Posts Tagged ‘Social Marketing’

While the call for marketers to jump on the social media and inbound marketing bandwagon is getting louder every day, will you know how to benefit from your participation in the community, without alienating it, once you find it?

It’s critical to remember that even though you are representing a brand, and your ultimate goal may involve increasing sales, social media is not the time or place for sales speak. Marketers must always remember that as participants in these conversations, they don’t and can’t control them. The goal is to engage in meaningful exchanges and develop honest relationships. Once you are engaged, here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you are making the most of your social media efforts.

1- Do you know how to spot your online market?

To begin with, social media marketing can often be an overwhelming choice of continuously changing options. Because it’s usually easier to find your community than it is to create it, finding the right channels where your business and your audience’s interests meet are crucial to your success. Your audience may be found in or may be moving between popular social sites, blogs, social bookmarking sites, forums, CGM sites, mobile technology, application-based networks, and assorted types of vertical networks to name just a few. It’s always a difficult balancing act to know where to find and how to maintain a relationship with a continuously moving target.

2- Will you be able to recognize your community when it’s included within a larger group?

Are you sure you will know if you are in the right place, or are you passing by an opportunity because you didn’t recognize it? As the environment changes it’s important to have a comprehensive understanding of this rapidly evolving landscape, and to be able to recognize your market, even when they are not talking about your brand or specific category.

3- Can you spot trends in sentiment of satisfaction, and advocacy for your brand — or your competition’s?

The ability to listen to the market is a key benefit of social marketing. It gives you the opportunity to understand what your brand, (or your competitor’s brand) actually means to the market, helps you find evangelists, gather information for the future, spot dissatisfaction and address issues before it publicly explodes into major problems. It is important to know how to decipher the information that you are gathering.

4- Is your audience spreading the word about your brand and have you given your audience something they find worthwhile to talk about?

An audience of passive listeners will not stick around long unless you openly share meaningful content to engage them. This is not the time for a free sample or a newsletter. In order for social marketing to be most effective, your relationship must have substance for everyone involved to stay engaged. Nobody wants to hear about your products or brand all of the time, but if you begin with an honest and authentic corporate culture then provide highly insightful and or entertaining content worth sharing— that has nothing specific to do with your brand — chatting with you and about you will become natural. This is an ongoing creative process that requires imagination, planning and participation from across your entire organization and often outside as well.

5- If you haven’t planned where your going, how will you know when you get there?

One of the most overlooked aspects of social media marketing is the strategy and plan. Just as in any other form of marketing, social media should be an intentional and planned marketing effort with specific goals and metrics to identify success. Despite the claim that social marketing is free, there is a significant time commitment (and associated cost) if you want it to be successful and productive. If your efforts aren’t planned, they can’t be measured. And without measuring your efforts and gains, you wont know what works and what doesn’t. A strategy with specific goals, tactics, and time estimates will help make sure you stay on track and provide a framework for achieving your goals

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In a recent Search Marketing Survey, MarketingSherpa concluded that cross-functional marketing strategies are becoming more common.

With the ever expanding variations in search, PPC, and contextual models, and now add the introduction of Facebook’s own PPC program, advertisers have increasingly more options to determine not only the medium, but the location, format, and cost structure that works best for their individual needs.

“Facebook serves as a perfect example. They offer advertisers the choice to buy display ads on a CPM basis or bid for PPC placements. These big, successful publishers would not be using the model if it didn’t work.”

The Options Multiply

The variety of options to accurately pinpoint specific markets continues to increase in the form of inbound marketing tactics, PPC, contextual, social media, and display advertising.

In a rush to account to management for their advertising budgets, marketers are jockeying for position and adjusting their numbers between search, PPC, contextual and display advertising. Offline budgets are giving ground to the increasing online tactics, and the allure of easily attainable metrics.

