Social Media Marketing Strategy (Influence and ROI)
Social media can be used for different goals. For example, Oprah’s opinion on literature has inspired millions to choose titles from her book club. But you don’t have to be Oprah to have influence. You influence your friend when she listens to a song you recommend on Facebook. You influence your coworker when he checks an article you posted on LinkedIn and shares it with someone else. Social actions like these are reflections of influence.
As a company you can influence one customer to another. For example, a loyal customer can act upon others by a simple tweet, feedback or an RT (retweet) that mentions the brand. It is important for organizations to focus on cultivating the engagement and not figures.
Define your target audience and find specific areas of expertise. Don’t try to cater to everyone. Alternatively, if you are really keen to progress to power users, key decision makers and influencers, your content should be designed around your market. Social media is simple and yet complicated.
It’s complicated because you have to know your audience so well that you know exactly what social media platforms they use regularly. Is it Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? LinkedIn? The focus should be which social network is generating more audience and engagement, see the example:
ROI = (Gain from the Investment – Cost of Investment) /Cost of the Investment
Marketing VS. ROI
Social media marketing should never be done as a stand-alone campaign, and it should always support your other marketing initiatives. Social media is not an activity that can exist on its own. For social media to be beneficial, it is important to co-exist alongside other activities such as offline marketing, digital marketing, public relations, and advertising.
Social Media Strategy (ROI and Audience)
Social Media Marketing is not necessarily a direct sales tool, but is effective at engaging your audience, conversations, expand web presence, build brand awareness, generate expose and provides SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits.
Some marketers say social media has no ROI but is great for:
- Brand building
- Relationship management
- Product development
- Reputation management
- Customer interaction
- Customer feedback
- Customer support
- Community building
Jeffrey Hayzlett, former Kodak CMO said: “Social media is not a campaign. It is a commitment.” Meaning a social media plan should cover your immediate and short-term while keeping an eye to the fact that technology changes all the time, if not daily. Don’t be surprised that some of the tools you chose are outdated by the time you get around accessing them. Flexibility is the key to success in business today.
One of the most frequent questions is that how do you measure ROI on social media? It is possible, but it’s not black and white. The same question could be asked about how can you measure ROI on organizational emails. The absence of social media, a striking example: an email in your organization would lead to an implicit cost of being in business. You can get greater profits using social media marketing that can help cut expenses and increase revenue.
For example: more traffic equals more profit.
Social Media Strategist (Return On Investment)
Measuring Social media ROI is like asking a sales person what is the ROI of a phone call. They only way to discover the answer is by tracking a volume of phone calls and looking at the conversion rate, understanding those converted and those who replicated the effort. It can be applied to customer service as well, what’s the ROI for great customer service? We know companies that have great customer service tend to be more profitable than those without it, but is it a truly quantifiable return on dollars spent?
The Return On Investment in social media can be measured by looking at:
- Mentions — people are talking about your business and your product.
- Traffic — track the number of people who visit your site or blog, Fan your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter.
- Positive feedback — look at what people are “saying” about your product. Engage with your customers through social media.
- Tracking promotional codes — How many people are clicking on a link? You can track clicks on specific urls by using url shortener: bit. ly.
- Other sites like Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Facebook Insights, Tweetreach
Solution:
A company can measure their ROI from social media by tracking which posts and tweets are driving traffic to the site, converting these trends to sales number.
It is important to keep in mind; social media is about sharing and connecting, creating a meaningful conversation around relevant content and encourage feedback.
There is a difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing. In traditional marketing, you throw out a message to millions of people who couldn’t care less. In social media marketing, you find the people who are already talking about your message and join the conversation.
Without a well thought social media strategy, is worse than neglecting social media altogether.
Marketing
“Marketing takes day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master”.
(Philip Kotler, 1931 -, US marketing guru)
Positioning in Marketing
“Positioning is the marketing tool that helps prospects and customers identify what’s unique about your product, service or company. Use positioning to give your advertising purpose, to give it a message, and to give it the appropriate tone. Then and only then, are you on your way to developing a good advertising strategy.”
Products
“You can have the best product or service in the world, but if people don’t buy – it’s worthless. So in reality it doesn’t matter how wonderful your new product or service is. The real question is – will they buy it?”
Success
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas A. Edison
The aim of marketing
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
Peter F. Drucker
Importance of Marketing
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”
~David Packard
Marketing World
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The Marketing Explorer 