Post Control Marketing

I began college as a mechanical engineering major, but soon realized it was not for me. Taking classes from various departments in multiple disciplines helped lead me to advertising and my marketing career. Those other classes were not wasted. I firmly believe that diverse knowledge helped make me a better marketer. The same is true for social media strategy.

Marketing via social media is unique and requires different skills from marketing, advertising, public relations, personal sales, and customer service professionals that can be more relevant to different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Customers’ needs and interests change when they’re in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Social media marketers should create unique content and engage in unique ways during these stages. Yet, the best person for the job isn’t always a marketer.

In your business or organization, you probably have different people or departments better suited for various content and engagement depending on the buyer stage. Diverse employees and departments may be best suited for communicating with and appealing to consumer interests and needs in these distinct stages.

Optimize your social media strategy with appropriate content and engagement from those employees, disciplines, and departments. Distributing social responsibilities to the most relevant people can be more effective and efficient. This often requires alignment of goals and objectives, software integration, and a system to identify, sort, and assign social media tasks across siloed departments.

A cross-discipline approach tailors content and engagement to consumer needs. It also can help scale one-on-one social media engagement spreading out time and costs across department responsibilities, budgets, and staff. To ensure the most appropriate people are creating the content and engagement follow these suggestions for each stage.

Click on the image to download a PDF of this template.

Pre-purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.

During the pre-purchase stage, B2C or B2B consumers are not actively seeking to buy. They may have a general interest and are simply exploring and learning. Or they may have a problem but have not realized the solution yet. In the pre-purchase stage use social media listening to find people in the market who haven’t purchased. Listen for brand, product, category, competitor, or specific product and service mentions.

Marketing and advertising can contribute by creating relevant messages and content. This includes content from followers and reviews. Monitor conversations to engage with marketing-related questions.
Public relations can monitor for reputation issues. Any negative mentions should be managed. Also, use media and influencer outreach to generate earned media awareness.
Sales representatives can create and share valuable content and answer consumer questions to generate leads.
Customer service can create satisfied customers who share positive experience reviews and make more purchases turning customer service into marketing.

Purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.

During the purchase stage, people are interested in buying and are seeking the best options. They’re looking for value, convenience, special offers, guarantees, and signals that your product or service is the best for their needs and budget. In the purchase stage use social media listening to find people seeking purchase information such as prices, offers, stock numbers, contact information, shipping options, or store hours.

Marketing and advertising can help answer questions, and provide additional information related to the product, service, and offers.
Public relations can create content to educate via media and influencer outreach looking for competitor comparisons and third-party endorsements to share on social media.
Sales representatives in B2C can directly interact with customers to facilitate sales. B2B sales reps engage to identify qualified leads and set up appointments and sales presentations.
Customer service can respond to any technical and account issues or complications in the purchase process that may prevent a sale.

Post-purchase Stage Content, Engagement, and Disciples.

During the post-purchase stage, people have purchased your product or service but are looking for validation that they made the right decision. In most markets, there are many quality options and buyer’s remorse may creep in. There may also be complications, issues, or hiccups that come with a new purchase. In the post-purchase stage use social media listening to look for current customers seeking help with product usage, problems, and account issues. Also, seek happy customers who share positive product and service experiences.

Marketing and advertising can create messages that reassure purchase decisions, share messages of happy customers, and build brand community through offers and loyalty programs.
Public relations can create relevant brand and earned media content that engages current customers, other stakeholders, and influencers to maintain relationships.
Sales representatives can follow up with customers to ensure they are happy with regular interaction while encouraging referrals and additional sales.
Customer service can resolve any post-purchase issues to help with retention and loyalty, plus contribute to positive social media comments and reviews.

Social media marketing is more than marketing. Are you missing out by not working across discipline and organizational department silos? Customizing listening and response with cross-discipline teams in social media can help scale social media engagement. Meeting the different needs of consumers through all stages of the buying cycle can help businesses achieve their overall goals more effectively and efficiently.

Another way to improve your social media content is to consider the right content in the right places. For help see my post “Does The Shoe Fit? How To Make Your Social Media Marketing More Strategic” including a Social Media Content Planning Template.

I recently published academic research in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines with Michael Coolsen titled, “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement.” Exciting right?

If you’re a research geek or academic maybe. A social media manager? No way. Yet, I know the findings, specifically our Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is very exciting for social media pros! So I wanted to write this blog post.

But, as you can tell by the title, an academic audience, and a professional audience are very different. Taking a complicated 25-page academic research article and translating it into a practical and concise professional blog post could take me hours.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with Google’s new AI generator tool NotebookLM so I thought I would try it. Thus, this blog post is about our research on a social media engagement framework and how I used AI to streamline my process to create it. As a bonus, I got a podcast out of it!

My co-author and I did the hard work of the research. I was okay with an AI assistant helping translate it into different media for different audiences. Click for an AI Task Framework.

Using NotebookLM.

Our study was on types of content that generate engagement on Twitter, but the real value was a proposed model for engagement. So before uploading any of the research into the AI tool, I condensed it to just the theoretical and managerial implications sections. Then I added a title, the journal citation, and saved it as a PDF.

NotebookLM uses Gemini 1.5 Pro. Google describes it as a virtual research assistant. Think of it as an AI tool to help you explore and take notes about a source or sources that you upload. Each project you work on is saved in a Notebook that you title. I titled mine “Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement.”

Whatever you upload NotebookLM becomes an expert on that information. It uses your sources to answer your questions or complete your requests. It responds with citations, showing you original quotes from your sources. Google says that your data is not used to train NotebookLM, so sensitive information stays private (I would still double-check before uploading).

