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Keys To The Art And Science Of Social Marketing

Oracle

By Mike Stiles

If you're a marketing leader, you often need to think like an artist. Using the right tone and pitch in your Facebook messages; crafting the storyboard for your 25-second YouTube video; evoking an emotional response with one simple tweet--these things require intuition, a sense of taste, and the courage to act without precedent.

At the same time, marketing executives must understand hard science. If you're looking to derive customer insights from social data and big data, you need tools that will allow you to be uncompromisingly objective. That's why marketing technologies are increasingly appropriating methods from behavioral economics, psychology, and statistics--and eliminating unnecessary guesswork in the process.

Later this month, Oracle will bring together modern marketing leaders from dozens of industries to discuss the art and science of their work. Following are some of the social marketing-related topics and questions that we will be tackling.

The Science

  • It’s vital that marketers understand the tech of social networks, those that are here and those yet to come. What are their functions?  What value prop do they offer marketing?
  • Marketers must think about ways to integate those networks into one manageable platform for efficient publishing and facilitating a comprehensive picture of your social analytics.
  • With organic reach dropping and the importance of paid social rising, how can companies work with paid social media partners to quickly leverage top performing content and extend their reach and engagement?
  • Listening to the customer has become every bit as important as pushing marketing messages.  Your social listening tool should alert you to the current hot topic in your space, what the public is saying about you, where the competition is messing up so you can offer better solutions, how people are responding to your campaigns, and the overall sentiment for your brand.
  • An enterprise workflow system means tasks can be assigned and managed and customer communications can be routed to the right person for the fastest response and resolution.

All these tools point to an ideal: the social-enabled enterprise, in which social weaves not only through marketing functions, but connects to other enterprise systems such as CRM, sales, HR, and fulfillment for the most powerful use of big data imaginable.

The Art

Tech is far from the answer to every marketing challenge. Creativity is not only still vital—it's even more do-or-die as content quality separates winners from losers.

  • As a marketing leader, what skills should you look for in identifying creative talent?
  • Brands now have to be “liked,” so you can’t realistically proceed with no brand voice and personality. People don’t connect with entities, they connect with humans. There’s an intuitive art to striking a chord with people and making them want to associate with you.
  • You often hear about how effective it is to surprise and delight customers. Yes, tech can show what your audience tends to like, but creating something that truly catches them off guard and sweeps them off their feet is an art.

Social is but one part of the modern marketing ecosystem. But perhaps more than any other component, as a result of being in the trenches of day-to-day brand/customer relationship building and nurturing, social is where you’re likely to find the most even mix of art and science.

Stay tuned: we’ll be sharing case studies and battle-tested advice for modern marketing in the days and weeks ahead.

Mike Stiles is Senior Content Manager for Oracle Social Cloud and proprietor of the Oracle Social Spotlight blog and daily podcast.

Source: iStockphoto