Are You a Socially Smart Marketer?

Marketers have increasingly recognized and adopted social media as a powerful channel for demand generation and customer advocacy. But, for business, it can’t be just about posting your latest selfie or taking a picture of your dinner plate. It’s about finding your customers where they are, listening to what they’re saying about your business and interacting with them to improve their customer experience. It’s about branding and making sure you are in control of the perception of your target audience. As we have seen time and time again, every tweet, post or customer engagement has the potential to go viral and either promote or destroy a company’s reputation almost instantaneously. So, what do marketers need to do to be socially smart? Plain and simple: focus on the customer.

Brands that are most successful in today’s marketplace are the ones who put the customer first. It’s not just about the customer though; it’s also about the sphere of influence – the friends and followers who listen to his/her thoughts, recommendations and opinions. It is conservatively estimated that two-thirds of adult internet users have an account on at least one social network and that the average visitor to your website spends between 5-6 hours a week on various social networking sites. Additionally, almost 60% of consumers report that user-generated reviews have a significant impact on their buying decisions (Monetate). Smart social marketers follow a strategy that makes sure that what their customers are saying about them supports the message they are delivering and course-correct quickly when that alignment is not happening.

For marketers, the challenge always comes in proving that efforts spent on social marketing and monitoring have defined value and are worth the investment in tools to monitor social efforts. In other words, how do we make money with social marketing? Let’s face it, it’s a lot of work, and it never ends. Once you commit to a social marketing strategy, you must continually innovate to find ways to be relevant, to have your voice heard, and to gain attention (followers, fans, views and clicks) in an increasingly fragmented space. And, perhaps more importantly, you need to know what your customers and competitors are saying about you.

If we think back even 25 years ago, it was much simpler. There was television, print and radio. Period. You created an ad, published/ran it, and measured direct results by attributing the uptick in revenue to the timing of the ad placements. As the Internet came on the scene and became commercialized, we focused on the “big four” social channels: LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. We scrambled to monetize them, investing heavily in PPC banner ads, SEO, paid search and finding clever ways to behaviorally target our audience. Today, however, the number of social sites grows daily, and finding ways to attribute revenue to our social activity becomes even more important. Additionally, our marketing budgets have not grown proportionally to cover all the channels in which we need to invest dollars.

This is where a social management platform becomes critical to social marketers. Can you simply go to your company’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts to post and gather results? Of course, and that’s a great place to start! But in order to streamline and organize outbound messaging and discover themes and sentiment of cross-platform social posts, marketers need to have a place to see all those conversations at once and to respond quickly to resolve complaints and spread positive reviews. A social management tool can also ensure that the cadence of outbound messaging is cohesive so that you do not miss a prime opportunity to tweet, post or share your message with the right audience at the right time. The social marketplace has many tools that can meet every budget and provide a wide array of features and analytics.

If you are just starting your social marketing journey, I encourage you to devote time to documenting your goals, road mapping and investigating the tools that will support the needs of your organization and measure your success.

Regardless of your social marketing strategy and supporting tools, one thing is crystal clear: wherever your customers are talking, you had better be listening.