3 Reasons Why Building Social into Marketing is a Significant Competitive Advantage

Understanding the role of social media in your business is important; however, before you get caught up in tactics first ask yourself “Is my business social?” If not, or if you aren’t sure, here are 3 reasons why building it into your existing marketing offers a significant competitive advantage.

Social businesses have a significant competitive advantage, as they keep pace with today’s market. Now that consumers are more connected, informed, and empowered than most businesses, a growing gap persists between consumer’s expectations and a business’s ability to deliver.

There are two factors required for business success.

Smart is defined by strategy, marketing, finance, and technology; basically decision sciences

Organizational Health is defined by minimal politics and confusion, high morale and productivity – and low turnover among good employees; it’s social.

There is a connection between being healthy and being social – healthy provides context for the smart attributes; it can create a competitive advantage. When businesses leverage health and embrace social, marketing is a natural outcome. In other words, healthy social business, by its very nature, is contagious.

Today many business owners and executives are struggling to figure out what, if anything, they should be doing with social media.

1. Social Adds Pull to the Push, Making Your Marketing Attractive

What a beautiful thing it is to be able to draw customers toward your business, instead of relying on broadcast or one-way communications mediums to build brand impressions. This process is often called Inbound Marketing.

Marketing efforts perceived by consumers as an interruption are no longer effective. Consumers want to communicate on their terms.

Infusing social into your business doesn’t mean that you abandon your tried-and-true marketing tactics.

Being a social business requires a different mindset; it updates effective traditional marketing practices by maximizing appropriate calls to action and website references, and carefully and thoughtfully positions opportunities for feedback across your marketing mix.

2. Social Networking Adds Relational Power to Your Existing Marketing

It enables unprecedented connectivity with the consumer, providing marketers with the ability to truly ENHANCE consumers’ lives. Social networking allows marketers to make marketing memorable. It provides the technological ability to delight, inspire, and surprise the audience in ways that marketing has never been able to before.

There is an unlimited number of ways to creatively integrate social into campaigns to make it exciting for marketers and consumers alike! People are interactive and love to share their voices and take part in games and promotions that generate buzz.

Organizations that adopt a social mindset can benefit by empowering colleagues and customers. So far we’ve emphasized social’s incredible capacity to connect businesses with external audiences, but we must not neglect its ability to enable businesses to connect and engage with internal stakeholders.

Just as customers are empowered with knowledge through their personal networks, social businesses keep colleagues informed and openly communicate with employees by:

Communicating company initiatives

Listening to feedback and input

Mapping consumer touchpoints (whether through email, in-store, on a social platform or at a customer service center)

Encouraging sharing and collaboration across functions, especially those who have ongoing contact with customers/prospects.

A healthy social business will inherently energize existing marketing efforts through empowered employees.

3. Without Social, You are Neglecting Your Audience

If your business isn’t social, it’s time to give your marketing a makeover. Let’s face it, if all your friends decide their new favorite place is the local lounge and you’re still sticking to the old tried-and-true corner café, you’re just out of the loop, which translates to out of the conversation.

Smart marketers know they need to be where the conversation is…and even smarter marketers know how to start the conversation. If you neglect to put social in your marketing, your marketing is likely at a dead-end… going into never-never-land.

And without a call-to-action tying in your strategy, all you got for that glossy print piece was real estate in a trashcan somewhere.

Make your DM efforts work harder by enticing readers to visit your site, comment on your FB page, and comment on your blog. Consumers expect businesses to be social. In fact social media is going to be part of your digital footprint whether you are active on social media or not.

The time to be nice is now; play friendly and put yourself in consumers’ corners.

Not sure where to start with your makeover to generate a competitive advantage? For starters, in addition to the options I just listed above, think about how consumers are using smartphones, and begin by: