How to use social media marketing effectively in building / developing a brand?
1.
How to choose the right
platform for your company?
Step 1: Identify your
audience
The first step is to identify who your audience is. You want to be as
specific as possible, since it will make your decision easier. Write down the
answers to the following questions:
·
Who is your typical customer?
·
How old are they?
·
Are they male or female?
·
What is their income and education level?
·
What are they interested in outside of your product
and service?
Use the answers to these questions (and any other pertinent questions
that may relate to the business or industry you’re in) in order to help build
out a profile of your audience.
Step 2: Define your
goals
Once you know your audience, you need to define goals for that audience.
As a business owner, your primary goal will likely be to drive sales by
attracting customers—yet, there are other creative goals for social media.
While some brands use social media to drive brand recognition and to develop
friendly relationships with potential buyers, others use social media for
customer support.
For example, on-demand media company Netflix uses the Twitter handle @Netflixhelps to address customer service issues. Not only does it
free up their phone lines, but it gives satisfied customers an opportunity to
promote their brand.
When it comes to creating your social media goals, brainstorm a list of
both typical and unusual ways social media could work for your brand.
Step 3: Find your
audience
Now that you have your audience profiled and your goals defined, it’s
time to find your audience. To do this, you’re going to determine which
platform your audience uses by looking at the demographics of the users on each
platform. You’ll also want to consider how active your audience is on that
platform. For example, while young Facebook users may have profiles,
they’re more active on Instagram.
Besides demographics and engagement, you’ll also want to look at how
individuals use the platform.
2.
How to measure the impact
of social media marketing?
To
start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable
your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of
the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your
social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.
Also,
let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different
from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness
measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate
fall into three categories: social media exposure, influence and
engagement.
With
that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field
between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.
#1:
Measuring Social Media Exposure
How
many people could you have reached with your message?
In
social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s
circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it
represents your potential sales lead pool.
Unfortunately,
as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for
manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics
versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your
overall strategy.
A
good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when
isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting
the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult
to do.
These
measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand
through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track
growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will
find the real diamonds.
▪
Twitter: Look at your number of followers and
the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly
potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the
month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can
determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for
Twitter measurement is TweetReach.
▪
Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your
brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became
fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who
commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook
reach. Facebook Insights provides value here.
▪
YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos
tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total
number of subscribers.
▪
Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts
tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
▪
Email: Take a look at how many people are on
the distribution list and how many actually received the email.
#2: Measuring Engagement
How
many people actually did something with your message?
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This
is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people
actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of
action.
Fortunately
engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6, Biz360
and TweetEffect. These metrics
highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.
For
a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post
by Chris Lake is a great start.
•
Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links
were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then
look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track
@replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.
•
Facebook: Determine the number of times your
links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break
this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall
posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly
tied to a specific social media campaign.
•
YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your
video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and
the number of new subscribers.
•
Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of
subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and
“where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how
many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to
your site.
•
Email: Calculate how many people opened,
clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to
the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.
#3: Measuring Influence
This
category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a
subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition.
Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above
are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your
campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?
You
can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer,
Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs
to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any
sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of
positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to
the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.
A
great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who
engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of
big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the
average Joe with a modest following?
If
not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important
that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average
user. Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and
influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to
measure all of the different social media channels.
#4: The Lead Generation Funnel
After
you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now
creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts:
the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the
funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.
Understanding
your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will
allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a
model to other social networks.
Now
that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful?
Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard
dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the
organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns,
and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on.
Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve
used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as
just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.
3.
How to apply?
Most startups, and many big businesses, still
don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their
business. They randomly churn for hours a day on a couple of their favorite
social media platforms, with little thought given to goals, objectives, or
metrics; and ultimately give up and fall back to traditional marketing
approaches.
The first thing that entrepreneurs need to
realize is that the process and framework for making social media marketing
work are different from traditional marketing, and trial and error certainly
doesn’t work. Ric Dragon, an expert in online marketing, in “Social
Marketology,” outlined the best set of steps I have seen
so far for the new world:
▪
Focus on desired outcomes
first. Valid social media objectives for a business
should include one or more of the following: increased brand awareness, lead
generation, service and support, or reputation management. Obviously, the
platforms and how you use social media would be different for lead generation
versus service and support.
▪
Incorporate brand
personality and voice. Popular culture these days expects a more humanized brand voice, and
constituents are listening carefully to the tone, vision, and expertise of that
voice. Think about how you can project the voice you want, and make sure it is
consistently used by all team members across all platforms used.
▪
Identify the smallest
segments possible of your constituents.
Due to the information overload felt by consumers today, marketing at the
generic segment level no longer works. Social media is the only one which
allows you to be hyper-granular and drill down to micro-segments, to
dramatically improve engagement levels and conversion ratios.
▪
Identify the communities
for these micro-segments. Traditionally, community
implied a physical grouping, but today a community is characterized by what
they value, more than proximity. More important than finding a community, is
creating one, with your blog and other social media engagement. The best
communities then become your advocate.
▪
Identify the influencers
of these communities. Social media brings all
the aspects of important influencers these days, including peer pressure,
authority, credibility, and in some cases, celebrities. Because feedback from
social media operates in real time, you don’t have to wait months for results.
You spend the months influencing the influencers.
▪
Create an action plan
with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan,
channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and
metrics. Social media activities span the gamut from curation to gifting,
building relationships and groups, blogging, service actions, to lead
conversion. Pick the ones that fit your desired outcome.
Iteratively execute and measure results. Measuring is all about return-on-investment (ROI). This can be customer
acquisition cost, revenue growth, profit, or whatever other parameters are key
to your success. Iterate and expect to pivot, based on results, because you
can’t get it all right the first time. This is not trial and error.
3.1Trends, examples
Trends 2015:
Example: Dell (Twitter)
While many businesses are trying to work out how to make money from Twitter, computer maker Dell shows what they have done to validate Twitter as a credible
business tool.
Last December, Dell claimed $1 million in sales that the company could directly attribute to their
use of Twitter.
Dell offers refurbished laptops, desktops,
workstations, servers and storage, and monitors and printers from Dell Outlet in the USA,
with its @DellOutlet account on Twitter a primary channel to notify
followers of the latest offers.
Yesterday, Dell said that the total value of
sales attributable to their presence on Twitter – both refurbished equipment as
well as new systems – has now exceeded $3 million.
Sources
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