The effectiveness of social media lies in its power to build relationships. It empowers you to engage and connect with visitors on a level deeper than paid advertising affords. The goal of your social media campaign should be to invite site visitors to join you and contribute to the conversation about what matters to them—and this has everything to do with your services, products, and brands.
Our consulting focuses on results, but this is a difficult task when working with social media. Calculating ROI in social media is challenging in itself. Social media promotes rather qualitative and intangible, though enormously advantageous, objectives such as building trust and forming relationships. Using specially devised methodologies, we break down marketing objectives into smaller components, which help us measure social media strategies in a variety of ways: the reach of your message, the authority of your brand, client engagement, visitor interaction, and decreasing marketing cost. Depending on your objectives, we tailor our metrics to monitor changes in your business before and after our marketing initiatives.
Here are just some of the metrics that we can use to measure our results:
- Number of content submissions to a social site
- Promotional and traffic boosts that can be converted to RSS audience, registration or even sales
- Comments and page views on the site
- Links, long-term traffic from linking sites, search ranking, and long-tail search traffic
In order to develop a social media strategy, we follow these steps:
- Online Brand Reputation Audit – Let us review your current online presence and find out exactly where your site appears, who uses your content, and what people are saying about your company. Negative information can rank high on search engines, and has a strong potential to hurt your company. We help you address these issues with resources that find and track negative comments and the behavior that leads people to search for them. We monitor search engines, blogs, forums, social networks, and a whole range of other websites to ensure a strong reputation for you.
- Market research – How much do you know about the online presence of your competition? Learn who the online leaders in your industry are, monitor their activity, track new developments, and build on the success of your competition.
- Consumer analysis – In order to build relationships with your consumers, it is imperative to know what sites they visit, what blogs they read, and how they act. We use social media to learn the behaviors of your potential customers in order to help you select the proper marketing tactics to reach them.?
- Audience Development – Once you learn the market and the behaviors of your consumers, it is time to turn your research into development. We select a proper mix of social media tools such as Twitter, Digg, and Facebook to reach your community demographic to start turning it into an audience that advocates for you. Community outreach services are intended to help you identify content, activities, messages, communities, and influencers that will most effectively help you share your opinions, experiences, and perspectives with the right audience. We teach you how to create genuine personal relationships with the influencers and evangelists that have the loudest voices within their online social networks.
- Social Media Training - Find out how to use such popular tools as Twitter, Ning, Wiki, and YouTube effectively. You will learn how to integrate these tools into your strategy and to connect with your demographic. You will learn how to identify the right online resources and to monitor what thought-leaders predict the next big thing is. We give you the tools to monitor and evaluate emerging technology so you can decide which will bring you the best ROI.
Social media has changed the way we do marketing. Below are some of the principles that define social media and its business applications. Today’s web solutions have to take advantage of Web 2.0, where content, interaction, collaboration, and functionality are the keys to success. We ground our coaching in these principles:
- Sharing is everything. Today, companies that are transparent in the eyes of their consumers gain their trust. It is essential for the company to share what it does, and to talk to consumers instead of selling to them.
- Your brand is what people think about you. Just because you intend to be the most prominent brand online, that doesn’t mean your consumers see you that way. Quite often, there is a gap between what you intend to look like and how your audience sees you. The key to social media is the ability to monitor EVERYTHING around you. It is your responsibility to know what people say about you, how your clients treat your services, and how clients use your products. Unless you closely monitor and act on your findings, you are irresponsible in the eyes of social consumer.
- Be aware – consumers have changed. The abundance of choices has made consumers a lot more selective. They have too many options to pay attention to anybody who does not meet their demands. Social consumers are in control, and if they are not satisfied, they will tear your brand apart. Social consumers create content and compete with you for the attention of the wider audience.
- Competition is easier to monitor. In only a few hours, you can find every trace that a company has ever left online. The challenge rests not in the amount of content available, but in your ability to digest it and use it to your advantage.
- Be organic. Paying for attention might work in traditional marketing, but in social media, where interaction is everything, you have build trust and relationships.
- Commitment and persistence brings results. Social media is not a quarter- based endeavor. It takes time and requires a long-lasting commitment to change. Your return on investment depends on the time you invest and the actions you take.
- Positioning – be careful of where you are. Social media makes it easy to appear before a wider audience. Most of the time, there is no cost to appear on various networks, industry -related sites, and even news portals. However, a company has to be selective and realize that appearing online is a commitment. Once you make your appearance, you have to reinforce it continuously or people will forget you.
- You have to matter. Every business has to answer the question, “Why do I matter?” Your audience needs to know why you stand out, why your services are what they need, and why your products have a positive impact on their lives. They have to become emotionally invested in your success.
- Tools come and go; your brand has to stay. If you have 300 followers on Twitter or 100 blog readers, do you think they will look for you if those tools become obsolete? Nine out of ten companies will say no. The reason is simple: people are addicted to new tools and applications. But you need to make them addicted to your message—to your brand. This way, your audience will follow you no matter what is trendy.
There are five steps to a successful social media marketing campaign:
- Brand and online presence audit
- Social media campaign design
- Listen to your audience
- Communicate
- Measure your impact
It is ideal to follow the sequence of the above steps for the best social media campaign, but we realize that we live in the real world (most of the time). For certain customers and projects, we can help with specific areas of the campaign.
Are you ready to launch your social media marketing campaign? Call us at (513) 373-4216 or complete this form.
