Page 406 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

newsfeed publishing algorithm, reaching your fans without spending money
to boost your social media posts has gotten increasingly harder. Some paid
investments are required.

» Websites: It’s sometimes easy to forget, but your own website is an important
content distribution channel. Contrary to all the public hype, people do still
visit company websites. If you have it structured in a meaningful way, the
website can serve as a great place to engage your consumers in real time.
Take a look at the Pepsi website (www.pepsi.com) or the GE web presence
(www.ge.com) for examples of websites that look and feel more like media
companies in how they publish content.
» Digital advertising: Arguably, the quickest way to get mass reach for your
real-time marketing efforts is by leveraging the scale of digital advertising.
Increasingly, you can buy digital advertising on a real-time basis and swap
creative in and out in the moment. You can even put social media content (a
Twitter feed, for example) into the display advertising. Digital advertising is an
important arrow in the quiver of your real-time marketing efforts because it
often gives you significant scale very quickly.
» Email programs: Your email programs can serve as an important real-time
marketing distribution engine for your real-time marketing efforts. Don’t shy
away from using these programs effectively. In fact, even with the rise of
social media, email continues to be a complementary means of communica-
tion. The challenge is in making it work effectively without overburdening your
consumers.

All the previously listed options can be activated in a matter of minutes. In fact,
we are already seeing that with real-time video ad targeting. What’s more, for the
first time ever, the real-time marketing efforts can be done on a mass scale — a
scale that historically was limited to traditional marketing efforts only.

Real-time engagement

After you’ve tapped into your consumer’s real-time insights, co-created real-time
experiences, and triggered the engagement with them, the last key piece is real-time
engagement. This is arguably the hardest to do in a scalable way. Expect to have
fewer consumers engage meaningfully with you when you move beyond pushing
content or experiences to them and ask them to participate on an ongoing basis.

Real-time engagement can take many different shapes. For example, it can
focus on building and nurturing daily engagement with your consumers through
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, or Pinterest. After you’ve triggered
consumer engagement driven by real-time insights, you can then use that
engagement as an opportunity to engage with consumers on a more regular basis.
What follows are some tips and tricks to consider for real-time engagement:

390 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM