Social media and direct response usually aren’t put together, and you have to be careful of that. It’s called social media for a reason. It’s because it’s social. You share it, it has engagement, and direct response and social media is a little bit different, so it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be ROI driven. So, the things that we have done with our clients and in, you know, in the past and present have been, we’ve been taking our commercials, editing down different, different versions of it for Facebook and Instagram that’s sixty seconds, and driving them to a unique URL to get an order based on the social media buy. We’re not gonna get into the Facebook media buy, but the fact of the matter is the content that we’ve been producing for short-form and long-form infomercials and commercials make great content for social media when we’re talking about ROI-driven direct response social media.

For instance, we just have delivered probably about twenty assets to a client and all those assets came from things that we’d already shot for their commercials, so for Facebook, and Instagram, and YouTube, and we could go on, they have a lot of material that we’ve been able to sort of help them amortize the cost of their original commercials, and really get good bang for their buck on social media.

Specifically, we have taken assets that we shot from the long form and short form, but we’ve also created very specific social media content while we were shooting the infomercial, while we’re shooting the commercial; therefore, either saving on dollars because you’re doing it all at the same time, but you do have to have a very specific strategy for social, and for your direct response when you’re doing it that way. With just a little bit of planning, it’s amazing how much material you can pull out of a day.

In recent a CMO survey concluded that 78 percent of companies had dedicated social media teams, but only 26 percent integrated social media fully into their business strategies. Now, I think that says a lot. That says that, is social media a viable aspect for all businesses? Absolutely. With that, with those kinds of numbers, but are you integrating them into your whole business strategy? I mean, are you trying to get an ROI out of it? And that’s our… You know, we… Our business lives and dies on an ROI, so there’s such an opportunity to maximize an ROI and social media if you do it correctly, and I’m gonna graze over it pretty lightly, but you’re, what you don’t want to do is you won’t, don’t want to jam a sale down somebody’s throat in social media. You want to get their interest enough to make them want to go somewhere and try something, or to look for more information. If you’re sticking an ad right, you know, “Buy this, buy now! With all that. That’s not gonna work, but you have to give them a value proposition. You have to, and somehow solve their problem, and identify their problem, give them a value proposition, and that’s about all you can do in sixty seconds when it comes to a good social media ad that’s designed to drive a response.

What we all know just from being on social media, as well, as consumers of that, we don’t like to see ads on social media. We want to skip by them, so you have to get creative and catch someone’s attention and just a second or two maybe is all you have and then compel them to watch, and then hopefully direct them to what you’re trying to get them to go to.

One of the biggest reasons why we’re talking about this today is because, from what we do at Script to Screen, everything is so holistic in what we’re doing. We’re thinking the very beginning of, you know, what’s the end result, what are the goals that we want to reach in a direct response television campaign, and how can we use social media, how can we use digital, how could we use all the other things that we can produce with the content that we’re producing to optimize and to give, you know, give a bottom line ROI. So, everything we do now is so much more holistic. It’s not just TV and it’s really important to think about that ahead of time, that’s why I want to really bring it up today because it’s just become such an integral part of what we do.