the five steps of an integrated social media campaign
TRANSCRIPT
The Five Steps of anIntegrated Social MediaCampaign
6th in the Social Media ROI Series
With Connie Bensen
LLEETT’’SS TTAALLKK::Social Media ROI
Whitepaper
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
Executive Summary: Many are seeking the secret to a successful social media campaign. Public relations agencies have been dabbling in this space for quiteawhile. Now marketers are dipping their toes in the water and adding the social channels to their marketing mix.
This white paper is the sixth in a series describing how a social media monitoring tool can greatly influence the return on investment (ROI)of your social media campaigns by providing essential information that guides the strategy and engagement. This paper will outline the ROIthat can be realized and measured by engaging in social channels. Finally, it will provide best practices to help you maximize your efforts.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
Some companies create a Twitter account or a Facebook page and consider that a social media plan. It isbased on ‘everyone else is doing it’ and there aren’t any metrics behind it. It is a shot in the dark.
Engaging in the social web before listening is like being blindfolded and throwing darts at a bullseye acrossthe room. Not very effective is it? If you have created a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page justbecause everyone else is doing it, you may not be directing your efforts towards the social channels thatmake sense for your business – you are working as if blindfolded. Can you measure your results? Do youhave a strategy based on in-depth knowledge of where and how your target markets interact on the web?
If you could identify where your consumers are online, it would be like taking off the blindfold. And onceyou reviewed their conversations then you could join the conversation in a tone that suited them. Now youcan see the bullseye! And finally what if you could count the number of darts that hit the target? You couldcalculate ROI. So let’s change-up your game.
In addition to researching and understanding your target market, it is also important to integrate socialcampaigns with traditional marketing efforts for online and offline efforts. This will maximize and extendyour campaigns on all fronts. The most effective marketing messages provide multiple points of contactwhich cater to your customers’ preferences. For example, at the end of each white paper in this series anumber the following points of contact are provided:
• Link to Freemium version of Alterian SM2• Link to corporate website listing resources on social media monitoring • Link to request a different form of marketing collateral• Email address and phone numbers around the globe
Layer that with interactions online and offline and you will have a winning combination that gets younoticed!
Let’s Talk about how a social media monitoring tool can increase the ROI of your Social Media MarketingCampaigns!
Introduction
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
As you know, a marketing campaign needs to be planned and executed around a timeline with givenresources. It also needs to have measureable goals in order to evaluate the success of the campaign.There are five steps to an effective social media marketing campaign:
• Listen• Plan • Engage• Measure• Evaluate & Revise
1. ListenA brand audit is the most important step in every social media campaign. A previous paper in the ROISeries covers this topic extensively. It is imperative to understand the online presence of your target marketand your brand. Listening first and devising a plan based on that intelligence will provide the greatest ROIfor your online efforts. A recent report, Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth, found that 75% of thosesurveyed said it would have a positive impact on their experience as a customer if companies took the timeto find out more about their needs.
There are many free tools as well as professional ones available to assist with the online assessment. Theexamples in this white paper are from Alterian SM2. The free version can be found here and a professionalversion is also available.
It is impossible to skip this first step. The advantage of using a social media monitoring tool for a brandaudit is:
• It greatly reduces the time required to manually do so
• It provides extensive information about your target market ensuring that your efforts are in the right directions:
An Integrated MarketingCampaign in Five Steps
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
The social channels where they are interacting at online
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
Demographic information
Ability to identify influencers and brand advocates
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
An overview of their sentiment and tone in regard to your brand and competitors
Most importantly, patterns and trends
2. Plan the Strategy and Establish MetricsSome of the social media monitoring tools available on the market allow you to reviewprevious campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness. Alterian SM2 provides access todata back to 2007. This information is invaluable when considering which campaignsresonated with consumers. This allows you to reconsider past campaigns and craft muchmore effective ones. That knowledge will make the ROI of future campaigns much higher.
This historical data combined with the research data from your brand audit will provide aclear path towards developing effective social campaigns.
Now, it’s time to put your creative hat on! Here are some questions that need answering:
• What are the campaign objectives?• What will resonate with consumers?• What will inspire and motivate them to participate?• How can you make it easy for them to share the campaign with others?
