Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Why Social Media Isn’t Working for Your Business, and 6 Things You Can Do About It


This is just a few of my quick thoughts on an article that appeared in AdWeek on 10-18-18 entitled “Why Social Media Isn’t Working for Your Business, and 6 Things You Can Do About It.” by John Stevens. His six thoughts are all on the money, all are applicable to this week’s discussion, and one is particular is especially relevant to our course.



This article is important in that many of us, even those who are fairly familiar with social media, are not sure that we are seeing true engagement and what the analytics we are seeing from the platforms are aiding our ROI or even our brand image.

According to Stevens:
…only 20 percent of businesses are able to measure the impact of social media on their bottom lines. A whopping 44 percent do not know if social media is working for them. In fact, a particular study provides an even clearer picture: 62 percent of small businesses report that Facebook ads aren’t working for them. (Stevens, 2018).

They all tie to the fact that social media, by itself, probably is not going to get the job done from an IMC perspective. In fact, he indicates several times that it is important to establish other touch points and reach people over time in other ways.

The one that is particularly relevant to us in this class is to “Ensure an optimal website experience” (Stevens, 2018). John talks to the fact that if you are a business, you most likely are driving people from social media to your website. His main take is that performance matters (which it does) and that mobile optimization is important (which it is). But as he points out elsewhere, being responsive to questions (in this case on your site) is also important and I would add that having appropriate content (to the link that brought the visitor there) and having content that has your organizational perspective and is not like everything else on the web is also important.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this article. His other 5 points are also very compelling.

Note: You may need to sign up for a free limited membership to AdWeek to see this article if you do not already have an account.

Reference:

Stevens, J. (2018, October 18). Why Social Media Isn’t Working for Your Business, and 6 Things You Can Do About It. Retrieved from: https://www.adweek.com/digital/why-social-media-isnt-working-for-your-business-and-6-things-you-can-do-about-it/

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 29, 2018 at 11:32 PM

    At what point is good content not good content at all? Do small businesses have the income to hire the right personnel to help generate interaction and engagement? I do believe Facebook Advertising is not good for all businesses. Maybe this is where an outside source can help the business make this decision?

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  2. Mark TietbohlOctober 31, 2018 at 3:19 PM

    I think that is a fair question. I think his point really is that social media can be hard (at times) to measure from a return perspective, and we need to do all we can to ensure we get the best bang for the buck. I would tend to agree that Facebook may not be the best platform (paid or organic) for all businesses (I am sure that statement will draw some fire). Whether you should pay someone to help you with this decision is another question in the sense that every business should (hopefully) have a feel about what works for them.

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