Social Media and Your Marketing Plan

A new client has asked me about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. Should they blog, or tweet, or Facebook? What delivers the best bang for the bucks?

First of all, a pet peeve. It’s still about reaching your target audience. It really bothers me to read articles that rave about social media for marketing, written in a way that makes me think the author is 25 years old and truly believes that everyone texts or tweets. I have a client who sells to a demographic dominated by male managers of near-retirement age, guys who prefer to print out their emails. Social media would be irrelevant to this target audience. However, this also means that in five or six years, a younger generation of managers will step into those shoes, and there may be good reason for this client to review their online marketing strategy.

Here’s my personal take on what works, and in order of effectiveness:

Customer Reviews – a ton of studies from sites such as Bazaarvoice have shown that when customers read positive recommendations about a product or company, their trust level goes up, conversion rates go up, value of each purchase goes up. So add a feedback mechanism to your website, and make sure your product or service lives up to its billing. If you receive a nice note from a customer, ask permission to quote. Challenge: collecting a good sample of reviews and keeping current. Dealing with negative comments.

Question and Answer tools – this doesn’t get rid of the old FAQ page, but Q&A tools allow for interactive feedback from your customer community. When questions get answered by another user, the customer gives it more credence. Challenge: unless your company has a large and active user community, it could take a while for questions to get answered and answers could be inaccurate, depending on the knowledge level of the person replying. You may need to moderate and reply in a timely manner. If so, always identify yourself as a company employee.

Twitter – this is the 21st century version of word of mouth, and word of mouth is still the consumer’s number one choice when it comes to trusted information sources. Challenge: not to be approached lightly. Many are the tales of companies who made one bad tweet, and caused their reputation to plummet. There is more to Twitter than just monitoring tweets and contributing to discussions. This needs a  plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Facebook – many companies have launched Facebook pages. The most successful have managed to create a community of “fans” around their products and keep things lively. Challenge: if you’re just starting out, you have to work to build up your fan base. As with Twitter, needs a marketing plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Blogging – the best blogs provide information or entertainment (think new product news, views, jokes) and do so on a regular and consistent basis. If your blog allows comments, it’s a good way to interact with customers. Done right, blogs can attract links, enhance your brand, and position you as an expert in your industry. Challenge: as with Twitter and Facebook, a company/retail blog needs to be launched with a marketing plan that defines goals, frequency of update, an editorial calendar or similar concept; and also you will need someone who is churning out content. It’s a lot of work because nothing looks sadder than an out-of-date blog – looks like you’ve given up on the business.

It’s no coincidence I seem to have ranked these with a lot of consideration for the amount of work involved. Customer Reviews are at the top. This is the most forgiving tactic for small companies. You can gradually build up your collection of customer comments, publish them when you can. Go lower down the list, and the workload increases. You need to dedicate resources and respond in real time – really make the commitment.

I take a serious approach towards social media as marketing tools. They seem so light hearted and spontaneous at first glance, but in practice they need a lot of nurturing, monitoring, and fresh content if they are to contribute effectively to your overall marketing plan. That is still the main goal of any marketing professional: to execute on a marketing plan that reaches the right target audience. In this context, social media would be just one element of an integrated marketing plan, which could include traditional print, trade show attendance, news releases, or contributed articles to consumer or trade publications.