And the technical side must also be considered:
• What resources will be needed? (technology, landing pages, staff resources)• How will it be measured? • How will you utilize tag lines, url shorteners, items that are easily tracked.
Social media monitoring tools help you identify a baseline for setting expectations. After the campaign isover, these benchmarks will provide comparatives that make it easy to measure success.
Listening Tips:• Utilize theme clouds to see trends. Search for industry terms to broaden your view of your target market (find out what you didn’t know you needed to know)
• Search for competitors to see where your target market is interacting
• Dig into conversations and review the sentiment and tone
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
The following chart is a Compare Dates report from Alterian SM2. It shows the results of Southwest’s ‘BagsFly Free’ campaign for the most recent quarter (blue line) compared to the previous quarter (red line).
What to measure will depend upon the objectives of the campaign. The easiest way is to keep theobjectives simple. What percentage increase or decrease in behavior would you like to achieve in a givenperiod of time? For example,
• Reduce demand on call center by 5%• Increase conversations about new product by 15% • Decrease product development time by 2%• Increase customer satisfaction by 10%
3. Online EngagementA successful campaign needs to go beyond the technology. Creating a Facebook app ispart of a bigger picture. The social web is based on human interaction and people will bepleasantly surprised to have the opportunity to interact directly with your brand. Theywant to talk with people though. The best people for this task are your own staff who areweb savvy and proponents of you brand. Invite those that are interested in participatingand provide them with training. They will be your most valuable resource in ensuring thesuccess of the campaign because they can use their networks to spread the word. Youcan’t buy viral, but you can mobilize your army of employees to encourage it.
Strategy Tips:• Start small. A successful campaign will take on a life of its own and grow organically.
• Be innovative. Get to know your community and find out what will inspire and motivate them to participate
• Tie the campaign into direct marketing and place information, invites to participate and links in email, newsletters.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
As stated earlier a comprehensive social media campaign should go beyond a singlechannel such as Facebook or Twitter. If you have done a good job of inspiring people toparticipate, then they will be recommending others to join in. They will be doing so ontheir blogs and in other social networks. The goal for your social campaign should be tocreate something so talkable that people are discussing it everywhere. This is where thesocial media monitoring tool comes into play.
One of the overarching goals for your social media strategy should include buildingcommunity around your brand. This is the premise of every social engagement. Acampaign is a small part of that and monitoring & responding to those that areparticipating are the essentials to success. You can grow the campaign’s successexponentially by thanking participants and answering their questions. You will also beable to identify brand advocates. The tool will show what online influence they have.
A social media monitoring tool makes short work of this by providing daily reports andreal time alerts that allow you to immediately respond to those participating andresponding to your campaign.
Every campaign requires metrics and reporting in order to determine the extent to whichit has met the business objectives. It is agreed that the social world is shifting what andhow we measure. The good news is that everything is measureable. The challenge isfiguring out what is a blog post about your campaign worth to your company? Or a
Tweet? If the campaign increases sales by 15% then that is an easy calculation of ROI. But what if itincreased your brand visibility? What dollar amount can be placed on that? There is a lot of value inincreasing your brand presence and the best way to argue for it is to point to the alternative: having abrand with little or no brand visibility.
A social media monitoring tool aggregates the conversations from all of the social channels in one placeand makes it easy to create high level reports for management depicting things such as the increase ofvolume of conversations about your brand compared to the benchmark, the sentiment around thecampaign and your brand, and main topics of discussion around the campaign, etc.
4. Evaluate and ReviseReviewing the success of a campaign is essential for planning future ones. Here are somequestions to consider:
• What worked & what could have been executed better?• Did the campaign increase customer satisfaction?• Was the effort worth the investment of resources? ie: was ROI realized both in value (increased brand visibility through word of mouth) and bottom line (increased sales or decreased demand on services)?
A quick caution in regard to the nature of the social web: Social media marketing is notabout campaigns. It is about utilizing social channels to build relationships which can
Engagement Tips:• Make sure that responses are authentic and not contrived.
• Don’t let fear hold your company back from participating online. If you have listened to the conversations and done your planning then you are ready to participate.
