Don’t Get Caught Up In Tactics – Keep the Customer in Mind

Dave Morse, Online Marketing Strategist for Delta Faucet, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss the lessons he’s learned at Delta surrounding keeping his team nimble, knowing your audience, and how important it is to balance traditional marketing with social.
Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast.

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[podcast]http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/2yjyzy/SocialProsEpisode69.mp3[/podcast]
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Tweetable Moments

“With social, you need to be grounded in various other areas in order to be successful.” -@davemorse (tweet this)

“You have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt those who buy and sell your products.” -@davemorse (tweet this)

The Balancing Act

The digital marketing team at Delta Faucet is small: just two full-timers and a part-timer. With targeting adults, for example, marketing requires a cross of traditional and digital marketing. For example, Delta just launched a new commercial illustrating the precision of their faucets that turn on and off with a simple touch. The commercial features Wilco‘s drummer Glenn Kotche playing the faucets as a drum kit.

A lesson that Dave’s team has learned is that things move fast in the digital world. With the rapid proliferation of channels — one day Pinterest wasn’t there, and the next day it was — his team needs to be nimble enough to evaluate a new channel and make a quick decision about whether or not to adopt it.
He emphasizes that marketers can’t get caught up in the tactics. “You have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt, or in as much detail as possible, those who buy your products and those who sell your products.” With a company like Delta Faucet that is B2B but also in a sense B2C, this is even more important. And the only way to prioritize their time across all the channels is to be very clear about which customers they are targeting and where. Sometimes the structure of a company doesn’t give marketers the resources or the organizational inertia to do everything they want to do, so prioritizing becomes the major balancing act.

Social Media Stat of the Week: Teens share more on Facebook when they have more friends

The Pew Research Center recently released some research they have done on teens, social media, and privacy. They found that the larger a teen’s network is, the more likely that teen is to share more information about himself.

This may not be as much a comment about Facebook, though, as it is a comment about the fact that there are different types of people: some are social (with many friends and who want to share) and some are less social. Perhaps most surprising about this data is how few teens share their phone numbers on Facebook. The main mode of communication for teens is texting, so it’s surprising that they wouldn’t share that information with their network on social media sites.

Four Your Information

How did you get involved in social media?
Dave has been with Delta for 6 years and got his start as an “e-marketing manager.” Someone at the company, and within the brand team, needed to take on that task, and Dave was that guy.
What do you like best about social media?
Dave appreciates the focus on producing good content. “It’s about providing good information that people find valuable, adding value to peoples lives,” and there is also the conversation piece: keeping people engaged and talking about the brand.
What do you like least about social media?
All the buzz surrounding social media is a little tiresome. “Social media gets the lion’s share of the conversation,” and other marketing aspects like SEO or email marketing get left out in the cold. So many other tools deliver a strong ROI, so while social is important, it shouldn’t be the whole focus.
If you could do a Skype call with any living person, who might that be and why?
Chris Anderson — from TED, not from Wired.
See you next week!