Stephenie Rodriguez
Each year brings a new suite of digital channels for reaching your audience. With change constantly happening, how can you keep up?
According to Stephenie Rodriguez, CEO of digital marketing firm Mighty Media Group, it’s quite simple: play. In a recent interview with CW Radio, she tells us that the only way to understand where your audiences are and how they interact on social networks and with mobile apps is to dive in and test everything along with them. And this applies to every channel. Yes, even Tinder.
Play with everything…even if your audience isn’t there
Even if your audience isn’t on a certain channel, or it doesn’t make sense for you to be part of it, Rodriguez recommends testing it anyway to understand the common features and how users interact with them (for example, understanding the swipe left or right mentality of Tinder).
“Understanding the way people are using technology and playing with it allows us to then create our own applications, our own use cases, because we are seeing and experiencing how the end users are using mobile devices and interacting with content,” she shares.
This is especially true for video live streaming apps (Periscope, Meerkat, etc.) and wearable technology that not only provide new opportunities for how we can communicate with stakeholders, but also the senses that we can engage, Rodriguez tells us.
“Be adventurous. Have a little bit of fun. We can’t break these things.”
“If you think about where we are going, it’s not a question of why should we use it or will we use it—we are already seeing that early adopters are actually there—but being able to offer a more engaged insight into what we are trying to communicate.”
If you are still fearful about making the plunge, she shares these words of advice: “Be adventurous. Have a little bit of fun. We can’t break these things.”
Listen to the complete interview below to hear more, including Rodriguez’s tips on creating buyer personas and the three digital marketing game changers we’ll see in the next five years.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This is spot on – provided you have the time. I find that now I’m spending a fair bit of time consulting to organisations that I’m essentially doing the playing for them.
By playing I mean testing social media tools to establish how they work and understanding their quirks, strengths, weaknesses and use cases before they’re used for actual market purposes.
Where I do have a concern is when digital agencies conduct live experimentation on their clients’ customers using new unproven social tools (at their clients expense), or where organisations deploy social tools without having staff work through a play process to understand them first.
That’s unnecessarily risky behaviour – it’s always possible to trial and play with these tools before deploying them in real world situations.
Modelling how they fit in with the rest of an organisation’s social media and digital footprint is also a good step, as is using planning and testing tools which don’t rely on the live use of social media platforms, such as Social Media Planner (smplanner.com), which can be used on a desktop quickly and easily to model how social media platforms may be used by an organisation in a play-like way..