Lisa Buyer is the owner and founder of The Buyer Group and author of "Social PR Secrets". Her business focus is helping clients build an audience and measure results of that engagement. Not surprisingly, her experience as a practitioner of Yoga impacts her viewpoints on how to be a balanced marketer and build sustainable digital marketing relationships.
-What is the number one cause of failure in digital marketing relationships between agencies and brands?
Inconsistent communication and reporting
Controlling expectations
Change in management or talent
No chemistry
-When do you decline a project or client?
When it is not a perfect fit for both of us
-What innovations are you making to improve digital marketing process and/or relationships?
Saying "no" more often
-What is your biggest frustration?
The fact that the public relations industry is yet to embrace SEO and give their clients the extra boost of visibility in search and social that can come with optimized content. Don’t get me wrong, they have acknowledged the coming and importance of it, but doing and saying are two different things.
-What are your priorities/guidelines when selecting new business?
First and foremost is chemistry. Is there a mutual and beneficial reason we should do business together? I wish there was a match.com for agencies and businesses. Both the agency and client must understand and agree on basic needs and have a mutual level of understanding the of each other’s strengths and weaknesses to trust the relationship. For example, if the client needs SEO services but does not understand SEO, the agency must at a certain level provide that education process of how and why SEO is important and how to know if it is working.
-What do you think are the qualities that prepare today's digital marketing professionals to be revolutionary and to stay relevant in our ever-changing industry?
There are four types of skills that are necessary for success in today’s digital world.
Hard Skills - education and training are necessary beyond just a college degree. Setting goals each year that include continued education in analytics, online marketing, SEO, SEM, Social Media and PPC should be part of every digital marketer’s knowledge base
Soft Skills - these are the people skills, the communication, writing, interacting, engagement, teamwork, collaboration, empathy, listening first and talking second, problem/resolution, being able to be selfless yet self fulfilling, courageous and strong yet mindful and helpful.
Networking - this is where having a first hand understanding of personal social networking and business social networking come into play. LInkedIn is a game changer for both professionals and businesses. Understanding the nuances of how to stay connected to the right people and also grow your brand’s community is part of the survival tactic of today’s digital world. Old-school executives who are not embracing these skills today will be buried alive in the next five years.
Balance - With today’s always on digital world, burnout comes even quicker. Running on the digital hamster wheel has its dangers when it comes to quality of life and quality of work output. Today’s digital marketing professional will need to learn the powers of balance and the importance of taking vacations, lunch breaks, getting off the grid even if its for 30 minutes. We are challenged to do more with less but yet we still have the number of hours in the day. So it’s about being aware of the dangers of multitasking, sleep deprivation and never leaving the newsfeed and reap the benefits of delegation, replication and meditation.
-Please share an experience that made you either super excited or super distraught in your time as a digital marketer?
Story 1
The day after 9/11 I had a tech dot com client that wanted me to pitch the WSJ NY office about their product- meanwhile there were still people buried alive in the twin towers. I fired that client.
Story 2
I recently spoke at a conference and wanted to give out a gift to the attendees in the form of gift cards from one of my favorite social media tools. I reached out to the company and asked if they had any promo cards I could give out. The show producer would not let me, made me take all the cards back because the company was not an official sponsor and did not pay to be there. I thought it was ironic that here we are as industry leaders preaching that brands should strive to build an army of brand advocates via social media to spread the good word organically, yet the conference would only allow the visibility of those that paid to play.
Read Buyer's deck on how to Create More Space in Your Social Media Life