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Early efforts in social media marketing have created a tremendous amount of buzz and interest, but surprisingly few case studiesfocus on monetization.
A recent study by Ketchum and Nielsenshows the number-one activity of social media users (online or offline) is reading blogs – even above TV!
So it’s clear that social media is here to stay, and accountable programs must be created to deliver performance and ROI. Here are 3 steps to help you get started:
#1: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Measure Against Them
In order to hold any marketing channel accountable, there first must be a framework of metrics that can be tracked, compared to a benchmark (industry or prior program performance) and analyzed over time. Social channels are no different. When looking to assign accountability to social programs, the first step is to define KPIs and measure against them. The three key components to track are:
a.Expanded Reach to New Audiences
Reach refers to the additional impressions that social channels provide to a program. Reach addresses the first value of social media marketing: tapping into the power of the social web to engage previously unreachable prospects to your brand message. In addition, reach through social channels increases a brand’s credibility as new consumers touched by social programs are being introduced by their peers or other respected “voices” on the social web. For example, the impact of a consumer seeing a friend recommend a brand as a result of a social program is much greater than seeing a static ad from the brand.
Influencer Sharing Behavior
Influencers (a.k.a. customers advocating for your brand) are essential to maximizing the viral impact of your social media programs. In order to leverage them properly, you need to determine the level of engagement between an influencer and the members of their social graph.
All influencers are not created equal. Some are exceptional at sharing a message but offer little in the way of engagement with their peers. Others generate little groundswell or buzz, but the peers they do touch take their advice.
Understanding who your influencers are within your customer base and tracking their sharing behavior are critical to optimizing program performance.
With the rise of social media, consumers are increasingly relying on user-generated content for purchase decisions.
Conversions and Monetization
Every social program must be associated with a call to action. Subscriptions to email lists, product purchases, signing up as a Facebook fan or downloading a free trial are all examples of calls to action. In order to measure monetary contribution to business goals, the marketer must assign value to the social program’s call to action and then track the conversions. Too often, social purists take a passive approach to program execution. The call to action need not be a sale. In fact, it could be motivating users to generate content to be added to a brand’s online community. The point here is that a defensible value for the action must be defined and tracked.
The combination of these three KPIs (reach, sharing behavior and monetization) provides clear program success criteria and can be weighted based on a program’s objectives. In the case of an awareness campaign, a marketer may place more weight on reach and sharing activity. In the case of a direct response program, the opposite weighting could be applied.
#2: Create Predictable Results With Targeting
When looking at potential advocates to share a brand message on the social web, the number of friends one has on Facebook or the number of followers one has on Twitter is important, but it’s not the most important factor. The real key to driving a predictable program is targeting.
Too often, social media programs start on the social web (where customer-specific data is scarce) and not within the CRM databases that companies have developed to provide deeper insight into their customers. Accountable marketing programs need to be predictable, and predictability can only be driven on the social web once a brand identifies its most engaged customers and who among those are willing to advocate on its behalf.
Consider the current crisis faced by Toyotaand how targeting could help drive advocacy, while a lack of targeting could be a disaster! I am a lifelong, loyal Toyota owner. I had my first Camry in 1996 and leased my second Camry in 1998. In the meantime, my wife purchased a Toyota 4Runner in 1999 and another three years later.
We followed these vehicles with a Sienna Minivan, a brief stint with a certified pre-owned Lexus and finally my 2007 Camry. I have owned no fewer than 6 Toyota vehicles in the last decade. I love these cars; I stand ready to defend them.
As I mentioned before, marketers need to understand that all customers are not created equal on the social web, and the number of fans and followers the brand has is not the critical data point. It’s how customers feel about the brand and the relative propensity they have to share POSITIVE sentiment with their social graph. Under the current system without proper social media targeting, Toyota is likely to ask my neighbor to advocate for the brand, who bought his first Camry last year and would love a reason to share his negative sentiment with his over 2,600 followers on Twitter and 700 friends on Facebook.
#3: Foster Viral Sharing With Incentives
Social media purists – take a deep breath before reading on. Social media marketing is subject to the same rules and limitations as other marketing programs. Specifically, there’s no way social media can become an accountable channel if it’s reliant on “lighting in a bottle” –type programs. Viral activity from a set of advocates needs to be predictable. Equally important, marketers must be able to influence the social participation in their programs. Incentivized sharing provides this level of predictability as well as an opportunity to throttle activity.
Rewarding customers for behavior, once again, is not a new concept. Airlines, hotels,financial institutions and even coffee shops consistently reward customers for loyal patronage. Why not apply that same logic to advocacy on the social web? Marketers need to build bi-directional incentives into social programs. This means they reward the influencer for inviting friends to participate in a brand’s program and then reward the influencer’s friends for acting on the viral invitation.
