Why Do Brands And Social Media Work So Well Together?

First, brands guide every decision and action in a company whether that is around marketing, product development, customer service or hiring. Think of it this way. Your brand’s promise to customers is the answer to one simple question, “What’s in it for me?” Thus, how you deliver products, what you say in marketing, who you hire to represent your business, how customers are treated, etc are all critical factors in delivering against that promise. The brand is the rudder for your company that ensures that you aren’t just working hard at your company, but your company, your marketing, and your employees are all working hard for you.

Brands help to attract higher quality leads, justify pricing premiums and close more sales. This is why Business Week advises to not spend a dime on marketing without a strong brand strategy. But brands are no good unless they are fully infused into everything your company does. In marketing, the brand encapsulates the reasons to buy, not the means to communicate that message. And marketing has always been seen as complex and costly, and usually results in some degree of frustration because you have no idea if it is really working or not. There is a saying, “I know that half my advertising is working for me, I just don’t know what half.” Without the right marketing, there is no way to get your brand message out to prospects in any scalable way.

This leads to the second key: social media. Social media is the most cost-effective way to target your prospects with dramatic scale and precision. Additionally, some of the best social media tools are often free to those that know how to use them. Brands and social media work so well together as partners because there is no better way to add power to your marketing message than through branding, and there is no more powerful way to get the message out to incredibly targeted prospects, in mass, with little to no budget than social media.

What do we mean by social media? Ask that question to 20 different people and you will get 20 different answers. The crux of it is that the internet has completely changed the #1 factor that influences purchase decisions, which used to be word-of-mouth. The Online Publisher’s Association conducted a study of the top purchase influencers on all stages of the buying process and found the internet to be the top purchase influencer by a factor of more than 2:1 over traditional word-of-mouth. The internet has simply given traditional word-of-mouth a megaphone through social networks, blogs, podcasts, etc.

Social media often refers to blogs, podcasts, wikis, communities, networkrs, video portals and hundreds of sites that aggregate user content. The internet has not only put individual voices online, but created an environment that is both participatory and collaborative. It has spawned a whole new movement being termed, conversational marketing. This is word-of-mouth on steroids.

I had lunch recently with a friend that decided, as a hobby, to start blogging about restaurants that he frequents with his wife in the Phoenix area (www.ericeatsout.com). After just a month or two, he now has more than 400 unique visitors a day, people from as far away as the east coast are following his recommendations and local restaurant owners and press are calling him about his service. This is a great example of the power of social media and conversational marketing.

According to Technorati.com, there are more than 112 million blogs, 175,000 new blogs coming online each day, and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. When you combine all this with search engines that can pinpoint exactly what social media someone is looking for through keyword searches, you start to see the power of how easy it is to find online conversations about virtually any subject.

Social media provides the opportunity for marketers to not only participate in these online conversations, but to create some of your own. Any blog post, tweet, social network entry or piece of content, from articles to press releases, videos, podcasts or white papers, along with many others, can be placed online, optimized to come up as individual search engine results and therefore be found by consumers online through keyword searches.

Keywords are your virtual keys for being discovered online in search results. When people talk about optimizing something online, they mean embedding the right keyword strategy as step one. And understanding your brand’s promise is the foundation to building any keyword strategy. Together they allow consumers to more easily find your business because they are searching for an unmet need that you can fulfill.

In fact, these consumers are what I call “hand raisers.” They have physically taken an action to search for content that is relevant to what you offer, meaning that they are not only self-qualified, but in the mind-set to be open to your marketing messages at that particular point in time. Most traditional marketing simply casts big nets out over demographic or psychographic groups in hopes of finding people that are in the purchase process. If these people are not in the mindset to buy, or simply not interested, you still pay to reach them as readers, listeners or viewers. In social media, the cost to optimize content is extremely low, but incredibly powerful.

And by the time these consumers have entered keywords into a search engine, discovered your link in the search results and clicked through to discover more about your business, they have qualified themselves twice. They have taken two actionable steps towards you. They are important prospects. Make sure that your brand promise in some way is there to greet them. That promise is the answer to their #1 question, “What’s in it for me?”

This new conversational marketing/social media opportunity is all about attracting people to your company. Once they arrive at your website, come into a store, or call on the phone, it is the brand that will reinforce your company’s relevant differentiation. Make sure you are living the brand promise at every customer touch point in order to connect on both rational and emotional levels. Neither side of the marketing equation (branding or social media) will work well without the other.

This is the essence of why brands and social media work so well together. And you can bet that this very article has been placed online, optimized for search engines, and is being found by numerous people that have yet to come to know my company and what I offer. Now is the time to put this power to work for your business.