When developing a social marketing plan, it is important to not only be engaging and relevant in order to attract fans initially, but also to maintain relevance to keep fans engaged.
Guide them on a journey
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| Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut |
Social marketing, like any other marketing is about taking people on a journey and influencing them along the way. According to Jason Breed, Global Social Media Practice Lead for Accenture, in order to determine what to focus on, it is essential to have a deep understanding of the target market to not just make the initial connection, but to continue to remain relevant to each individual consumer. Marketers must tap into data to uncover consumer insights. They must behave like an online sales person and maintain the consumers attention by looking for data and signals.
It is essential to remember that a buying decision process occurs online in a similar fashion to offline. With consumers at varying stages of the buying cycle, social media messaging must be relevant to all stages so that it appears to be in context. Social marketing must appeal to not only those that aspire to a brand but also the frequent purchaser so that one segment isn’t alienated at the expense of the other.
Followers and fans need to be treated as potential and current customers - persuading them through each and every touchpoint by being relevant, engaging and understanding their interests, motivations and needs.
The ultimate goal: Relevant, personalised communications within social media
In order to be even more relevant, brands must create an engaging “human experience” within social networks in realtime. The beauty of social marketing is two-way interaction between the community members and the brand, therefore marketers should use customer insights to ensure they are interesting and relevant to ensure community members continue to engage and develop a deeper relationship with the brand.
How can we take it to the next level?
Facebook is already providing functionality for brands to tailor status updates, messages, videos and photos based on location (based on IP address) and language to ensure their offer is relevant geographically. The ideal scenario for marketers will be when we can also talk to audiences with even more relevance by tailoring messages and content according to interest, previous likes, friends, other brands they are associated with, age, gender and product preference. Not doubt, it is only a matter of time before we will be able to do this.
References
Breed, J, 2012, Social Media Relevancy And Today's CMO, CMO.com, viewed on 25th April 2012, http://www.cmo.com/social-media/social-media-relevancy-todays-cmo
Chaffey, D, Ellis-Chadwick, F, Mayer, R, Johnston, K, 2009, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation, and Practice, Pearson Education, England.
Chaffey, D, Ellis-Chadwick, F, Mayer, R, Johnston, K, 2009, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation, and Practice, Pearson Education, England.
Kretchmer, J, 2011, Content vs. Community: How Online Publishers Can Nurture Both, Mashable.com, viewed on 25th April 2012, http://mashable.com/2011/08/19/community-content-publishers/
I have particularly loved your statement "Guide them in a journey"
ReplyDeleteMarketing is about building and maintaining relationships with customers. If everything gets reduced to the purchase moment, it is very unlikely to maintain that relationship.
As you mention, Digital Marketing offers new possibilities to maintain these relationships. The example you mention about Facebook delivering location based content is just on case, but there are hundreds more. This is certainly an increasing trend, which companies should be embracing if they want to remain competitive.
I agree that by focusing only on the moment of transaction, we don't foster long term loyalty. It will be interesting to see what new segmentation functionality Facebook will introduce next. Considering they already allow a large degree of segmentation for their advertising - interests, gender, relationship status, location, education level etc, I'm sure it's only a matter of time!
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