“What are we doing on social?” For brands, the dreaded question can be deceptively challenging to answer.
Social media is at the heart of the new digital age. Harnessed effectively, social is an unrivaled tool for building rapport at scale, enabling round-the-clock engagement and one-on-one conversations.
Standing in the way of social media success, however, is shrinking organic reach, unrelenting competition for audience attention, and the speed of change as platforms tweak algorithms. A more subtle challenge for brands is the pressure to chase metrics for metrics’ sake, sweating over likes and shares that may or may not have business impact.
But we live in a social world, and brands that thrive on social platforms can connect with customers in ways that marketers could only dream of in the past. We help brands succeed on social by being tactically nimble, clear about objectives, and adopting a relentless audience-centricity. The goal of all our social media services is simple: to help audiences tell their own stories better.
Let's talk.
An Organic Foundation
As popular platforms reduce organic reach, social media marketing becomes more and more pay-to-play. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still love organic social. On the contrary, we think organic is where good paid campaigns start.
If a brand’s organic pages seem disused, dead, or disconnected from social advertising, even a brilliant paid campaign can do more harm than good. Also, organic social has other roles beyond getting into people’s feeds. Social profiles typically appear high in search results, so they’re often part of consumer due diligence when evaluating a brand.
At BFM, we really do see organic social as the foundation of a social media strategy – not the entire effort, but something to build upon. Our first order of business in any marketing that involves social media is helping brands strategize and plan for their organic engagement.
A Two-Way Conversation
Generating loyalty takes a human touch, which means a human conversation. Today, it’s easier than ever for brands of all sizes to start a dialogue with the public.
Customers want and expect to talk with their favorite brands, and the language of engagement — clicks, likes, comments, shares, and conversions — has never been simpler to quantify, although these metrics need to be interpreted intelligently and kept in perspective.
But social media also enables social listening in a more systematic way – taking a bigger-picture look at the conversation around your brand, industry, competitors, and the cultural context in which you operate. The data and insights from social listening can then be fed back into the strategies, content, and execution of your brand’s campaigns.
At BFM, we believe in both social dialogue and social listening, and have the tools and capabilities to empower you to do both.
Social for Performance-Minded Brands
In the social arena, as with any marketing, brands need to know their audience, understand the messages that resonate with them, and take effective action to reach them. At BFM, we do this by pairing clients with a multidisciplinary team that is creative, agile, and focused on results.
When you work with us, we bring together copywriters, designers, strategists, analytics specialists, and marketing experts to create content and messages to reach your audience, whether organically or via paid efforts. From strategy to deployment, BFM’s social efforts are designed to reach the right people with the right content at the right time.
We see organic and paid social efforts as complementary, and we’re strategic about the uses of each. Rather than chasing engagement metrics, however, we look for ways to measure the impact of organic social on your ultimate business goals.
Our teams are agile, so we can move quickly and tune our tactics based on trends we identify through ongoing data collection. We take an iterative, sprint-based approach, so that every BFM campaign informs the next, because we believe the best marketing is always learning from the data – and ultimately, the people behind the numbers.
