Can Social Media Marketing and Traditional Marketing Coexist?
Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC
In a word, no.
If the goal is to integrate social media marketing into your traditional marketing, you're setting yourself up for failure. After all, traditional marketing is based on pushing out and controlling the message, targeting, and running insular campaigns. By comparison, social media marketing is based on relinquishing control, two-way communication, building community, and breaking out of campaign-thinking to build trust over time.
But let's put the philosophical differences aside for a moment. For many nonprofits, traditional marketing still works. After decades (or more) of honing your marketing strategies, now is not the time to drop the tried and true when social media marketing is still so unproven for your organization. So here are some social media marketing tactics that can coexist with your older tactics -- though a bit of a mental shift is still required.
Listen and participate.
Experiment with two-way communication. Start by listening.
Listening refers to searching the social web for relevant keywords including the name of your organization, key people, industry terms, even your competing or sister organizations. Learn about the people who are talking about you. Learn what their influence is: how many people they talk to, how often what they say is forwarded to others, how they represent themselves and are regarded in your field.
After you spend time listening, you can begin to participate and add your organization's voice to those conversations.
Enable easy finding and sharing.
Do you know what your stakeholders are searching for? Is your stuff -- your programs, events, services, publications (the things you would market in traditional ways) -- coming up for them?
Before anyone can spread the word for you, they need to be able to find you. That's why search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are so important. There are a lot of good resources out there to help you with the basics of making your site easier to find in search engines.
To go a step further, sharing is a way for your stakeholders to help one another find your stuff. It's also a way to build inlinks, which are vital for good SEO. Make all of your stuff easy to find and share.
- Add sharing chicklets like ShareThis or TellAFriend.
- Add sharing functionality to your email templates and signatures.
- Add references to your social web presence (e.g. "Find us on Facebook") on direct marketing pieces (including both mail and email).
- Use landing pages, a custom URL specifically for a direct marketing piece, and from there make it very easy to share the message on the social web.
- Turn your press releases into social media releases, which are both keyword rich and easy to share across the social web.
Seed and nurture community.
You have a database, but do you have a community? Of course you do.
Traditionally, you might focus more on mining your database, knowing that your core community will get the message. The social media way is to focus more on the core community and help their enthusiasm spill over to people you might not even have in your database.
How? Think about your biggest face-to-face event or fundraiser. What can you do before, during, and after the event to make it easier for people to use the social web to talk about you? Focus on the websites where you've already found your stakeholders talking and hanging out.
You might think of this as another communications channel, but it's really much more. It's a way for you and your stakeholders to share control of the messages that have traditionally been so tightly regimented. It's also a way for your stakeholders to get to know your organization as a gathering place for the people who share their passion. Isn't that what's it's really all about?
Build a network of influential fans.
As you get to know your community, a core group of highly influential people will get your attention. What do influential people look like? Many of them have successful blogs, hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and Facebook, and thousands of followers on Twitter.
Resist the urge simply to mark these people in your database and push more marketing messages at them. Instead, focus on building a mutually beneficial relationship. Appeal to their individual quirks (egos) and always be thinking about what's in it for them. Hopefully, you can turn a few influential people into champions for your cause.
The key is to find a way to make it very easy -- even prestigious -- for your champions to spread the word about you.
These tactics are not a recipe for overnight success, but rather a recipe for a slow shift toward a new way of marketing. But hey, we non-profits are good at this stuff. It's part of our mission and what we've been doing for years. And now we have the marketing tools and techniques that reflect the personality of our organizations. That's a very good thing.
Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer are Chief Social Media Strategist and Chief Social Media Marketer at SocialFish, LLC.