• Realize that execution of a campaign can go very well or can go really badly and could get noticed. All interactions online are subject to discussion so be prepared to adjust your campaign for unforeseen circumstances. The social web requires flexibility.
Measurement Tip:It is best to keep the reporting simple. Social media monitoring tools offer a myriad of reports but you should decideearly on which reports best show the campaign’s progress.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
augment your business objectives. Many have planned and executed a three monthcampaign. They created a situation where they engaged with their consumers online.Then after the campaign there weren’t any resources in place to continue the interaction.This is confusing to consumers and creates a contradictory effect. At first you are activelyengaged then it is turned off and this sends mixed signals. It is imperative to rememberthat effective social media marketing builds on momentum. It generally takes an
extended period of time for the momentum of word of mouth to build and for the community to grow. Forthis reason it is highly recommended that you have a plan in place to support an ongoing online presence.
One must remember that a social media campaign is a small part of a larger social media strategy thatneeds to be an ongoing effort. A social media monitoring tool supports a campaign through every step byproviding insight that augments planning and deciding on objectives. It efficiently and effectively identifiesthose that are talking about the campaign online making it very easy to respond and thank them. It alsoidentifies brand advocates that can be energized to extend the reach of the campaign. They can alsoprovide the foundation for future campaigns. A social monitoring tool is essential for measuring progressand overall success. Reports are easily created that provide a high level overview of what the campaignachieved as well as compare the results against the benchmarks. A social media monitoring tool has provento be an integral component of social media campaigns.
Next steps
• Try the Freemium version of Alterian SM2 ( a professional social media monitoring tool)• Explore resources on social media monitoring• Request a Little Book on some BIG marketing topics• Email [email protected] or call
North America:+1 312 884 5321
UK & Continental Europe:+44 (0) 1202 250003
Asia Pacific:+61 2 9968 2449
Conclusion
Evaluation Tip:Create a list of new opportunities thathave been created for future campaigns.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Campaign Strategy Tips for the Social Web
The Five Steps of an Integrated Social Media Campaign
About the “Let’sTalk” Series withConnie Bensen
Social Media marketing is providing a whole new dimension for brands to connect with consumers. Thesocial web is a vast entity and every marketer needs a tool to harness the information in the most costeffective and efficient manner. A social media monitoring tool offers the ability to maximize the digitalportion of your marketing budget in order to create, execute, measure and report on a social mediastrategy.
The Let's Talk Series, by Connie Bensen, is a series of 10 whitepapers describing the variety of ways thatmarketers can increase the ROI of their marketing efforts. Topics will include how to use a social mediamonitoring tool for SEO, Lead Generation, Social Media campaigns, Customer Service, CompetitiveInsight, Corporate marketing, PR and reputation management, etc.
Connie is the Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, which provides marketingsoftware to help brands engage with their customers. She is a key voice amongst online CommunityManagers. Her blog, www.conniebensen.com is recognized as a leading resource for cultivating onlinecommunities, providing best practices for this emerging role and it is listed in Forbes.com as one of the 20Best Marketing and Social Media Blogs by Women.
Alterian’s SM2 is a social media monitoring and analysis solution designed for PR andMarketing professionals. SM2 helps you track conversations, review positive/negativesentiment for your brand, clients, competitors and partners across social media channelssuch as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-timealerts.
Alterian (LSE: ALN) empowers organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences withtheir audience that help build value and reinforce commitment to their brand, through the use of theAlterian Integrated Marketing Platform. Alterian drives the transformation of marketing andcommunications, making it practical and cost-effective for companies to orchestrate multichannelengagement with the individual.
Alterian’s unprecedented integration of analytics, content and execution through industry leading tools,such as the Dynamic Messenger email platform, SM2 Social Media Monitoring platform and the awardwinning Content Management solutions, enables companies to build integrated communication strategieswhich create a true picture of the individual.
Alterian works with marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies who recognize the needto plan and deliver coordinated customer engagement services in partnership with their clients. For moreinformation about Alterian, products within the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform or Alterian’s PartnerNetwork, visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.
About Alterian
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White Paper