Fargo INC! February 2016 | Page 33

MARKETING As part of its social media strategy for AGCO, Flint Group suggests contest ideas, photo ideas and other elements that make the plan easy for the client to implement. unless they’re very committed, especially in the social media spaces, we encourage them not to do it unless they’re committed to the followthrough and the type of activity it entails.” with a lot of companies in that area. That social media and the person who's helping you – whether it be an AGCO dealer or whatever – is really a marketing person on your staff.” What does that commitment look like? With AGCO's dealers, do you push one social media platform more than others? ROGER REIERSON: “A lot of companies don’t relate the cost. Because with social media, the fallacy is, ‘Oh, let’s just do it online. That’s a lot cheaper.’ They don’t get the hourly commitment or the personnel commitment to really do social media right. So what you have to convince them of is, you’re not buying space in a magazine. Instead of using that money to buy space in a magazine, you need to use that money to buy someone who’s going to be contentdriven to build your social media content. “Instead of a marketing expense, they think it’s a salary expense and they can’t quite put the two of those together. You’re trying to convince them, it’s part of your marketing budget to hire that social media content person. That mindset, I think, has to change JD: “We almost always start them off with Facebook because that’s what they’re the most familiar with and that’s what their customer base is usually involved in. And then some of them will do Twitter, but it’s a little harder to get them to engage in that. And we’re starting to do Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. “With Facebook, we try to get them to commit to a strategy so that they have a really thought-out approach to their social spaces and probably 80 to 90 percent of (dealers) are Facebook and that’s it. We give them exactly what they should post. We give them photo ideas, contest ideas, different things that map to whatever their objectives are.” Do you track social media traffic for dealers using data and analytics? JD: “Yep, we track all that. And we provide the dealer with a dashboard to show their activity level. But we also set goals for the activity. So we don’t necessarily want them to just get a bunch of likes. We want them to actually have some engagement from their prospects or customers. And that might be responses, it might be comments, it might be sparking different conversations.” How do photo and video fit into your digital strategy with AGCO? JD: “We really try to encourage them to have kind of a humanized approach so that it doesn’t look like something that came from an advertising company. We want it to feel very personal. So a lot of times, it’s things like: snap a photo of somebody who just bought a combine or go to their field and take pictures. But we try to really help them engage their customer. “It depends on what we’re 31