Online marketing is not slowing down anytime soon. It will continue to grow and change, further fragmenting the audience and the marketing mechanisms that we use to reach them. Marketers will need to try new things to determine exactly what the right mix is for them. As they do, new tactics will continue to emerge and further complicate the formula.

“IBM for example has been utilizing a combination of social media, with traditional marketing to create a broader strategy since 2006”, says Sandy Carter, VP Service Oriented Architecture and WebSphere.

Use a Comprehensive Strategy

The most reasonable solution for marketers is a comprehensive one. Learn and adapt utilizing the metrics from the variety of online efforts, while integrating traditional marketing methods, social engagement and a host of inbound marketing tactics.

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First there were blogs. Then YouTube and Flickr created image-rich platforms where users could create visual journals, display creative works or promote their personal views and then exchange a list of their favorites with other users.

Next Twitter popularized micro-blogging, the social networking site limited to text-based posts or “tweets” not longer than 140 characters. The concept is to answer the simple question “What are you doing now?”, and since Twitter allows only 140 characters, it was a natural fit for texting.

At the same time, mobile-marketing began showing significant results in reaching and connecting with specific market segments.

It only makes sense to put together the best of all of these phenomenons: A “moblog” or Mobile blogging site is a place where the user can publish blog entries to the web, including images, right from a mobile phone. It’s a great idea for those addicted to blogging letting them post even when on the move.

Moblogging is a whole new type of short form blogging, that incorporates the best one-to-one benefits from blogs, the visual richness of Flickr and YouTube, and the social interaction and simplicity of Twitter.

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Marketers are all jumping into Social Marketing. Yes of course there are lots of great benefits associated with it: customer advocacy, brand recognition, social acceptance and we can’t forget the relative low cost. What some marketers don’t consider upfront, is that there can be a potential downside.

While no company wants bad press, smaller companies can often be seriously hurt if they don’t deal with bad buzz appropriately. Blogs have gone a long way to help give these mid-size companies a leg up, but a brand must remember to always stay active in their brand image. By opening up lines of communication between you and your customers, you may start to hear things you wish were not so public. It’s a critical part of your brand’s image to actively engage these customers to find out how they feel, keep interactions positive, and resolve any issues.

So what do you do if your brand’s buzz goes bust? A company’s response to negative buzz can have a bigger impact on the brand image then the initial bad review. Here are some simple things to keep in mind:

Don’t think about it too long.
Address negative buzz quickly and efficiently. Accept responsibility for mistakes and take action to correct them right away. This helps to slow down or stop the flow of negative buzz, and can turn it into a positive conversation about your brand’s integrity.

Stay active on public message boards.
Message boards are the most common venue that people use to complain about companies or brands they are unhappy with. Other members of the group then join in until the entire forum has a hostile view of the brand. Stay active on message boards related to your industry so you can help to offer resolutions quickly.

Say what you’ll deliver, deliver what you say.
Pete Blackshaw, a founding member of www.WOMMA.com said that “negative word of mouth is often created when a product’s advertising is not in sync with the consumer’s experience”. Simply put, stay true to your own marketing.

Being prepared is half the battle.
You can get in front of a problem by paying attention to customer feedback and responding quickly. If you’re repeatedly hearing the same issues, then by quickly dealing with the root cause and rectifying the problem will become the new conversation.

Fight buzz with buzz.
Use the same tools to turn negative comments back into a positive buzz. In addition to responding on blogs and monitoring message boards and forums, marketers can also look to websites such as Getsatisfaction to keep up with what the public is saying about them. Marketers can also listen in on Twitter conversations related to their brands so they can react quickly.

The basic elements of every effective social marketing campaign is the same: engage your customers and respond to their needs to help improve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Rena Bernstein is Creative Director at Elektrik Ink, LLC, a full-service advertising and strategic design agency that specializes in the convergence of traditional advertising and digital marketing. Read more about Advertising, Social Marketing and Brand Identity at www.elektrik.com or call 212-675-1568.

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