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How many of you struggle with bosses or clients that are just interested in vanity metrics? What do you feel your responsibility is?
Posted by on December 28, 2020 at 1:03 pmThis is something I’ve seen a lot of and been part of myself. Bosses or clients who don’t completely get social media, and are mostly interested in growing the number of followers—as opposed to building a long-term strategy that optimizes for profit in one way or the other.
Do you just do as the boss or client wants, or do you feel like it’s your responsibility to push for a more meaningful strategy?
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5 Replies
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byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia -
I had the opposite.
Client considered anything that drove engagement as too much like clickbait and has reverted to posting endless regurgitated content that gets 1 or 2 pity likes, no reads and no comments.
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I ran a luxury resort account that wanted one million followers, but didn’t want to allocate budget to audience growth. Their barometer was the shitty meme pages aggregating content from everyone else.
First step was expanding the competitor set. Made them agree to world famous hotels. Fontainebleau, Bellagio, MGM Grand, etc.
They barely had half a million between them.
The next step was doing the math. They were bewildered when I showed them the investment estimate to go from our ~80K to 1M in 10 months (this was a February ask after our new organic editorial strategy was sold in at the top of the year.) They got offended when I said the budget would be better allocated to driving bookings and reaching people who’d like to spend $2400/weekend for a pool and a beach.
Either way, the dialogue kinda fizzled there. They found something else to worry about, and I got a new job later that summer.
I had another watch brand that was comparing itself to those Instagram brands that invest solely in influencers while selling cheap Alibaba products. Think MVMT or Daniel Wellington. Had to show them how that aesthetic and strategy cheapens their decades-old brand. But they decided to introduce new SKUs to target the Basic People of Instagram, anyway.
I’m so happy to be away from social marketing where KPIs are invented on the fly by egotistical owners and enforced by incapable marketing managers, and into a traditional ad agency where we can set a logical KPI as the AOR.
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Yes! I’m currently dealing with a boss like that right now. He is obsessed with seeing the followers go up on our LinkedIn page!
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I generally avoid this by really clearly stating what the growth expectations are before signing a client. How sales are more important than likes and how sales don’t always follow what the “engagement” looks like. That being said, I had a client that constantly wanted to know “how many potential customers were in her audience” and wanted me to hit impossible monthly targets within her rates and I ended up dropping her because it was not worth the headache and her inability to understand organic social media.
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