How to use social media
in your marketing mix
Nick Leech
Content of this talk
Why use social media in your marketing mix?
Pros & cons of using social media as a business.
4P’s of social media marketing& integrated social
media.
Getting people to interact with you.
Turning followers into sales & monitoring
performance.
Adding a social layer to your website.
Why should social media be part of your marketing mix?
1,400,000,000
1,200,000,000
1,000,000,000
800,000,000
600,000,000
400,000,000
200,000,000
-
Registered users
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest Instagram
Why should social media be part of your marketing mix?
36% of UK consumers use social media to interact with brands
39% of Twitter users have tweeted about a brand
58% of Facebook users have liked a brand
42% of Facebook users have mentioned a brand in a status update
41% of Facebook users have shared video, a link or a story about a
brand
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29897/21-Captivating-Social-Media-Stats-How-People-Interact-With-Brands-INFOGRAPHIC.aspx
Why should social media be part of your marketing mix?
How do consumers prefer to get updates from their favorite brands?
What are the Pros & Cons?
Pros
One on one relationships with customers
Position yourself as an expert
Distribute offers & deals instantly
Increased sharing & word of mouth potential
Very little direct financial investment
Cons
Not a “fire & forget” option
Requires time to be dedicated to it each day
Public airing of any issues (service & technical)
Can lose control of the conversation
What do you want to use social media for?
Top roles for social within organisations
Social is a
brand awareness
channel
Social is a
marketing campaign
channel
Social is a
content marketing
channel
Social is a
Customer service
channel
Social is a
Lead generation
channel
Social is a
retention channel
Social is a
sales channel
Source: econsultancy.com
What do you want to use social media for?
Building a community around my brand
A new customer support channel
Driving sales and referrals
Building closer relationships with customers
& brand advocates
Social media action plan
1. SMART goals that are aligned to
Business drivers
1
2
3
4
Business drivers Goals
• New customers sales
• Revenue
• Leads
• Retention
• Customer support
• Brand awareness
• Build a community
Increase sales by x%
Increase revenue by x%
Increase sales enquiries by x%
Reduce churn by x%
Reduce support tickets by x%
Increase brand searches in Google
Increase forum comments by X/day
What to follow Specific to your company
Industry trends
Keywords
Influencers
Competitors
Channels Purpose Priority
Blog Thought leadership, engagement, linking
Twitter Headlines, engage, sales, service
Facebook Social, community, sharing, discussion
LinkedIn Engagement, networking, recruiting, thought leadership
Goals Social media metric Tools
Increased ARPU Conversion tacking, customer feedback Google Analytics
Brand Awareness # of people reached FB / Twitter Analytics
Community Building # of interactions Social Dashboard
Customer support # of issues addressed Your CRM/ support system
2. Social news
What are the trends to watch
to & competitors to follow?
3. The channels to use
How will each channel help you
achieve your goals?
4. Measurement
-What social metric indicates
success?
-What tools will you use?
-How will this fit in with your
marketing goals?
Heart Internet’s positioning one sheet
What we want:
Our aim is to create a community based around the Heart Internet brand though a single, cohesive and integrated strategy
across all channels.
We will provide a personality behind the business, positioning ourselves as web hosting experts, by actively engaging in
conversations with our customers and prospective customers, as well as communicating new features, promotions and
prizes.
What we don’t want:
We must not use social media to open up new support channels nor seek out customers complaining about their current
web host to sell our services.
All conversations should be positive and remain on topic and avoid getting in to tit for tat conversations. At no times must
we use the mediums purely for a hard sell.
Twitter Facebook
• Instigate discussion and conversations surrounding topics
associated with our target audience.
• Share useful links/resources from 3rd party websites.
• Announce new blog posts, features, promotions and prizes.
• Run exclusive campaigns and promotions.
• Personalise Heart Internet with pictures, updates and personal
contact.
• Increase engagement with the brand
• Integrate other media (e.g. YouTube, blog etc.)
• Offer exclusive promotions and resources
What makes people want to follow a brand?
