Spring is sprung, the grass is riz and it’s time to refresh your social media strategy.
In the past few months you’ve seen a perfect storm in social: customers have been increasingly pinging your twitter handle for help and to complain, your competition is all over the news feed of your target audience and the board has approved a significant increase in your budget for 2017.
So time to get those ducks in row. Duck, duck, duck.
This two-part primer will help you to determine the key objectives for your social activity across the marketing function and then take you through the nine areas of impact that will mean you can bring them to life.
Setting your objectives across the customer journey
Social now touches every part of an organization; it’s no longer a conversation between marketing and PR, it’s in customer care, in the business insights team and it turns out that the product development team have been using it behind your back for the past 18 months.
To help you to take a comprehensive view of what social can do throughout the marketing process I’m going to use the time honored ‘marketing funnel’ or ‘customer journey’ to guide us.
This framework was originally developed in 1898 by Elias St Elmo Lewis as a process by which the customer evolves through a series of stages from Awareness of the product through to Interest, then Desire and finally to Action or purchase (AIDA).
Over the years this model has been tweaked, critiqued and most recently turned from a funnel into a donut by McKinsey. Regardless of which version you subscribe to it is generally accepted that these activities occur at some point in the process of a customer buying a product or service. Most organisations I have worked with have their own version that suits their specific industry or brand, but broadly they follow the same structure.
As an initial step it is vital to map your brand’s overall marketing objectives and challenges at each stage of this journey, a task that has likely already been done by the marketing team. By identifying these overarching marketing objectives you’re able to ensure that social is aligned with them. Where possible it is desirable to build on, or contribute to, activity that is already occurring. At its most basic this could be something as tactical as leveraging the next brand campaign photo shoot to create social assets.
The most fundamental difference between social and traditional broadcast marketing is that social is essentially a conversation, and it’s useful to think about the conversational aspects of your objectives at each stage of the customer journey;
- What can you learn by listening to social conversations using a monitoring tool?
- What can you achieve by distributing content and engaging audiences at each stage?
- How can you use the content your audience creates (UGC reviews, ratings and comments)?
Table: Example marketing objectives across the customer journey
Learning by listening
The most fundamental difference between social and traditional broadcast marketing is that social is essentially a conversation, and it’s useful to think about the conversational aspects of your objectives at each stage of the customer journey;
- What can you learn by listening to social conversations using a monitoring tool?
- What can you achieve by distributing content and engaging audiences at each stage?
- How can you use the content your audience creates (UGC reviews, ratings and comments)?
It is hard to imagine a successful conversation where you don’t listen to what the other person is saying. Listening to what is being said in social enables us to develop a real time picture of what our target audience, our followers and our competitions’ followers are saying about us, our products, our competitors and their products and the overall category. This could be wonderful things that confirm the righteousness of our product vision, or it may be a bellwether of changing attitudes / usage / market conditions.
But you won’t know and can’t respond, if you don’t listen.
Table: Examples of the role of social listening across the customer journey
Let your content do the talking
The consumption of content via social is skyrocketing, with video on Facebook in 2015 reporting a 100% increase from 4 Billion daily video views in April up to 8 Billion in November. While the organic reach of the main social platforms has declined to the point where it is almost negligible, there are still enormous advantages to making your content available in social; targeting influential individuals, paying to reach large relevant audiences or making it available to be found in search.
Table: Examples of the role of content distribution across the customer journey
Let your audience do the talking (UGC)
As digital cameras have become ubiquitous and the ability to edit / add filters / annotations and to upload and share images and video is in the hands of every mobile phone owner, user generated content continues (UGC) to grow apace.
UGC also comes in the form of reviews on sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp and in ratings on Amazon and even in the comments sections of articles and blog posts. The power of user generated content can be harnessed at each stage of the customer journey. Ratings and reviews have been proven to have a significant impact in trust and purchase intent and UGC can provide valuable validation of usage, purchase and even interest: people like me, like this product.
Table: Examples of the role of UGC across the customer journey
Getting focused
Once you have completed the exercise of mapping how social can successfully achieve or support your brand’s key marketing objectives it is essential to reduce these to a small number of key objectives (3 is the universally agreed number of sensible objectives, just check your fairy tales; little pigs, billy goats gruff and Goldilocks’ bears, just to name a few).
In the next post we will look at how we go about achieving these objectives with “9 Things You Never Realized Were Essential to Social Media Success”