The expected growth in social media marketing spending next year is a positive thing—a sign that it has earned a place at the marketing dinner table. While there are still many challenges to using it effectively, increasing budgets without a solid strategy is a sure way to fail.
—Debra Aho Williamson (Lead Analyst, eMarketer)
Picture courtesy: webceo.com
While the potential advantages of social media marketing are many, what marketers also need to be careful is to not lose touch with the bottom-line. The other issue that is going to test marketers as they implement social media is the corporate culture of “instant gratification takes too long” and being able to communicate what is happening and why via social media. Then there are social media “experts” who talk about vanity metrics like engagement and followers while your senior management is asking “and this did what for sales?”
Picture courtesy: keytheory.com
Like it or not, even though the current system of online marketing analytics is that they can measure everything from buzz to impressions and reach, it is a very valid argument that the primary objective for social media, or any marketing program for that matter, should be to raise revenue. The disconnect between social media analytics and ground realities is that there’s little way of actually determining how much of the ‘interest’ generated by this method of campaigning has translated into sales, especially in cases where online buying is not possible. Due to this, marketers need to ask themselves: what happens if social media analytics indicate positive metrics while sales are declining?
So why are marketers going to increase spending on social media and email marketing in 2011? Well, firstly that is because of the media measurement frenzy. Simply put, most marketers have been trained to “go where the eyeballs are” and right now Facebook and Twitter have a lot of eyeballs.
When it comes to deciding if social media is right for your brand, marketers need to ask themselves the following questions:
1. Do our prospects and customers want to hear from us? This is an important question to answer. Where does your brand fit in with their busy life?
2. Can we make the transformation from brand to media – What is the value that you are going to provide to your audience and why should they want to talk with you and ‘friend’ you?
3. Are people who follow us on social media current customers who want promotional offers and can we reach prospects and convert them to customers? Someone who ‘friends’ or ‘likes’ a brand on social media is more likely to already be a customer and probably just wants to know about promotions to save money.
4. Do we have someone who can take web analytics and tell a story while identifying opportunities ? Anyone can provide data to senior managers but what’s needed is someone who can tell a story and then point out how we can improve our social media marketing to meet brand objectives.
5. Where is management in believing that social media can help us meet brand objectives ? If they are skeptical they are more likely to question the need for resources and the continuous use of social media. Establishing a clear connect between changes in revenue and use of social media is vital. The management are not likely to be interested in the eyeballs you are grabbing, so statistics about how many website visitors you are getting should not be the centerpiece of your argument.
Another danger of social media is that while it brings your brand closer to the target audience and enables you to keep track of what the satisfaction level of your existing customer base are, quick access to negative feedback leads to inappropriate reactions from brand managers. An example is The Gap changing its logo and changing it back again due to a social media backlash: when they announced their new logo, there was widespread nay-saying on various social media channels, so they retreated to the old logo like a bunch of scared rabbits. What should be noted is that the change in logo was unlikely to discourage people from buying a jeans from the Gap; most of the critics were not even single-time buyers. In other words, it was unlikely to such a severe impact as to necessitate going back on a planned decision in such a knee-jerk manner. So, it is very important to effectively sort relevant feedback from idle-minded chitchat.
You can use social media for testing new product concepts and other ideas but when you go through months of strategic planning and set a course for your brand you can’t take all that and throw it away just because some people said they don’t like it on your Facebook page.
Marketers have to be willing to listen to their customers and their audience via social media but when it comes tostrategic brand direction they are the ones in charge not consumers. Users on social media reporting a bad product line is cause for concern and remedial action; an unpopular new logo isn’t.
The Bottomline (pun intended)
Social media is not going to save the day for bad marketing, bad products, or poor implementation. Since this is still a widely uncharted territory, social media marketing cannot (or should not) be implemented by third-party agencies (as in the case of conventional marketing) and has to be done in-house in order to develop capabilities through learning. Most importantly, social media has to be something that is right for your company and your customers. Only then will it really work for the companies benefit.