Social Media Strategies – marketers often make the mistake of just reducing social media strategy to a mere measurement of ROI.
Although measuring the ROI of social media campaigns or ad is important and necessary, it is far more important that marketers make sure their social media campaigns are effective, even if the state of ROI measurement may be less than satisfactory or the objective goal.
2 Keys to Effective Social Media Strategies
To maximize the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, as a marketer, you must recognize two important facts of social media life when implementing social media campaigns.
First, while it is certainly true that consumers have much greater control over their online experiences.
Marketers also have and must exercise a fair amount of control over the rules and framework for brand participation in social media.
Take, for instance, a marketer can control who posts to a blog devoted to the company’s brand.
More generally, marketers certainly have at least some control over the rules and the participatory framework of how consumers will engage with their brands in the social media space.
Secondly, marketers must appreciate that the social media environment is highly dynamic and rapidly evolving.
While this may seem obvious, it is mostly overlooked when campaigns are conceived and launched.
Surprisingly, many marketers still approach social media as if the practices and consumer behaviors are largely fixed.
Social media-savvy marketers know this is not the case, but traditional beliefs about how to reach consumers and potential consumers die hard.
4c’s Of Social Media marketing
- Connections
- Creation
- Consumption
- Control
The habit of an Effective marketer
To be effective in marketing you must always look for how consumers will participate and interact with your brand.
Savvy marketers understand that there is a feedback loop.
They don’t sit back once the social media campaign begins. Instead, they listen carefully because they know that consumers not only “consume” the campaign, but can comment on it (“create”), share it with their friends and anyone else (“connect”) and provide their uncensored thoughts about it (“control”) for any to view. And this listening must then lead to action.
For instance, if a consumer posts a question to the marketer’s blog, someone with a face in the company must reply. If a video is uploaded, someone must monitor the Twitter stream for comments and be prepared to react if problems appear.
Traditional marketing metrics with narrowly defined ROI tend to lead to social media campaigns that maximize short-term benefits for the brand (or the marketer), without worrying too much about customer motivations and the long term.
The result tends to be campaigns that expect the customer to work for the brand. In contrast, effective social media strategies put the brand to work for the customers by satisfying their needs to create, consume, connect and control in the social Web.
In a well-designed social media campaign or ad be it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. consumers are likely to spread viral videos, create additional brand-related content, tweet about the brand and post about their experiences.
The social metrics that reflect these kinds of social media behaviors are important not only because they let marketers measure the bottom-line impact of their social media marketing or ad but also because they focus marketers’ attention on social media strategies that take into account the objectives of both the brand and the online customer.
Why you should Improve Marketing Effectiveness
There is a reason to be highly optimistic about improving the effectiveness of your social media marketing activities.
Social media is a highly measurable environment, and it is a relatively simple matter for marketers to measure the number of product reviews, blog posts, and comments, likes, purchases, retweets and appearances in the social network timelines of the company’s brands.
At the same time, marketers are often able to measure click-through to transactional websites, as well as capture the number of leads generated or conversion rates for online sales.
While there will still be those situations in which behavior cannot be completely and accurately traced (e.g., offline purchases or offline word of mouth), I think that carefully planned social media strategies campaigns or ad afford phenomenal opportunities for relatively easy and cost-efficient measurement of customers’ online investments in a company’s brands.