Page 95 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

advertising (those banner ads that appear at the top and side of a website) across
large magazine and newspaper websites, complemented with paid search cam-
paigns and maybe email campaigns. These campaigns were used to drive pros-
pects to a microsite (a site devoted to that particular campaign) or a website, where
they were encouraged to make purchases or engage with the brand.

With an SMM campaign, you mustn’t drag people away from the social platform
on which they’re communicating and interacting with each other. They don’t
want to be distracted, and you’ll probably only waste precious marketing dollars
trying to lure them to your website. Instead, it’s more important to execute the
campaign on those very platforms where your potential customers are in conver-
sation. You have to engage your customers where they want to participate, not
where you want them to be. And unlike in a digital marketing campaign of yester-
year, the customers of an SMM campaign ignore you unless your SMM campaign
is aligned with their objectives and behavior patterns on those social platforms. In
the following sections, we outline specific guidelines that you should follow when
launching an SMM campaign.

A good example of a failed “build it and they will come” attempt was Bud.TV by
Budweiser. They tried to create an entertainment destination bypassing YouTube.
The effort failed miserably because Budweiser had to spend valuable advertising
dollars to encourage consumers to do something that they had no interest in
doing — moving away from YouTube, where they had the most entertaining con-
tent (and all their friends), to a corporate-sponsored website. What’s more, the
fact that users couldn’t embed the video clips elsewhere (including YouTube) hurt
the effort. Bud.TV launched in January 2007 and was shut down early in 2009. Fast
forward to 2019, and you’ll notice that very few advertisers launch social media
marketing campaigns where they try to pull customers to their websites to engage
with them (granted pulling customers to your website to purchase is different and
appropriate if done with sensitivity).

Creating Your SMM Roadmap

As with any other good marketing campaign, you need to construct a roadmap
that shows you where you are going and how you’ll get there. In this section, we
discuss seven steps that you can take to bulletproof your campaign structure. They
are as follows:

» Define your objectives.

» Develop a powerful story/experience.

CHAPTER 4 Launching SMM Campaigns 79