Today, we’re pleased to have a guest post from Sofie Leon from Skai Social partner, Spredfast. As Business Development Manager, Sofie is responsible for managing Spredfast’s partner relationships. In this capacity, she works with the Skai team to enable joint customers to maximize the value of our integration. Prior to Spredfast, Sofie spent time at American Express and Frontier Strategy Group, amongst other companies. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at Stanford University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
If you’ve been keeping up with recent Skai Social research, you’re aware that Facebook advertising has been undervalued somewhere between 12-30 percent, and multi-touch attribution gives an online advertiser some additional context to the customer’s experience in the purchase funnel.
As Skai helps you on your journey through the complexities of your funnel, I’d ask you to consider your brand’s social strategy at its core:
- Why is social part of your mix?
- How are you supporting your brand’s corporate strategy via social?
Regardless of your role, you may be spending hours thinking about efforts to improve your brand’s digital strategy in paid and beyond. Can you articulate what is at the root of that strategy?
I asked these same questions of myself when I joined Spredfast earlier this year. What drew me to Spredfast was the company’s “why.” The Spredfast Team believes that great social experiences create lasting relationships. That relationship is made up of a myriad of touch points ranging from “liking” a promoted post on Facebook to a retweet to sharing a compelling picture or video.
Each piece of content plays a role in the consumer’s journey through the buying cycle and in the consumer’s long-term relationship with your brand. We believe in the business value of these one-to-one-to-many conversations because it is these experiences that build lasting relationships.
The opportunities for engagement come from the social content that tells your brand story and enhances your Brandsphere (thank you, Brian Solis). It’s not just what the brand says but how it comes alive on social and whether it authentically sounds, looks, and feels like your brand.
We spoke with one of our customers at HomeAway recently about the intersection of paid, earned, and owned, and I was left thinking about how the paid, earned, and owned silos reflect the organizational silos we inhabit. Content moves fluidly across these worlds as an Instagram promotion turns into a collection of powerful user-generated content, which is then promoted through targeting to a specific audience.
The bottom line is that the most successful organic content provides context to inform a well-performing paid campaign. To manage your social strategy organically is to discover what great content or great experience could be amplified for your paid audience.
This is exactly why our Skai and Spredfast partnership was born: to help gain further context for social media marketers and to ensure brands better capture consumer behavior from social and do holistically.
We see these touch points as key parts of that customer journey, part of building the lasting relationship with each customer through social experiences. This is how you end up discovering and delivering valuable customer experiences whether you’re REI, with constant interaction that becomes a part of consumers daily social lives, or AT&T, moving “from a call to action to a call to conversation.”
I believe great experiences build loyalty and extend your customers’ lifetime value.
Why do you do social? I’m @sofieleon and would love to hear your thoughts.