Consistency is the Name of the Game

In 2011 companies and marketers sought to combine social media marketing and traditional marketing. Obviously social media marketing is just one tool under the marketing umbrella, however people continue to think that it is this alien entity. If there is one thing you take away from this post let it be this:

Social Media Marketing is like any other marketing tool, treat it as such.

I have put together several posts on social media tactics. Any regular reader knows that I believe if you are taking part in Social Media without clear, measurable, and realistic goals you are wasting your time and money. Would you run an email campaign and not analyze the data? Would you not analyze your ads performance and just dish out dollars without knowing your return? OF COURSE YOU WOULDN’T! So stop doing that with social media.

Now that I went off topic with my standard Social Media Marketing rant, let me get back to the post I wanted to write.

On the surface it looks like social media and other marketing outlets are completely different. The audience has different expectations on a Facebook page than they do when they see an email, visit a website, or click an ad. The following is the fundamental differences between digital media:

Type & Amount of Information Displayed

Digital marketing has many different nuances, you have a website, landing pages for ads, email marketing and social media marketing. A user expects a particular type of information from an email, and to deviate from this would negatively affect your campaign. If you are sending an email that is promoting X% off of product Y, you wouldn’t include information about product Z (assuming this product is not on sale too).  Why wouldn’t you include information on product Z? Because it adds more information than your user needs or wants.

This same logic applies to your Google Adwords. When you are running an adword campaign, you do not want to send a user to your home page. There is too much information on the home page, and whatever the user was looking for when she clicked your ad will be more difficult to find. Landing pages are great ways to increase content because it serves up relevant content to a user who is actively seeking it out.

A website is the encyclopedia of your company, it has all the information of your history, your staff, your products etc. A website also has a professional tone that speaks to people rather than engaging them in a conversation. There is an incredible amount of information for the user that is looking for it, and this information is presented in a way that builds confidence in the user about your brand.

A Facebook page has much less information than your website and this is by design. Users can learn the basics about your brand and then move on to the most important part of a Facebook page, interact. How you post information and share data on Facebook is completely different than a website. You aren’t talking to people on Facebook, you are talking with them. This greatly changes the type of content that is on your Facebook page, rather than being the encyclopedia of your company it is more or less your brand ambassador.

I like to look at landing pages as islands of information. The people who land on these pages are expecting a certain amount and type of information, it needs to be digested quickly and be sufficient enough to entice the visitor to act. These pages, by design, have very little navigation and limited information. Landing pages can get increasingly personal with geo-targeting and other cool tricks, but the type of information that landing page’s display must fall in line with the visitor.

In most cases, you have the most information about your user when sending emails out. People receiving your emails have opted in to your marketing efforts and are expecting messages from you. The better you segment your lists, the better your campaigns will perform. Since you have so much information about your audience when sending emails out, you can send highly targeted messages to a crowd that will have a positive response. Including merge fields can make emails very personal. An email is arguably the most personal form of digital marketing, which is why a message can have minimal yet targeted information.

So what?

Well now that you know the amount and type of information that is to be concluded on your different media outlets, you need to develop a consistent way to display this information. Much like when a user clicks an ad they expect to see information that is reflected in the ad they picked, you want to have consistent branding across your pages to solidify your marketing efforts.

One way to do this is through consistent design and visual branding, which is why we have been developing a digital marketing suite to reduce the hardships of coding and designing.

Related articles

• Why Marketing Mix should include Social Media Marketing (leadsexplorer.com)
• Social Media and Inbound Marketing (bizsugar.com)
• The Ugly Truth Behind Social Media Marketing (sixstoriesup.com)
• Social Media Statistics of the Day [infographic] (michaelhartzell.com)