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Boardroom breakthrough: Is this the year that social marketing really won its place on the company agenda?

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Ambition and recession:  It's an uncomfortable mix that the majority of us in marketing haven't really been able to dodge this year.  Faced with often dramatic budget cuts, most marketing departments have been victims to the boardroom hatchet knife one way or another.  But as we move towards the last stretch of 2009, the really interesting picture that's unfolding is one where even the most conservative board members have, albeit through necessity, finally turned their backs on many of the outdated marketing classics they'd come to know and trust and actually started to green light the "radical" new interactive and social media tactics that previously received only lip service. 

 

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 Marketing goals haven't changed, but the mechanisms used to achieve them have probably changed forever.

Sophisticated permission based marketing systems, building brand fans through social networks, SEO:  all of them are the big winners of 2009's tough economic climate. The real casualty, once again, has been poor old print. This isn't new; print media has been in decline for years, and when it comes to lead generation and genuine relationship building, marketing people like us came to understand the power of building brand fans through relevance based communications long ago. What has changed is that our budget holding executives in the boardroom have at last caught on.

It's not that the boardroom ever actually denied that social media is killing print journalism, it's just that until recently, their point of reference for social marketing was often little more than the online version of the trusty broadsheet that gets them through the train ride into work. Sure they understood that the web was stiff with blogs, forums and communities, but these were rarely considered likely places for customers to frequent. Thus, when campaign results were reviewed at board level, news stories that made the print editions of any national paper generally received more hearty approval than those available "only" on the web. Even more challenging: a product review in The Telegraph online could be more likely to raise an approving eyebrow than a similar review in Mashable or TechCrunch, ignoring the fact that Diggs, ReTweets or comments can struggle to reach double figures in the online version of the broadsheets but regularly register in the mid hundreds in social media driven titles.

The rescission has changed this. Tough times mean that marketing needs to fuel business opportunities more and  flatter business board members less. The relationship between sales & marketing has been rekindled and success, as perceived at board level, is mush more likely to be measured on a campaign's ability to engage well defined prospects with relevant messages that build real relationships. Mentions in mainstream media are still nice to have, but they're less essential for more companies.

It's brand building Jim, but not as we know it!

This January one of Europe's most established business technology companies asked us to help them build presence in a brand new vertical market. Already considered a heavyweight in manufacturing, energy, travel and government, ambition in this particular company's boardroom never faltered as the world economy tumbled.  While many marketers were asked to simply turn on the life support systems in a bid to survive the trauma, our challenge was to bring a whole new market sector within reach using a campaign budget that had just been shaved by over 40%.

In the good old vibrant economy we all knew and loved, outsourced marketing operations like Now used to refer to this kind of brief as "the right royal stitch up!": the classic "heighten the ramp while deflating the tyres" tactic that usually kicked-off to a prolonged and often painful divorce action between client and consultancy. But in the unprecedented times of 2009, this wasn't the intension. Marketing budgets genuinely did need to be cut; and these cuts were often made reluctantly by hard pressed CEOs who understood the consequences.

Rather than fuel confrontation these circumstances actually inspired debate: Just how could the mighty business ambitions hatched in the boardroom become real if big ticket CEO favourites like £20-30,000 sponsorship and media tie-ins were no longer an option? Suddenly all the social marketing stuff that people like us had been pushing onto deaf ears seemed worth listening to: If piggybacking on the leading media titles comes at too high a price then why not take a punt on these permission based thingamajigs. If launching our new product at the leading trade show is too rich for the purse this year then maybe it is time to go to customers via YouTube?

Marketing people like us love to experiment with the newest latest. Any CEO that's sat through a Twitter pitch over the past 12 months knows this only too well; It's all high-caffeine potential but decaf in the detail. But while the jury might still be out on micro-blogging's ROI, the need to effectively do more with less has undoubtedly boosted the business case for social media for the last bastion of tradition in the boardroom.  As a result even the most conventional CEOs are green lighting permission based social marketing tactics and recalibrating the benchmarks that marketing people are judged on: Not just because budget pressures mean they have little option, but because this year, more then ever, social marketing tactics became tried and tested.

This autumn, challenged to produce a live event that brought the "most established European business tech company" mentioned earlier, face-to-face with the key decision makers in the new vertical market they wanted to develop for 2009, Now embarked on a programme of relevance marketing that reached out to prospects via a series of permission based e-shots and built brand fans using LinkedIn and Facebook. No "traditional" media vehicles were factored in.

Building from the bottom up over the course of the project, these tactics alone delivered highly motivated delegates in numbers that actually exceeded board expectations. Moreover, delegates attending on the day seemed to be there for all the right reasons: They showed an unusually high interest in the themes and topics under debate, asked well considered compelling questions about the products and services under the spotlight, many even hung around long after the beer had gone to network and mingle. Real relationships are building and real business opportunities are developing out of them.

None of this happened by creating a big budget spectacle with mass appeal. No extra policing or crowd control was required on the day. It happened because the right people were approached with the right proposition, and they rightly responded.

Isn't this the kind of thing that the board has been asking for all along?

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