When businesses want to take a flight on wheels ontight marketing budgets, with a vision of high ROI, then what works best for them is a right strategy with carefully planned steps.
This blog ensures you a high ROI on social media strategy by guiding you on how to create a positive buzz around your brand and also on not only how to retain, but to acquire profitable customers.
While businesses are struggling to evaluate how effective their social media campaigns are, most companies are clamoring for assessing the ROI made on their social media activities.
Currently, businesses are using a variety of metrics to gauge the impact of diverse campaigns across departments. However, the metrics used in assessing the ROI fail to provide an overarching picture of those marketing programs, which are responsible for escalating their revenues.
The Power of Seven
For accomplishing your goal, follow a seven step framework, and ensure a high return on investment.
Step 1: Examine the conversations. By examining conversations related to brands on social media platforms, businesses are able to access valuable information, including relevant people. For instance, you monitored a total 800,000 conversations involving 1,700 individuals across various social networking sites. These 1700 are the relevant people through conversations that reveal their engagement with the brand.
Step 2: Spot Influential Personalsto Spread Messages. Companies can source data, and identify a group of influential individuals who can work as a team to spread the “right” message. These people are also called “influencers”. For instance – After assessing conversations involving 1,700 individuals across various social networking sites, identify the kind of influential persons in the social media domain who might spread company’s message.
According to a report released in 2013 byTechnomicInc, Subway has led all restaurants in consumers’ ratings for its advertising campaigns on the basis of three attributes – memorable advertising, advertising one can relate to, and advertising that makes you hungry. Its long-running marketing campaigns on social media, such as, ‘Every Sandwich Tells a Story’ have helped consumers identify with the brand. The study said that Subway’s campaigns have pushed the brand’s name as one of the best-perceived brands. Let’s read further to understand how?
Step 3: Discover the DynamicsShared by Influencers – Next step for companies is -assessing the dynamics of influencers, identifying their common strengths, and creating a pool of profiles based on that.This helps businesses in locating the influencers in accordance with the needs of campaign.
These influencers can be further encouraged to talk about the company and its products or services. According to research pieces on social media, these kinds of influencers display high levels of engagement in four ways:
Spread Message – This implies the number of times message is forwarded; with or without modification. This means the number of times the influencer and the network of friends, can not only “see”, but “share” a message.
Influence – This implies the influence on receivers of a particular message which drives them to forward it to their friends. How often is the message of the influencer being “retweeted,” “hashtagged” or “shared”?
Social Impact – This implies the number of replies and comments received for each message. For this one need to identify the social sites, such as zeroing in on Facebook and Twitter as platforms for this study.
Like Mindedness – The similarities between the influencer and network of friends.
Step 4: Identify Your Potential Brand Ambassadors- Finding influencers for social media campaign does not suffice, rather find those who have interests in your products and campaigns. For this, one needs to follow a metric called Stickiness Index (SI). SI measures the extent of word of mouth (WOM) caused by a particular influencer in terms of the number of discussions.
Realizing the importance of social media as an important tool, Subway picked up campaigns which helped the brand to instantly get connected with its followers. Today, Subway has a high score in terms of huge fan-following on Facebook (21+million), and Twitter (33, 800).
Taking a cue from the example mentioned in the previous point, Subway’s famous Facebook campaign– ‘Every Sandwich Tells a Story’ gained great popularity amongst its followers who would pick up a Sandwich of their choice. The Sandwich was actually a free gift, but the strategy of the brand was to gain an access of their profile, and make it public. Here, the users were not just the followers, but alsothe brand ambassadors of Subway popularising the brand. This was a tactic followed by Subway for making their sandwiches correlate with the individuality of theirfans. Subway’s strategy was to reinforce the brand value of its sandwiches, and also give them a personal touch.
Step 5: Recruit Influencers – After you identify influencers interested in your company, take the next step and recruit them. They can be roped in as a good marketing source for your social media campaigns, and can be given the taskofspreading positive WOM. An example here would be making these influencers engage the audience in indirect ways to promote your brand, such as online games.
Step 6: Retain Influencers by Incentivizing Them – By incentivizing influencers, you don’t lose the chance of attracting some great prospects for your business. These incentives offered can be in the form of monetary benefits, discounts or freebies.
Step 7: Gather the rewards to weave into Effective Social media campaigns
By tracking positive WOM, they can link it to the brand growth, and weave it into more effective social media campaigns.
By following the above methods, the ultimate result that businesses get is in the form of accelerated financial performance, better customer engagement, and improved brand awareness.
One great example of social media success is Ellen DeGeneres’ Selfie who broke all records at more than 2 million retweets in two hours during the broadcast of the 86th Academy Awards on ABC. DeGeneres shared the selfie via her Twitter feed by writing, “Social sharing is now part of the way we live and communicate is not new anymore. Literally everything is documented and pushed out on social channels today.”
Apart from best practices, KPIs are the right way to measure social engagement. Some of the social interaction metrics or KPIs are:
- Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
- Alerts (register and response rates/ post click activity)
- Downloads
- Email subscriptions
- Comments
- Fans (when a user become a fan of something / someone)
- Favourites (add an item to your list favourites)
- Feedback ( giving an feedback via the site)
- Followers (following something / someone)
- Forward (forwarding to a friend)
- Groups (joining group/groups for social activity)
- Invite / Refer (a friend)
- Love / Like this ( form of rating something)
- Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc)
- Messaging (onsite)
- Personalisation (pages, display, theme)
- Posts
- Print page
- Ratings (Rating something on the basis of performance)
- Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
- Report spam / abuse
- Reviews
- Social media sharing / participation (users activities on social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc)
- Tagging (user-generated metadata)
- Testimonials
- Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
- Uploads (adding an item, such as articles, links, images, videos)
- Total contributors (active contributors)
- Views (videos, ads, rich images)
- Wishlists (save an item to wishlist)
- Despite a robust network of data available through social media, most organizations are unable to develop the right metrics. Therefore, the need is to develop a stout methodology for calculating the social media marketing spending and maximizing the ROI of social media campaigns.
