How Important are Value and Listening in Social Media Marketing? {Updated}
What happens when you’ve developed an awesome marketing strategy, attracting and retaining your audience through a good relationship, and generating the recommended trust to be a leader in the field?
Is the job already done here? Not yet.
Don’t make the common mistake of some marketers thinking they have nothing else to do to improve their campaigns.
There is something we can always do better, so success in Social Media Marketing is an ongoing pursuit; you can’t just stay too comfortable with something.
Trying to market your business using social media is a continuous process of reflection and refinement.
That’s why the exact point when you generally think that your efforts are finishing during a Social Media campaign, is actually the starting spot of your journey for a marketing success.
It seems like it never ends, right?
However, putting special attention to what it looks like the “final” steps of a social media campaign is what will make the difference and get the most out of your efforts.
So, we want to focus on Value and Listening as two key stages in Social Media Marketing that you shouldn’t ever take for granted!
How do you Value your Social Media efforts?
“All that stuff you made in Social Media is great but what’s the ROI?” this is the question we hate to hear because as marketers, we often have these huge expectations that our marketing campaign went so viral and interactive that our Return of Investment (ROI) must be following the same line, and sometimes it’s not the case.
I’m sure we all agree that Social Media Marketing is valuable because it allows companies to directly engage with their clients, build brand presence and sell more products.
However, having a good relationship with your brand and make users click on the “purchase” section are two different things.
Validating your investment and participation on social media is vital, so you need to work with metrics that can be easy to understand.
It’s logic that you or your boss want to compare the investment of any kind of resources to their returns.
Likes and followers? That was only the first stage of the social media journey.
A lot of social media value doesn’t even occur on your own properties, but in other users’ accounts.
It comes from natural Facebook and Twitter mentions of current and potential clients, and how are we supposed to track that?
Now, you have plenty other metrics and new data streams to understand the behavior of customers.
We still care about numbers!
Always supply trustable and verifiable ROI data to develop long-term relationships with your social media community.
Otherwise, your efforts won’t be quantifiable and you won’t have enough base to answer your boss with total security that hated question, right?
To get value out of your Social Media is very important that you focus your efforts on the things that customers are looking for.
This study shows the main reasons why people follow a business on social media:
- To get promotions and discounts (71%).
- To be updated with the latest product information (66%).
- To obtain customer service (49%).
Many people forget about the last bullet point.
I dare you to DM on Instagram or Facebook a company asking for some kind of support fort their products or services…Feeling ignored?
If you aren’t very sure about the value of social media for a business, also check these statistics from the same study:
- 61% of people affirm that reviews on social media influence their buying decisions.
- 68% of consumers check Facebook when purchasing products.
- 56% of them check on Pinterest.
Measuring the exact ROI of a Social Media Campaign is definitely a challenge, especially because most of the value happens outside of your brand page.
However, you can start having an idea by considering these aspects:
- Asking your customers how they found you, which counts as anecdotal examples.
- Find correlations between a new social campaign and sudden increases in conversions and sales.
- Check how different types of posts or ads increases or decreases traffic and conversions.
Ensure your company that you are deriving value from your social media marketing efforts.
Don’t panic about it because you can find many tools to measure the financial impact of social media on your organization, including e-commerce revenue, lead generation, etc.
As some examples, we have:
- Kissmetrics: We love the fact that you can analyze and track individuals, groups of similar individuals and users as a whole. Tracking the ROI from any social network and website will help you to attribute the conversion credit to its respective channel.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Calculator: it will help you to realize what a lead costs you and whether it’s worth it.
- RJ Metrics Cloud BI: it shows you a more specific analysis of detailed information about the social media channel that sent you the customer in the first place. We think this is great to decide which social ad platforms are actually working for you.
Never stop listening!
Social Listening or Social Media Listening is nothing more than a technique that allows companies and brands to know everything that people say or comment on social networks about the brand itself.
Brands use social media monitoring tools for this purpose.
By monitoring what they say about us outside our “digital environment”, we can measure, among other factors, the real impact of the brand, the feeling of affinity and the negative comments or attacks.
It is a function entrusted to the Social Media Manager.
Did you think their job was easy?
In short, theSocial Media Manager has to measure the effectiveness and frequency of everything that is said.
The main purpose is to evaluate the impact of all conversations that primarily affect the reputation of the digital brand.
All this information will help us in making decisions for the digital marketing strategy of the brand.
We will have data on the behavior of consumers, competitors and the sector.
Using Social Media Listening will help us answer these questions:
- How to know if your product or service is satisfying your consumers?
- Is the brand message reaching its target?
- Do you really know the needs of your customers?
- Do you manage your reputation online?
As some advantages of social listening, we have:
- Improve customer service:
If we are attentive to any comments generated by our users, we will be able to improve their experience as a client (or potential client).
Meeting their requirements on time represents our best letter of introduction.
- Solve problems and anticipate possible crises:
This goes hand in hand with customer service.
However, we must be prepared to determine when a comment is really a problem and represents a possible crisis of reputation.
That way we will prevent the situation from getting out of hand.
- Improve our product or service:
People will always be more transparent when they offer their opinion.
Especially if they do it through a social network and not face to face with the developer.
- Monitor the competition:
If we know the opinions of users in relation to our competition, we can consider them to innovate and offer what they need first. Therefore, we would always be one step ahead.
- Identify influencers and new clients to attract:
Through the comments generated by our content, we can know influencers that can work for future launches of new campaigns or products.
As well as possible clients that, for some reason or another, have not converted, offering them what they need to attract them.
Definitely, Social Media Listening offers much more.
Always in order to obtain what any Digital Marketing Strategy seeks: generate leads.
Try useful and simple tools to track and improve the listening of your business!
- Google Alerts: The most basic tool for this purpose, offered by Google, allows you to choose exactly themes that generate alerts. In this way, they let you know in real time when people creates a conversation around your brand, products or name.
- IceRocket: It’s free and allows you to search for specific content.Filtering if you want to receive the results on any particular social network or in all.
- Social Mention: This free tool will analyze the data in greater depth, based on 4 categories:
– Force.
– Feeling.
– Passion.
– Reach
- TalkWalker: Available for more than 10 social networks, it allows filtering and obtaining data up to two years ago./li>
- Mention: Generates PDF reports that allow you to obtain detailed information of each mention you have received. It’s paid, but you can get a free trial period.
- Brandwatch: We love this one because it doesn’t only Identify potential crisis trends but also find trends that affect your brand, product and market.
Never stop listening because this process should not be a single stage in your SEM campaign, but a habit in your enterprise culture.
Keep in mind that not all types of listening are the same, and you can do this same process at different levels.
Let’s focus in the intentional and proactive type of listening!
Intentional listening is what we make most of the times to discover the cares, aspirations, and concerns of the target audience with whom we want to connect.
However, sharing experiences is what actually instigate a dialogue between our company and our target, and you don’t need more than a couple of questions for it.
Do you remember the “keep it simple” motto? Well, a successful Social Media Campaign is not only about our knowledge or having a compelling marketing message, but most important about what we can learn if we listen first.
Humanizing brands and creating experiences that encourage us to continue listening bring us closer to our target, in a bidirectional way that turns out to be key for all marketing campaigns in Social Media.
Apparently, this is the same in all aspects of our life; speak less and listen more!
Most companies are still struggling with Social Media and it’s because they think it’s an event when actually we are talking more about a process that requires dedication, creativity, and of course, a good sense of listening!
If this sounds familiar to you, the Finepoint Design team will do the hard work for you, designing and guiding your efforts through the best strategy for your company!
Contact us today to talk more about your brand and company needs.