It was a close call last month, with a single vote deciding 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, but January’s MVP competition was close to a landslide victory for a certain social media marketer…
Sharing 3rd place were Sophia, Yas, Simon, Rich and Chris G with 1 vote each, perennial MVP contender Chris P clinched the runner-up spot with 2 votes, but the clear winner with 6 nominations was Andrew.
Now we all know social media can be tricky, especially from a brand perspective. How do you get the balance right between sharing fun, useful and informative content while also generating leads and ideally, sales? How do you accurately measure this activity to prove the value it’s adding to businesses – basically making the intangible tangible – without getting too bogged down with vanity metrics and meaningless KPIs? And if that’s not difficult enough, how do you maintain a consistent strategy when the social media landscape (not to mention Facebook’s organic reach algorithm!) is constantly shifting?
Taking all this into consideration, Andrew was set a challenge last year – put commercial awareness at the forefront and make sure our social strategies are as robust and result-driven as everything else we do. This was no mean feat as the social realm can be a fickle place and any attempt to lead with a hard sell gets sniffed out by consumers pretty quickly – and they’ll tune you out even faster.
That’s why most businesses are happy to use social purely as a brand building / awareness raising platform, with a fairly unstructured approach to content syndication and curation. Some posts land, others miss the mark, it’s the nature of the beast.
But Andrew wasn’t happy to settle for that.
While it’ll never be an exact science, Andrew has worked relentlessly over the past few months to create a clearly defined plan of action for each of his accounts, so it’s no surprise to see those campaigns starting to bear fruit. Brand building and lead generation are sometimes seen as being at opposite ends of the marketing spectrum, but Andrew’s social strategies are managing to combine the two seamlessly, with excellent engagement levels and an increasing number of direct sales.
His dedication, enthusiasm and infectious excitement for the problems he’s trying to solve, coupled with an ever-positive ‘can do’ attitude, were mentioned repeatedly in the nominations, which is testament to the passion and energy he brings to the team.
It’ll be interesting to see how our social marketing strategies continue to evolve with Andrew at the helm, and how he can scale this activity to achieve bigger and better results across the board.
Well done, Andrew. I suspect the company credit card will be making its way to Byron Burger in the near future?