In other words, both the brand advocate and the advocate’s friend are treated like VIPs for engaging with the brand via the social web. Programs that include these bi-directional incentives perform two times better than those that rely solely on altruistic motivation for sharing activity. As long as marketers are transparent about the incentivized offers, the integrity of the channel is maintained while the marketer can access a dial to turn KPIs like reach, sharing behavior and monetization up or down.
There’s been real innovation in the last year around social media marketing and many leading brands have taken advantage of the wave. In order for it to continue, marketers must introduce a program-level discipline to their social marketing efforts. The concepts above are a great place to start. Define KPIs and track at the individual and program level over time, target social programs at your most engaged customers and introduce incentives for social sharing activity.
What are your thoughts? Is your organization holding social media marketing accountable, and if so, how? Please comment in the box below.
Many small businesses and solo entrepreneurs dive into social media marketing strategies without visualizing a bigger plan. What ensues is usually far from what they had hoped. Instead of attracting more leads and sales, they end up wasting time, money and passion.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This problem can be easily remedied by taking time to learn from those who are already experiencing success with social media marketing and by implementing a clear, specific, actionable and measurable web marketing plan.
In this article, I’ll give you a step-by-step overview of the actions that will P.O.S.T. help you succeed in marketing your business online.
P:People
Before you implement any social media marketing strategy, you need to create a marketing plan. A plan always starts with research. It’s amazing how many businesses fail to do this step properly before they start marketing. I’ve been guilty of it in the past, so I can sympathize!
Think of it this way: Would you rather hop in a plane with clear instructions on how to get to your destination, or play it by ear?
Before anything else, gather market intelligence:
Who are your target audience and competitors?
How are they using social networks?
Where can they be found?
How are they interacting or communicating with others?
What are the best ways to catch your audience’s attention and engage them?
Some tips and resources you can use for market research:
Keyword research: You would do well to find out the keywords your target audience is using to find solutions to their problems. A brilliant tool for this is Market Samurai.
Surveys: Perform surveys to find out what your target market is really thinking.
Forums: Hang out in niche/interest-specific forums and interact as much as you can to build relationships and find out what people are talking about.
Quantcast.com: See public information on popular websites in your niche to get a snapshot of what you can expect for your own.
Google trends: Find out what’s hot in the search engines now.
Google competitors: Check out the top 15 ranking websites in Google for the keywords relating to your niche and look at what they’re doing online.
Twitter search: Keep your finger on the pulse of the marketplace by instantly revealing real-time tweets for certain keywords and phrases.
O: Objectives
After you’ve gathered valuable and actionable information about your target market and about your competitors, you can then set your objectives.
Sample objectives:
They (objectives) are the means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future. ~ Peter F. Drucker
Increase website traffic by X% within the next 6 months.
Increase sales revenue by X% by December 2011.
Improve search engine rankings and get on page 3 of Google (or better) for specific target keywords (list the keywords).
Increase lead generation by X% per month by November 2011.
Reduce customer acquisition costs by X% before December 2012.
Remember: you can’t achieve what you can’t measure, so it’s essential to establish measurable and targeted objectives!
S: Strategy
Create a social marketing strategy with a tactical plan of action.
A clever and enduring strategy would be to “build a strong presence within our niche and engage with our target audience,” NOT “build our brand and get active on Twitter.”
Twitter could be gone tomorrow – replaced by a competitor… or your target audience may stop using it. What will you do then if your strategies bank on that particular service?
A sound strategy will align you with your objectives.
If your objective is to increase traffic, then you might choose a strategy like, “publish a search engine–optimized, engaging and entertaining blog that our target audience loves to read and share with their social networks.”
If your objective is to step up revenue, you might want to adopt a strategy like, “Increase sales conversion while lowering cost per lead.”
T: Tactics
Effective tactics will save you time and money and amplify your success.
Tactics are specific actions, steps or decisions that you can use to execute your chosen strategy.
For example, if your objective is to “increase net profits” and your chosen strategy is to lower overhead by lowering your cost per lead, then your tactics might be:
Build a presence online.
Build a branded, customized blog.
Start building a list by using our blog’s content as bait.
Create a high-converting opt-in section in our blog. Make it convert well by creating an irresistible freebie to give away.
Social Media Platforms
After you have formulated your P.O.S.T. plan, it’s time to identify, assess and select the appropriate social platforms to use.
The most popular social media platforms for business are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The best ones to leverage are those where your target audience is already active and engaged. So go to where they are, interact with them, build a relationship and then drive them to an appropriate website of yours (for best results, send them somewhere that continues the conversation, like a business blog).
Your choice and prioritization of platforms should depend on how well they fit into your strategy and how regularly your target audience uses them, NOT which brands are currently generating the most hype on them.
For example, a common trend identified by Marketing Sherpa is that there aren’t many businesses that blog because they perceive it as difficult to initiate and maintain when compared to the investment in Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking, etc. As a result, these businesses make the mistake of focusing on using specific media just because they are perceived as easier to set up and use, not necessarily because they generate the best return.
Marketing Sherpa’s Social Media Marketing Report 2010 revealed that tactics related to blogging and microblogging earned the highest ratings among social marketers in terms of the most effective tactics for achieving objectives.
