There is a lot of buzz right now about social media and the right way to carry out its implementation. Quick, When you think about social media what comes to your mind? No prizes for guessing - Facebook? Twitter? Linkedin? Youtube?
All of the above are only tools that are to be used to support your entire social marketing strategy. Social marketing is a far bigger strategy which is a crucial part of the core marketing strategy of any organization. So why is it necessary for a company to invest in social marketing? Because social marketing has revolutionized the way we do business. Social marketing is about conversations. Our customers are out there talking about our brands, what they did and did not like and how it made them feel. There are valuable consumer insights out there which a company can leverage to pave its path towards success.
So how do we get started? Here is the process that I took in coming up with a social marketing framework which has been particularly effective in my experience:
1) Listen:
Firstly, define your goals - It is essential for a company to determine measurable goals which would potentially lead to increased market share, growth and profits.
Secondly,a sincere attempt has to be made to listen to your customers.
This involves primarily 2 steps:
- Determining the persona segments of your audiences and high value communities
The right way to determining persona segments is to conduct an indepth research on the triggers, motivations, behaviors and needs of your target consumers. By doing this you will be able to tailor your outgoing messages to suit the unique needs and requirements of your consumers on a one-on-one basis which is far more relevant and engaging to them.
- Identifying what conversations are taking place online and where
Tools that can be used for this step are numerous.If you are under a budget and you want to get a whiff of the industry, free tools like Google Alerts and Social mention will do. There also exist paid tools like Radian6 and Lexalytics which tells you the sentiment of the conversations that are occuring online. You would get deep insights on whether your customers are speaking favorably or unfavorably about your brand.
- Identify your influencers
I believe that this is one of the key points to consider before even thinking of creating a social platform. Whether they are the mavens - "a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge to others" or the connectors - "people who have a wide network of casual acquaintances by whom they are trusted", it is extremely important to find out who your influencers may be. This may not be apparent on first notice but by making use of services like Klout and Technorati, you will be able to take the first step in identifying who your core influencers may be.
2) Create:
Based on the results from the conversations online, you can now create a platform or invest in an existing platform, depending on where your target audience interact with each other the most. It is crucial that all your social media tools are considered as secondary touch points in the process. These in turn need to be integrated with your central touch point - that is, your website. The social media tools may include but not limited to the following:
Social networks - facebook, linkedin
micro-blogging - twitter
community building - ning, kickapps, telligent
thought leadership - squidoo, yahoo answers, wikipedia
media sharing - flickr, gather, youtube etc
3) Engage:
Based on the unique features of the platforms you choose to create, you need to come up with a content strategy for each tool you plan to use within your platform. For example: The kind of content you may have on facebook will vary widely from the ones you have on twitter. Blogs may be totally different from communities created by the company online. The key thing to remember is to converse with consumers as opposed to having a one way monologue. Erik Qualman put it very effectively when he said that "it is a people-driven economy". With all the existing clutter in the market, consumers have learnt to turn a deaf ear to marketers that market irrelevant products to them. It is only when marketers find their own unique "purple cow" can they stand out in their consumers' eyes. After testing numerous engagement approaches a company would be able to find out that which works best with its target market.
4) Measure:
As no marketing strategy is complete without making an attempt to prove ROI (Return on Investment) or ROCI (Return on customer investment) the last step is to measure the success of your social marketing strategy. This requires asking questions like -
- Did our social marketing efforts have a viral effect? That is, did others pass along our message to external communities?
- Did we learn something new about our organization and customers based on the customer database we are continually building up?
- Finally and most importantly, is our social media presence strengthening over time, leading to greater market share and leading us towards our overall business goals?
Ultimately, companies need to prime their system continually in order to keep their consumers engaged. The most important factor is to ensure that you are continually and gradually moving towards your end goals in the most effective and efficient manner.
Source: http://msinetwork.com/
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