Laurel Mintz, CEO of Elevate My Brand is my podcast guest next week and below is an excerpt from the conversation. Laurel is a renowned marketing professional with both an MBA and JD. Her company works with global brands such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Nestle, and Popchips. She’s an expert on everything marketing/ digital strategy, social media, and events.
An Excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe: What do you see as one of those things that most people don’t really understand about marketing?
Laurel: The time and money it takes to actually do it right. I mean that’s the easy answer, right. I think people feel like marketing should be a magic bullet, and ultimately marketing is about strategy and planning. I think when companies come to us and they have really high expectations, we have to kind of bring them down to earth sometimes and let them know, “You’re starting from zero. You have X number of dollars to spend on marketing and advertising. This is really the output you should be seeing from this, and we have to kind of pull them down from the clouds. Because, as you were saying earlier, you know, Facebook is what everybody would love to be but very few companies are that, so I think being realistic about where your dollars are going to take you is probably the biggest issue that we see, and I would say secondarily developing the right messaging and content. Content is so critical as you know in this day and age and people just don’t spend nearly enough time crafting the right message, making sure that there is consistency in content and sending it out on the right platforms.
Joe: I think one of the big fallacies people have and you can agree or disagree with me and expand on it is that they think social media is free marketing.
Laurel: Right. I’m probably being a traitor to my industry right now by saying this and agreeing with you. It isn’t necessary evil. I think social media’s here to stay. I think if you are a new company, you need to be on it, as we talked about earlier it’s a really important customer service tool. It can be a great PR tool. But, you also need to make sure that you’re utilizing the advertising components and spending some money on it as well and not just spending money on advertising but spending money on the right graphics, spending money on the right content. There are so many other pieces that are built into developing a proper social media campaign and that’s why there are so many agencies out there like us that have a million people dedicated to doing that every single day because it’s so content, it requires so much content.
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