Source files accepted include Google Docs, Google Slides, PDF, Text files, Web URLs, Copy-pasted text, YouTube URLs of public videos, and Audio files. Each source can contain up to 500,000 words, or up to 200MB for uploaded files. Each notebook can contain up to 50 sources. If you add that up NotebookLM’s context window is huge compared to other models. ChatGPT 4o’s context window is roughly 96,000 words.

When you upload a source to NotebookLM, it instantly creates an overview that summarizes all sources, pulls out key topics, and suggests questions to ask. It also has a set of standard documents you can create such as an FAQ, Study Guide, Table of Contents, Timeline, or Briefing Doc.

You can also ask it to create something else. I asked it to write a blog post about the findings of our research. You will see that below. Yet, the most impressive feature is the Audio Overview. This generates an audio file of two podcast hosts explaining your source or sources in the Notebook.

The NotebookLM dashboard gives you a variety of options to interact with your sources.

Using Audio Overviews.

There are no options for the Audio Overview so you get what it creates. But what it creates is amazing! My jaw literally dropped when I heard it. And it will give you slightly different results each time you run it.

I noticed things missing in the first audio overview such as the journal and article title and the authors’ names. I did figure out how to make adjustments by modifying my source document. Through five rounds of modifying my source document, I was able to get that information in and more.

Sometimes overviews aren’t 100% accurate. It says, “NotebookLM may still sometimes give inaccurate responses, so you may want to confirm any facts independently.” In our research article we give a hypothetical example of a running shoe brand following our model. It was not real. But in one version of Audio Overviews, the podcast hosts talk as if the company did what we said and got real results that we measured.

I was impressed that in other versions it didn’t use our example and applied the model to new ones. One time it used an organic tea company and another time a sustainable clothing brand. On the fifth attempt it even built in a commercial break for the “podcast.” This last version gave my running shoe example and added its own about a sustainable activewear brand.

What’s really interesting about the last version is that it pulled in other general knowledge about social media strategy and applied it to the new information of our study. At the end, the hosts bring up how our engagement model will help know what to say but that social media managers still need to customize the content to be appropriate for each social platform. That’s a social media best practice but not something we mention in the article.

The Audio Overview Podcast NotebookLM Created.

It’s amazing these podcast hosts discussed our research and explained it so well for social pros. What’s more amazing is that they are not real people! Yet NotebookLM did more. Below is the blog post it wrote. It included our diagram of the model, but had trouble getting it right. So, I replaced the image with one I created from our article.

Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement.

This post examines a model for social media engagement based on an October 2024 study in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines. “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement,” published by Keith Quesenberry and Mike Coolsen.

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is a framework to help social pros create more effective plans by aligning brand goals with consumer goals. It emphasizes understanding the motivations behind consumer engagement and tailoring content accordingly.

How the Model Works

The model outlines three key brand goals:

Building brand community (Reach): This goal focuses on expanding the brand’s audience and increasing awareness.
Building brand-consumer relationships (Response): This goal aims to foster brand interaction and engagement.
Building brand-consumer bonds (Recognition): This goal seeks to create brand emotional connections and loyalty.

Each brand goal is associated with a corresponding consumer goal and form of social media engagement as seen in the graphic below. Consumers can manage people’s impressions and persuade others by sharing certain brand posts. They can gain information about a brand with other types of brand content for deliberation. Then they can bond with others regulating their emotions in evaluating brand posts with other fans.

Click on the graphic to download this model for social media engagement.

Here is an example

A sneaker brand launches a running shoe and aims to build brand community (reach) creating content that appeals to runners’ desire for impression management and persuasion. This could be sharing inspirational stories about runners breaking records encouraging retweets and brand visibility.
Once awareness is established, the brand could shift its focus to building relationships (response) by providing information about the shoe’s features and benefits, appealing to consumers’ information acquisition goals, and prompting replies and comments seeking further details.
Finally, the brand can foster brand bonds (recognition) by sharing content that resonates with runners’ social bonding and emotion regulation needs, such as posts about the challenges and rewards of training, which encourage likes and emotional connections.

Key Insights from the Study

The study found that simply using popular content types like videos or photos is not enough to guarantee success on social media. The message delivered with the content is crucial.

Marketers need to consider:

The target audience’s motivations for using social media
Buying cycle stage (awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty)
Desired word-of-mouth function (sharing, deliberation, evaluation)

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement offers a strategic framework for developing effective social media campaigns. By understanding the motivations behind consumer behavior and aligning content with both brand and consumer goals, marketers can achieve better results and build stronger relationships with their target audience.

I hope you found this look at NotebookLM and the insights from our social media research helpful. In what ways do you think NotebookLM can help in your job? In what ways can the insights from the Brand Consumer Engagement Model improve your social media content strategy?

NotebookLM Could be a Great Study Tool for Students.

NotebookLM could be a great tool for student learning if used as a study guide, reinforcement, or tutor. It would have a negative impact if used to simply replace reading and listening in the first place. What’s missed when you use AI in the wrong way is depicted in the graphic below. It is from a previous post on the importance of subject matter expertise when using AI

Personally, I was fine using this tool in this way. My co-author and I did the hard work of the research. This AI assistant simply helped us translate it into different media for different audiences.

This graphic shows that in stages of learning you go through attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. You need your brain to learn this process not just use AI for the process. — Click the image for a downloadable PDF of this graphic.

Half of This Content Was Human Created!