We continue our conversation with Pauline Wallander, partner and project director for SocialView. She started her career as a social media marketer as an intern for SocialView along with her university studies in 2015 and since then she has continued to build her career in social media together with SocialView.
In this article, we talked about what the initial steps on how market on social media, the common mistakes businesses make on social media and she continues to share her expertise with social media.
What are the first steps when anyone would like to start to market their business on social media?
“The conversion from the business goal to social media goal is one of the first most important steps.”
Pauline shares that these two sets of goals don’t convert as straightforward as some people would think. As an example, she shared that generate sales as a business goal, might be to establish brand awareness or increase engagement with their audience as a relevant objective in social media, which will further on generate a sale.
It’s important to have the business goal and the social media goal to be clearly defined. Understand how they relate to one another will help entrepreneurs to monitor the progress of the social media marketing.
“Do not pre-decide channel before we know the audience. It’s the audience and the objective that decides the channel, not the other way around”.
It’s an impulse for businesses to decide which platform to use before considering which audience to reach out to. Pauline says that just consider the channel before audience and objective mostly leave you with an irrelevant presence.
She mentions that different types of audiences can be found on different platforms. It might seem that Facebook would be the popular choice, but a business can find their market and growth on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Snapchat or a combination of them all.
“Several channels play an important role together, reaching the audience at different times when they are in different moods”.
What are the common mistakes in digital marketing?
“Conversion blindness”
Business owners can fall victim to conversion blindness. Pauline describes conversion blindness as someone who only focuses on the click and sale. That often lead to discount focused content and false strategies, missing the whole point of marketing that is to attract and engage your audience.
She further explains that today it’s absolutely possible to drive sales through social media but some entrepreneurs believe that if they don’t drive sales with a direct click like for example google, then using social media is not a valid strategy anymore.
She encourages entrepreneurs to see social media in a long-term perspective and to treat social media as an investment. Sales are about timing and patience.
“They are missing the whole point of creating adjusted and individualized content for the platform.”
Creating content is a fundamental part of marketing especially in social media. Pauline warns entrepreneurs that it’s not a great idea to try to implement your traditional TV commercial in social, thinking you were efficient. Content in social media is all about relevance, both to your audience and to the channel.
She says that businesses, as a result, miss the opportunity to make the most out of social media. They miss the opportunity to be creative and smart about their content to be able to engage with their audience.
“We can’t get the data together”
There is so much data readily available for people that it can be difficult to figure out what to look at. For Google, there is still the cookie-based data while for other platforms like Facebook and Instagram that uses people-based data and it can be difficult to figure out how these things match. According to Pauline, its common for a business to compare one set of data over the other. She emphasizes that these data measure in different ways.
Business owners should avoid thinking that these data measure the same thing and can be directly compared, but accept the fact that they are different and rather complement each other. The goal is to understand what these data mean for your business, use the right attribution model and to look at the bigger picture and if the current strategy is contributing to it.
“Not connecting your social media marketing to your other marketing”
Pauline says that entrepreneurs should maximize the use of social media by incorporating it to the other marketing strategies and plans. She calls it a 360 solution and means that combining your social media with e-mail, out of home-campaigns, TV-commercials and similar in a smart way, can greatly increase the impact of your efforts.
Social media should not be something separate, it should be a part of every other marketing effort and just as important.
“Not connecting your marketing and sales team.”
Pauline explains that this is still a common problem within businesses. The marketing team does one thing, and the sales team is doing another. That is not how you find growth in your marketing. She encourages businesses to “Put the sales and marketing teams in the same room and make them talk. Then the marketing team will understand the sales cycle, and the sales team will understand how marketing is contributing to the sales”.
Is it possible to grow a start-up’s digital presence organically? Do you have tips on how to go about it?
“I absolutely think that you can grow organically if you find your niche and if you can find a real purpose on why I am supposed to follow your social media channel”
Pauline describes this as the golden question. “Why should people follow you on social media?” She thinks that this question is not asked enough because she would notice businesses posting things that are interesting to them, but it might not interest their audience.
She says that businesses were able to grow organically, for example letting influencers grow your brand by sending them products and let them post on Instagram. But now this strategy has become more common and people are now inclined to follow a business that is something more than that and adds value to their lives.
“Sooner or later you would need to build your brand and put in money to grow in the long term.”
Despite Pauline agreeing that businesses can grow organically she still believes that eventually, a business would need to invest in their social media marketing to ensure its continuous growth.
She believes that a business should evaluate how much they can spend on social media and at least begin with a small test budget. The testing budget will help them to try out different types of content, on different platforms, with a different audience in a small scale to see patterns in what marketing strategy could benefit the business the most.
“Be the one who hustles”
If working with a low budget or a zero budget the best way to grow organically is to hustle. Pauline advise entrepreneurs to go into different pages and like photos, tag people, comment on posts, re-posting and to do whatever it takes to make themselves visible.
She believes that it all comes down to what social media is and that is to connect with people, showcase themselves, and engage with other people’s content.