(Percent of respondents)
Source: http://blog.getsatisfaction.com
Values
Some things are easy, others take more planning
Simple
• Retweet positive comments
• New product/ feature announcements
• Reply to all sales enquiries quickly
• Link to case studies & testimonials
• Ask for feedback on what new features & offers they want
Intermediate
• Exclusive discount codes & short term offers
• Crowd source deals
• Contact people asking for hosting & domain name recommendations
• Offer an exclusive version of your hosting
Advanced
• Integrate with an affiliate program
• Register domains directly through Twitter (use Twitter & Heart Internet
APIs)
• Integrate a shopping cart in to Facebook (e.g.www.payvment.com)
Monitoring performance
5 categories of social
media measurement
Visits, views, followers, fans, subscribers, brand,
mentions
Share of voice, sentiment, top influences report
(Radian 6)
Clicks, retweets, shares, @replies, DMs,
wall posts, comments
Content downloads, webinar attendees,
lead generation forms, pitches/proposals
Online sales, phone sales, in-person sales
Track repeat
business and retention
Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com
Add a social layer to your website
Showcase positive tweets on your website
Is this real? Clearly a real person and tweet
Make it easy to share Sign up with social login
In this talk I am going to show you how you can use social media as part of your marketing mix, and to avoid the most common pitfalls small businesses fall in to.
I’ll start with why you should use social media to begin with, and then give an honest appraisal of the pro’s and con’s.
Once you have decided social media is something you can full commit to I’ll talk you through a framework you can apply to your social media to get the most out of it and encourage people to interact with you.
Finally I’ll show you how to turn followers in to sales and how to integrate your social media with your website.
Clearly social media is here to stay and still growing. There are more than 1bn people on facebook! There are 1bn people on Google+. Apparently
But the user numbers alone don’t justify it.
So, why you should allocate any of your time to it as part of your marketing?
The fact is, that not only is your audience on Social media, but your audience is choosing to interact with and talk about brands
More than that, Consumers expect to be able to interact with a brand via social media.
The fact is, your customers are having conversations about you and your brand whether you are on that network or not.
## Run through each point ##
So hopefully I’ve convinced you that SM should be a part of your marketing mix.
The big three to focus on are Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
If you can produce video content, by all means use YouTube to add another dimension to your marketing.
If you are targeting businesses or business people who will do their research on you, LinkedIn. But remember, linkedin is mostly where people turn to when thinking about their careers and themselves.
So in many cases you’re still better off targeting businesses on FB or Twitter.
The first question to ask is what you want to use social media for, because Social media can pretty much be whatever you want it to be.
This graph shows how different organisations use social media.
How many other channels could be used so differently?
It can be dangerous to attempt to be all things to all people. If you use one social profile for support, sales, branding, and so on the message gets diluted.
Define what you want to social media for. And If you want to use it for multiple purposes, I would recommend create distinct accounts for each e.g. create @yourcompany and @yourcompany_support
This way you can keep the conversation focused on where you want it to be.
Don’t operate each network as a silo, use them to drive visitors to each other.
Your ultimate aim should be to drive traffic/ awareness towards your website
MAKE A PLAN
Taking the upfront time to plan your social media will save and effort and makes sure you hit the ground running.
Create a document that summarises how you will use social media, and make sure relevant people in your organisation understand it.
Here is the positioning sheet we created for Heart Internet that guides how we use social media.
This ensures we take an approach consistent with our brand and other marketing. And helps us when new people join.
Just being on social media is no guarantee it will be a success. Ask yourself why will people want to follow your brand?
This research shows the biggest potential comes from focusing on your existing customers, running special offers and generating useful content
Don’t just chase a number, for the sake of having a large number of followers. Focus on quality over quantity e.g. it is better to have 100 active followers who have an interest in your product than 1,000 who pay you no attention and have no interest in web hosting.
The key is to getting started is to be active and not dip in and out once a week or less. It is a daily commitment, especially at the start.
Here are some ideas for the type of activities you can carry out in order to gain interaction. I’ve broken them in to four categories;
Rewards – This covers price discounts, prize draws, competitions, exclusive content and so on
Discussion – Some good ideas to get people to interact with you and each other to build a community feel
Sharing – Create content people want to share. EG thought leader interviews. Also linking to relevant 3rd party resources you can benefit from being associated with
Awareness – You need to make people aware of your social channels using all the tools available.
Decide how much effort you are prepared to put in, and let that define the type of activities you get up to.
Crowd source deals, e.g. If 20 people ‘like’ a deal it becomes active
**Review what is within each section**
Make sure you measure what you’re doing. There are many metrics you can focus on.
Tag all shortened links with your analytics software’s tracking data (e.g. Google analytics) to track visit and ecommerce data
There are some great tools out there to help you measure your efforts on social media. Many of them are totally free.
Anyone can make up a customer testimonial. It is a lot harder to fake a tweet = more credibility
Make it easy for customers to share, like, +1 your content
Try adding social logins to your site, making it really easy for people to sign up.