploaded to the web in the last two years. This clearly illustrates the way that marketers have shifted in mass to what is now called performance driven marketing.   The subtle and time intensive efforts of building brand equity have been challenged by the need for data and immediate performance. In a day where CMO’s and CEO’s are held to quarterly profits in spite of long term goals, this plays perfectly in that arena.

As brands have embraced performance based marketing there have been challenges. The days of hiring an agency to develop a campaign and having the campaign executed with perfect rhythm to the annually approved marketing plan are over. Speed, change and execution have become the norm and the marketers have to adapt or get the heck out of the way. The pace never stops. Marketers work day in and day out to develop personas, content to match, target multiple audiences, buy ads via a number of online resources, and measure the KPI’s and costs. And all of has to be constant as campaigns are optimized in real time. This delivers the C-suite’s ultimate goal of ROI based campaigns to drive transactions.

To do it well, you need a team. All the technical aspects of performance based marketing have spawned a plethora of specialized agencies: content marketing agencies, digital media agencies, SEO & PPC agencies, social media agencies, UX agencies, Influencer agencies, email marketing agencies, and digital marketing agencies. The skill for everything is rarely in one place. Many agencies are working together better than ever because the machinations of marketing have be come so diverse. Clients have started to realize that smaller more nimble agencies can react faster and stay in their lane better than large network agencies that have P and L’s for their respective departments.

Clients who try to operate a performance based program with their marketing department are waking up to a sobering reality. Marketers are attempting to “ fix the problem” by bringing it all in-house. This is easier said than done. In 2016 a large numbers of marketers said they were going to bring everything in-house but a follow up in 2017 revealed that few had made the move. There are too many moving parts and those who thought they would rely on media giants like Facebook and Google were forced to face the fact that they are just media companies looking for more money and not concerned about actual business results.It comes down to the agencies and where they will go. Will they be able to bring together the creative and technology in a way that provides results while winning the hearts of consumers? The technology guys need to become more creative and the creative guys need to embrace technology. Instead of working on optimizing the media we need to work on optimizing the creative. The data obsessed performance marketing marketers are here to stay, it’s our job to make it better.