Blogging for Business
Once you’ve established your presence on the appropriate social media platforms, the best way to profit from those relationships you’ve built is to drive them to your blog(NOT your company website) and engage with them even more.
In your blog, aim to:
Post valuable, useful content that demonstrates your expertise, and encourage your audience to spread your message.
Encourage interaction with your market. Instigate conversations. The more participation and involvement you can generate from your audience, the better.
Pre-sell, NOT sell. Many business blogs make the mistake of posting exclusively about their sales, promotions or discounts.
Exude your brand.
Give a taste of what it’s like to work with you or buy from you (fun/enthusiastic/easy, etc.).
The above are key reasons why it’s best to direct Internet users to your blog, not your website.
As long as your target market can be found online and as long as you’ve identified specific platforms that your prospects actively use, you’ll need a business blog to effectively market online.
But wait a second.
We’re not talking about just any business blog, we’re talking about a blog that’s designed, configured and optimized to:
Attract traffic.
Convert visitors into leads on autopilot by getting them into your sales funnel.
Establish you as a trustworthy thought leader in your niche.
Convert leads into loyal, raving fans.
Help spread your message and generate buzz by digital word-of-mouth marketing.
Create Your Sales Funnel
Your sales funnel is the process you’ll use to take a prospect from unfamiliarity (“I don’t know you”) to loyalty (“I love you!”) or even fanaticism.
One of the most proven and best ways in our experience to get prospects to become leads can be summarized in this process:
Opt in -> Relationship building -> Make an offer
Opt-in: When a prospect arrives at your blog, offer them something of massive value in their eyes (maybe an ebook, report, video series, etc.) in exchange for their name and email address.
Relationship building: Using an auto-responder, send them an email every week or twice a week. Your email should also contain something that gives massive value. It could contain tips, links to tools, strategies, reports, updates, etc. Make sure to give value and build your relationship with your audience before you try to sell them anything.
Make an offer: We recommend a ratio of 80% free, valuable content and 20% selling. This means that 80% of your emails give value (no selling) and only 20% of them are invitations to take their experience of you to a higher level and buy from you.
Insanity is commonly defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It’s really this simple.
Measure: Finally, you need to track your progress while marketing with social media so that you can see where you’re getting the most success and the best bang for buck.
Some metrics you could measure are:
Quantity and quality of commentary about your brand/business
Amount of traffic and sources of traffic to your blog
Network size in terms of followers, fans, etc.
Leads generated (number of subscribers), different landing pages for different campaigns
Engagement with influential people
SEO rankings, number of keywords for which you rank well
Quantity and quality of incoming links
Cost per lead
Conversion rate
Identify what’s not working and then either tweak your approach to make it work, or discard it. Identify what IS working and then scale up that approach to produce a wider smile.
Conclusion
“Blogs are the foundation of all high-profit marketing online today. I see it with my multimillion-dollar product launch clients who funnel all their traffic through a blog. I even see it with my small-hobby-blogger clients who turn their passion into a mid-tier six-figure income. Your business blog can cash in on the elegant promise of that simple lemonade stand we all cherished as kids!” ~Jaime Mintun – marketing maven and copywriter
If you don’t have a blog—start one now. Marketing Sherpa has already identified that if you don’t have a blog, you’re going to find it more difficult to achieve your business objectives through marketing online.
To get the most out of business blogging, check out How to Engage With Social Mediaand 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Outstanding.
If you’re already using a blog, are you doing well to leverage social media in your favor? Are there any tips or tricks you have to share with our readers?Let us know and leave a comment in the box below.
We want to use social media for promoting our brand or Product, why social media? What about social media? Central to the notion of effective social media participation is the ability to create, publish and share content.
It's important to focus on the key components of what it takes to deploy an effective social media strategy individually and as a whole.
The sheer volume of information on the topic of social media marketing makes filtering and prioritizing what's most important to a specific organization a challenging task. It's important to focus on the key components of what it takes to deploy an effective social media strategy individually and as a whole. By understanding the social web as it relates to fundamental marketing principles, tactics, tools and best practices, we can create a framework or roadmap for the development of a working strategy.
3.1POST Method
As for building the framework for a social media strategy, these 6 keys shall be considered: Audience, objectives, strategic plan, tactics, tools, metrics.
If these six factors in a program step by step to consider, there is a specific method: POST "POST" is four-step approach to the social strategy; it’s a four-step approach that helps marketers define a social media marketing strategy for their business and/or clients.
P is People. Assess customer’s social activities. Who are trying to reach? Who are audiences? Where do they hang out? What's the best way to reach them?
O is objectives. Decide what want to accomplish. Starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before decide on a technology. Then figure out how to measure it.
S is Strategy. Plan how relationships with customers will change. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you are done. Want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers, or want to get people talking about your products, or want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones.
T is Technology. Decide which social technology works. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once know people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.
The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy
