Social Media Agencies Craft Marketing Strategies Differently Than You Do

via social media agency:  Have you ever worked at an ad agency? It's like working for a law firm, accounting firm, and Japanese pop art studio at the same time. The are anal and neurotic about data, testing, metrics, and somehow, coming up with a vision that stands out. Even if that vision doesn't do anything but stand out, meaning that it generates no sales, they test it to see what they can learn about audience reaction and see if they can somehow take the components that drive sales and genetically fuse them to the components that get people talking (even jeering) about an ad campaign.

This means that if you're the marketing guy at your company (which means you're probably the CEO, founder, receptionist, sales manager, etc), you're probably using social media very differently than the way an ad agency uses Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg, etc.

Sad for you, this means that your competitor, who's using an ad agency, is driving far more sales than you are.

So that leaves us with the all important question, what can you do differently or take away from the smartest people in the marketing world for your business? Can you duplicate what Ad Agencies are doing for their clients (read: your competitors) and do it in house?

Why Yes.

What Social Media Ad Agencies Are Doing (That You're Not)

1. They Back Trace Their Target Market Use Behavior
You use social media to market your company the way that you use social media. This is bad. Remember, when you use social media, when you tweet, post to facebook, post to pinterest (if you do that at all) you're doing it when you do it. This is like going fishing when you're hungry.

Ad agencies go fishing when the fish are hungry.

Ad agencies did the research. They figured out that if your target is a 35 year old woman with an office job and 2 kids, she:

A. uses twitter at 8:45 AM her local time til 9:am. That's 15 minutes people.
B. logs on to Facebook at exactly 5 PM her local time for 22 minutes while waiting for parking lot traffic to clear.
C. uses Facebook for 40 minutes after 10 pm on Saturday and 9 pm on Sunday.

Social Media Ad Agencies also know that:
A. tweets remain visible for about 50 minutes after posting
B. facebook posts remain visible for 3 hours after posting but ONLY get exposed to 18% of your LIKErs.

What I'm saying is that you're Tweeting when nobody is there.

You're NOT Facebooking when everybody is there.

2. Social Media Agencies Create Perceived Ubiquity.
This is more important than #1. Let's discuss this in the next post. And, it will be a private subscriber only post. You can join here: http://sparkah.com/private