Online Marketing Summit | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in Blog, content marketing, mobile, Online Marketing Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media monitoring

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego. He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing. Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy. The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

In fact, a study by NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey Company) found that 2 in 5 social media users are accessing their social platforms from their mobile devices.

As additional devices are released on the market content marketers should be aware of these trends and create optimized content not only for computers, and Internet enabled devices, but for their customers as well.

How Do Your Customers Access Social Media?

Pratt also provided some valuable information on the different cycles that content marketers should go through in order to effectively target new customers.

Discovery

Any time that you launch a new client what is your first step? I’m going to bet that discovery is typically your first step post sale (or pre-sale). It is essential that you take a similar approach with your own company when launching a new social media campaign. Some of the key items you should be looking for when running your initial discovery might include:

Brand mentions
Product mentions
Keyword mentions
Competitor mentions
Influencer mentions

It is also recommended that you begin determining which social sites you should participate in, key influencers you want to get in front of, and topics that are trending or popular.

Listening

After you have discovered what is currently being said about your brand and your industry it’s time to really begin listening. Attempting to jump head first into the deep end will not produce the results you are looking for. Begin by tracking how your customers are using social media. Are they sharing particular pain points or problems? Are they looking for tips or advice in a certain way? It is imperative that you interact with your customers in the same way that they interact with everyone else. You may also want to determine:

Where are they participating?
What are they already saying about you?
What is their activity level on each social network?

Planning

Pratt shared a very insightful formula for the Planning phase of the process. First you want to identify your business objectives. This could be anything from improving your customer service to generating more sales. Other objectives might include:

Improve brand sentiment
Generate brand advocates
Increase your brand reach
Reduce your sales cycles
Improve your product reviews or ratings

The second step involves identifying your organization’s value add. Work to determine what sort of words your customers or potential customers are using when they mention your company.

Finally you need to define your level of commitment. How often do you plan on interacting? What steps must you take in order to create an engaging social media strategy?

Execution

When implementing your social media campaign it is very important that you as marketers consider how it will align with your other online marketing strategies. The convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Measurement

When beginning to measure your brand awareness there are four particular KPI’s to keep in mind.

Brand recognition
Share of voice
Engagement
Reach

A recent report by the Altimeter Group provides specific formulas for calculating each of the KPI’s listed above.

Although there are quite a few steps involved in creating a customer centric social media strategy it is well worth the effort. Have to fear, there are many reputation management and social media engagement tools at your disposal. Some require a monthly cost while others are at no charge. Some of the tools available on the market today include:

Brands Eye
Sysomos
Trackur
Social Mention
UberVU (Raven Tools offers monitoring using UberVU)
Sprout Social
Radian6

Remember, one of the keys to a successful social media campaign is asking questions. The more you know about your current and potential customers, the easier it will be to engage them online.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com

Video Interview: Social Media Marketing at GM – Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media

Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, interview, Online Marketing Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, Video Interviews

At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego I caught up with Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media at General Motors to talk about digital marketing. In this short interview I asked Charlotte a few fundamental questions about digital and social media marketing related to customers:

1. How does GM segment digital marketing activities between customer acquisition and retention?

Follow up: Does GM follow a social media editorial calendar according to customer buying cycles and personas?

2. With all the shiny objects of social media in the world, how does she go about deciding what to test and what to implement?

Take a look at the video and I think you’ll be interested in the customer-centric approach GM takes with social media and how time is allocated towards new customers, activating current customers as evangelists and their approach to filtering shiny social objects.

How is your company focusing digital and social media marketing efforts towards winning new customers and engaging those you have? How do you evaluate new social technologies for marketing and communications? Do you allocate time for testing, experimentation or go with the crowd?

Transcript:

LO: This is Lee Odden from MarketingBlog.com at Online Marketing Summit in San Diego. With me is Charlotte Blank, Manager of Social Media at General Motors. Welcome.

CB: Hi Lee, Thank you.

LO: So thanks for spending a couple of minutes with me to answer some key questions I think for digital marketers, big brands, small brands. One of the first questions I had for you is, in terms of your digital approach, how much of it is split between customer acquisition vs customer engagement and retention?

CB: We definitely approach the consumer from a 360 degree angle. We try to keep the consumer at the center at all times in thinking about their journey from when they’re just kind of living their life 98% of the time to maybe thinking about making a car purchase a few months down the road to actually actively researching the car.

I think social media in particular, plays a role in all of those areas of the funnel. Our own channels, like our Facebook pages and Twitter handles for example, we typically think of as an upper funnel play. There are really an opportunity to engage our consumers with their lifestyle passions. For example, music is a big pillar for Chevrolet and we offered early access to Spotify when that came out. That was a good integration with the millenials that we were targeting for the Sonic launch. That encouraged more engagement with our Facebook page. That would be an example of a lifestyle play that we use our own social media channels for.

I also see social media playing a big role in the ownership and CRM space and that’s where I think I’ll be focusing a lot of my efforts this year. I think that there’s a big opportunity with turning our owners into advocates and giving them tools to light up their social graphs and really share with their friends how they love their GM vehicles.

In that kind of middle area, more on the conversion question, we do have an entire group that has all kinds of sophisticated ways of knowing when someone is in market. Because we really want to be cognizant that we’re not flooding the market with our messages about “buy now, buy now” when really only 2% of people are in market at any given time. So we like to be very sophisticated in the way that we target those people with relevant messaging when they’re ready for it. There are still great opportunities for social to play a role there, especially in the influencer space. The ratings and recommendations – we work a lot with 3rd party sites like KBB and Edumunds – those are increasingly socializing.

LO: Is there integration much from an editorial planning standpoint? Are you running social content calendars for example, that tie into buying cycle or customer segments?

CB: We absolutely do use content calendars, mostly from a lifestyle engagement space. We do constantly measure and optimize the way that we’re resonating with consumers. We’re starting to find some real nuances depending on the name plate. So some of our more performance oriented vehicles, Camero fans, Corvette fans, Cadillac, they really like that awesome car content – great performance engine type of content that they just can’t get enough of. Whereas we’ll use some of our bigger brands, Cheverolet overall to connect more with young consumers based on a lifestyle play, a mom blogger relationship or ways to be more a part of every day life.

LO: In the social media world, by the way I love that you used the word optimize, OptimizeBook.com is where you’ll see this video and information about a book called Optimize. In terms of this fast changing world we’re in, there are so many apps and channels for us to deal with, it’s almost information overload not only for consumers but for marketers deciding where it is that those consumers are spending their time. How do you decide when it comes to new digital marketing technology, to invest, where to experiement?

CB: That’s a great question, that’s one of the things I talk most about in my job. It’s one of the most important things that we can do. It’s all about consumer insights and putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer you’re trying to reach. This varies by campaign, by name plate, by the tone that we want to have with our consumers. We need to define up front what are we trying to achieve and who are we trying to connect with? Put ourselves in their shoes using thorough research, data and insights. What is that these people like to do? Do they use the Pinterests of the world, are they big Tweeters, do they even click on online advertising? It depends on who we’re trying to reach. If you constantly put yourself in the consumers shoes, it can help avoid the “chasing shiny object syndrome”.

LO: Right, some empathy towards what’s important and what they care about. If you’d like to share a Twitter handle, a blog or any other social destination for folks to find out about you and the work you’re doing?

CN: You can follow me @charlotteblank and please like all our Facebook pages. We have 8 Chevrolet pages and one each for Cadillac, Buick and GMC.

LO: Thanks Charlotte!