By adaptive - November 6th, 2013

You may have the perfect strategies and the best social media campaigns, but if you don’t integrate and stay consistent, engagement will be lost

Over the past two features we have examined the role of the mobile device in social media strategies and how businesses need to adapt and grow to match the rising demands these platforms are placing on their corporations. In this, the final part, we are looking to how you can integrate your social media presences and ensure consistency to achieve maximum impact and brand cohesion.

“Most businesses have become very au fait with digital as a principle, such as having a corporate website and online store,” says Dan Neale, Co-Founder of Alfred. “The part that is letting many businesses down is the mobile element and ensuring their existing platforms work across mobile. The most important things to ask are – will the content be viewed by people on mobile and does it work?”

The experience of your brand on a mobile platform needs to be just that, an experience. Your customers want to interact with you seamlessly from one social media platform and device to another. Failing to optimise for mobile means customers won’t be able to grab onto your brand whenever it is convenient for them and that’s never going to work in your favour.

“You need a good communication strategy and to know what your targets are,” says Leticia Supple, Content Strategist and Founder at Brutal Pixie, “You need to profile your audience and see where they are, when they interact with your brand and what devices they are on. Then you need to build a strategy based on what you have to put in front of people most often and build an editorial strategy that defines your messages.”

According to Mobile Life by TNS the ways in which consumers value their devices depends a lot on the value they give in return. Today they want content and they want it to perch neatly on their operating system and function perfectly within the limitations of their device. The same report outlines how the interactive user experience makes mobile “hugely relevant to businesses across every category. Huge benefits become available when a brand is invited into a consumer’s mobile world.”

It is vital that your social media strategies, regardless of platform, offer value to consumers. Is it relevant to their lives? Why would they be drawn to visit your social media as opposed to that of your competitor? Answering these questions will set you on the right path when it comes to ensuring relevance.

The importance of being integrated

You want to engage with your customers? Be interesting, be personal and don’t be superficial. Get their attention everywhere, but don’t spam them with irrelevant content. An excellent example of a brand taking on every, single social media platform with aplomb is the Red Bull Stratos [http://www.redbullmediahouse.com/products-brands/online/social-media.html#c290] campaign. This jump from space saw them achieve the biggest digital live event on record across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Google +, Facebook and their dedicated website. Every platform was scaled to match the medium and to make the most of both mobile and monitor screens.

Red Bull

Their results – record breaking at the time – speak for themselves and show how important it is to integrate one message cohesively across every platform. Aim your campaign at your users using the metrics and measurements you have gleaned through research and tools.

“The most common pitfall when shifting to mobile is to try to apply the same rules as you did on the desktop,” says Bill Dinan, President of Telmetrics, "Mobile users search, connect and purchase differently than in other media channels and it is critical to recognise this if you want to tap into this valuable audience. Understand their purchase behaviours, including preferred research tools, activities and mobile purchase influences.”

Many of the social media platforms offer tools that assist businesses to target mobile users and even their chosen operating systems. Use what is at your disposal and avoid being too clever. A genius idea on a home PC may be nothing more than a data-eating nightmare on a smartphone.

Take a look at the infographic below – the majority of media consumption is screen based with 90% of consumers moving between multiple devices to accomplish their goals. This shows how important it is to have a strategy that carries the same message, tone, content and offers across every accessible platform.

InfographicScreens

“To integrate messaging and strategy across all devices you need to start with mobile when you are planning and keep thinking about it while you are planning your entire digital strategy. Do not think of it as an add-on!” says Neale.

For Pierre Dorfling, Head of Digital at Boomtown mobile is capable of integrating with other marketing media, and must do so to be successful. “Businesses can create call to actions from virtually any other medium such as radio for the morning traffic, the billboard at a bus stop or even the television,” says Dorfling, “Users can be prompted to access content on their mobile devices and companies can increase the interactivity by constantly reinforcing the message.”

It’s worth noting that the influence of mobile can be substantially increased if integrated properly with your other platforms. It seems obvious, but there are still campaigns that neglect one or another side of the marketing coin.

“Quite often social media can be treated as its own silo that’s divorced not only from marketing, but from your general business activities,” says Lynette Hundermark, Apps Business Director at Prezence, ”Always use the various channels available to your brand – your website, email signatures, business cards, marketing on traditional channels – to push your consumer back to your brand’s social media.”

This level of cohesion will ensure that your campaigns are not divorced from one another or shift off tone, off message. Keep social media and traditional media and mobile campaigns together and make sure that the same messaging is carried consistently across them all.

“To make this work, you need to ensure that your messaging, both in terms of content and tone, remains consistent,” says Hundermark, “Mobile, like no other marketing channel or tool before it, has managed to give brands unprecedented access to consumers. A brand that fails to recognise the importance of mobile isn’t risking irrelevancy, it is already irrelevant.”

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