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“Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your customers say it is.”

Or so goes the old advertising maxim.

If we were to update that to modern times, we might add, “And you can discover what they’re saying about your brand on social media.”

When Cambria Jacobs, Vice President of Marketing, Door to Door Organics, sat down for an interview at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 with Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, she shared that old advertising maxim along with her team’s journey on social media — from a customer service channel to a unified, proactive, brand-building strategy.

Here are four key lessons from Cambria’s interview …

Help your customers on social media

“Primarily, we were using social media as our vehicle for customer service,” Cambria said. While her team transformed its use of social media to grow its brand, don’t overlook where the journey began.

The ecommerce grocer started by using social media for customer service. Whether you choose to engage in social media marketing or not, your customers are likely already using social media to discuss interactions with your brand.

Use social media as another channel to help serve them.

Listen on social media to better understand the customer experience

Social media isn’t just a megaphone. It’s also a massive digital water cooler constantly providing customer interactions with your brand in real time.

As Door to Door Organics’ team listened to its customer on social media, it better understood the impact of its product in customer lives.

“There was this feeling of joy that Door to Door Organics could capture,” Cambria said. This new customer understanding eventually helped power the natural and organic online grocer’s marketing strategy down to its tagline — #JoyDelivered.

Amplify word of mouth

Customers naturally create content about many brands through social media. By finding, and sharing this content through its own social media accounts, Door to Door Organics let customers shape and promote its brand to each other.

“It’s not the company selling the benefits or the message or the value,” Cambria said. “It’s other customers, other people like them that are building a sense of community, really promoting something that makes it feel very valuable, very tangible and very appealing.”

And, hey, this is all branding

While social media marketing tends to be associated with the word “engagement,” at the end of the day, this is branding in the same way a Super Bowl ad or a nonprofit sponsorship is branding.

“It’s not just about sell, sell, sell, promote, promote. It’s really building a community,” Cambria said. “It’s just a way for us to really connect that feeling of family with Door to Door Organics and our customer.”

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, @DanielBurstein.

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About Daniel Burstein

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS. Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – digging for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine – from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications – a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications.

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Categories: Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing Tags: customer-centric, Inbound Marketing, MarketingSherpa Summit, social media, user generated content, video, Viral Marketing