The Road To RoI
Building a Strategy for Social Marketing Success
INTRODUCTION
The era of social media has taught marketers an important new truth: You no longer control how consumers perceive your brand. What matters most today is not what you say about your brand — it’s what consumers say about it. Successful social brands understand that they must influence this conversation without trying to control it. But how do they accomplish that? The road to social marketing success begins with a strategy built around five key initiatives: 1. Integrating social into the marketing mix 2. Organizing for social 3. Aligning social to business objectives 4. Engaging consumers 5. Building a multi-network presence This report explores these
…show more content…
Prepare Internally
Social’s integration into your overall marketing strategy may require you to think differently about how to structure your marketing operations and resources, and about how social media fits in to company-wide policies and procedures. Social marketing expertise and resources within enterprises are typically very limited, so how do you best leverage those scarce resources across the organization? How do you maintain proper control and standards for social media marketing across all the necessary organizational units without creating bottlenecks and impeding the speed and agility required for effective social marketing? And how do you define how your company-at-large uses social media, as well as the extent to which employees can participate? For global brands that have thousands of employees and manage, on average, 178 business-related social media properties, this is a critical concern. 4
Organize for Social
There are a variety of ways that companies can organize for social business. Based on our experience with thousands of clients, a “hub and spoke” organizational model works best to scale social marketing and empower company-wide coordination and accountability. In this model, the “hub” – a team of expert resources that includes social marketing strategists and content specialists – supports an array of “spokes.” Spokes are teams that represent different product lines, regions, and other units in the
Social media has become an essential channel for corporations to build a two-way relationship with their customers. However, having a social media account cannot solve everything. To make the best use of social media in keeping a positive relationship with their customers, corporations ought to seek and maintain influence among their followers in social media, and participate in communications with them.
We are successfully utilizing social media as a powerful way to gain positive exposure and connect with our internet-savvy customers in a global and local level. We rely heavily in word-of-mouth advocacy”. (John Mackey, 2012)
Social media has become an influential ground for consumers to share their opinions about a company’s brand and products. In addition, it helps in having a strong brand that produces positive relations and distinguish the brand from competitors, is a critical component for effective marketing. According to Dahlén and Lange (2009) “the quality of the product is not the evident factor when it comes to purchasing a product, the deciding factor depends on how the brand is perceived” (Para. 1). This demonstrates the importance of incorporating social media as a tool to promote brands, allow for interactions, and customer satisfaction by engaging with customers more frequently for feedbacks or reviews. Thus create an opportunity for the company to show its devotion to their customers, and initiate good reputation, which can increase sales. In other words, social media has the ability to upsurge the awareness for businesses as well as the brand.
It is interesting how social media today is influencing the marketing role of many companies and how it’s playing a big role in their success. The more the company advertises on social media, the
Social media is an effective media of communication between the consumers and companies. The companies are using social media for improving consumer engagement and brand lift. This essay gives a brief overview of social media platforms and how effective they have been. It shows that the whole marketing concept has undergone radical transformation due to the social media interaction. The essay ends in conclusion depicting what marketers need to take care in order to have successful social media campaign.
One of the key roles of social media from a marketing perspective is the development of a client based platform. It is becoming an increasingly important part of any business’s marketing. Businesses can utilize existing online platforms to build networks of current and potential clients. By being active online allows businesses to connect with their customers in innovative ways to become a trusted source of information and convey the passion they have for their industry.
The marketing industry is an elaborate network that links companies to their consumers, primarily through written communication. The main objective of marketing is to identify trends and patterns in consumer behavior, and utilize the data to influence consumers to purchase more goods. From a macroenviroment standpoint, the general conditions of a market are heavily dependent on global environmental factors. The most significant factor that influences the markets today is technological advancements. Since the release of Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, and Myspace in the early 2000s, the number of people using social media has increased to over sixty-five percent. The ever-growing dependency on social media platforms, has given marketers the tremendous opportunity to further market potential consumers. Social media marketing is a specific form of marketing that focuses on producing ad content that social media users will post on their own networks. This particular marketing technique is effective because ads and content are created, based on what personal information users post on social media. Firms and organizations that advertise their brands on social media are more likely to increase their customer base and annual revenue. By doing so, companies are able to increase exposure of their brand and widen previous hidden, customer bases. As a marketer, the fine line between right and wrong is often blurred. The amount and
Social media has become essential as a marketing tool for CU's, which is why 74% of marketers are incorporating social media into their marketing budgets. The CMO Survey released in August 2014, indicates that “marketing budgets are expected to increase by 7.2% in the next year.” With 1.65 billion social accounts that are active globally, social media has become an effective
In today 's society a company 's social media strategy is as important as ever. You can look at a company 's social media profiles and measure a customers engagement with that company and how the customer responds and interacts with the company 's content. These metrics can be useful when evaluating a company whose stock you want to buy. Every company tackles social media in their own way, some focus their efforts on one social network, while others may go wide on multiple social networks. When comparing two similar companies, such as Panera Bread (NASDAQ: PNRA) and Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), the company 's social media and its base of followers are even more important. With 1,800 locations Panera Bread spent $65.5 million on advertising in 2014 while Starbucks, with 21,366 locations, spent $315.5 million, over 5x what Panera spent.
We cannot deny how big of an impact social media has on our lives now, not only on people but businesses too. It has opened a whole new door to the business world and given them a big opportunity to interact and attract a larger amount of customers. It’s given us a new and faster way of communication by exchanging pictures, stories, news, blogs, online discussions, etc. In exchange businesses have benefited by a long shot just by the click of a button. With the help of the Internet a company no longer is dependent on a particular customer base to survive because now it can reach out to a worldwide audience within seconds. It’s imaginable the countless business attributes of all social media to this day and still is growing. Social media
In today’s business world, social media is being discussed on a daily basis. This phenomenon has taken over the marketing and advertising industries and has changed the way they handle their efforts to attract customers. There is a big misunderstanding that social media are only popular networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” The rise of these online communities has given companies an opportunity to engage in conversations with their customers. This in
Today, many businesses are experiencing the effects of social media. Government, businesses, and communities interact through social media and use it to access their investors and potential customers. According to Donovan (2016), “Most types of businesses today make use of different tactics and techniques to make a significant exposure of their website to its target customers.” The goal is to use social media to maximize their potential in order to be one of the strongest participants in the business world.
Social media is capable of connecting a brand with its consumers and discover how they are being perceived, it also has the power to change perceptions and identify the key people within the business network. The unique feature of social media is that it can provide corporations and businesses solutions developed through operating with consumers and stakeholders. Basically, social media serves as a visible connection to one’s corporation and its stakeholders, consumers, suppliers, etc, who each have a defined role within the system to filter and regulate information. As mentioned earlier, the influence of social media is spreading in a proliferative pace that has resulted to an essential transformation in society, technology and business customs.
Businesses use platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as a modern tool to share information with their customers. Facebook offers the option for businesses to create a fan page for their company or product. Twitter allows the use of 140-character posts that users can follow, tweet, or retweet. Blogs are less commonly used, but allow businesses to write in journal type format. YouTube offers a video-library to its users with millions of viewers around the world. There are many other types of social media but most of them follow similar general communication capabilities. Utilizing these
In recent years, social media has become the best available option for brands to communicate with prospective consumers. In other words, social media is an opportunity for brands to transcend the traditional middleman (Neti, 2011). One of the many positives is that companies can build their own brand communities easily on the social media. There are some obvious benefits of brand communities which are facilitating information sharing, spread the history and the culture of brands, providing help to customers, and positively influencing brand loyalty (Laroche, Habibi and Richard, 2013).