So, you’ve created your online marketing strategy and let’s assume that you have an idea of how you’re going to use SEO, PPC, Email Marketing and Affiliates. What about SMO (Social Media Optimization0? Is the plan just to join Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and Digg and treat any business that comes through from social networks as gravy? Hopefully not.
Based on my experiences, I’ve assembled a process and some concise steps to follow when you include SMO as part of your annual web marketing strategy.
1. Always ask “Why?” : This is critical. Never jump blindly into a SMO exercise without understanding why. Why does the organization want to enter the social media scene? Why should the company enter the scene? does the leadership even understand what social networks are and the environments involved within? Sit down with the business leaders and get answers to this basic question.
2. Define objectives : What do you wish to achieve once this is completed ? What are your main goals in this social strategy? Divide your objectives into behavioral and business goals.
Your behavioral objectives could be one or more of the following:
- Creating brand awareness.
- Building a product based or customer based community.
- Achieve customer loyalty.
- One-on-one marketing.
- User generated content.
Your business goals should be :
1. Develop the social media platform as a viable channel for sales. You can state the goal as : To achieve sales of X products or $ABC in revenues from SMO.
To determine this goal, use industry statistics to determine the volume or value of sales. For e.g. if a typical visit-to-sale value for Facebook or most social networks is 2%, take 2% of projected sales and use that number as your projections. comScore has a lot of information about those statistics. Note that any sales from this channel is incremental.
2. Increase number of product leads. You can state this goal as : To obtain X leads for products A, B & C from SMO.
I’m assuming that you have a web analytics tool which is integrated with an internal CRM tool. Use the reports to determine the sourcing of your leads for the previous year. If any social networks are the source of the same, double the number of leads for the projected year and use this number as your lead projection from SMO. Note that the nautre of leads are different from actual sales and doubling them over last year is pretty conservative. It’s the real dollar conversions that matter.
3. Increase the number of email sign-ups : You can state this goal as : To increase email sign-ups by 50%.
Use the same process as leads.
Remember, the above goals are predicated on the assumption that your website(s) traffic will increase by a certain percentage. To understand the trend, do a year-over-year analysis of your website traffic and determine the average rate of growth (or decline). Use Google Trends to understand if your industry is flat in the search landscape or growing or declining. See attached image using Sony Vaio as an example. Searches for “sony vaio” have been increasing steadily. Use that growth rate or the growth rate of web product sales from your analytics, add 5 percentage points to it and voila! you have your projected annual traffic from SMO. Note that SMO is a new source of incremental revenue and given the rapid growth of social networks, a 5% add-on is quite conservative.
3. Determine the process: Make sure you understand how SMO will be implemented, by whom and in how much time. Note that your SMO is not just about selecting a handful of social networks and creating accounts with them and sitting pretty. After the social networks relevant to your business are selected, you must set standards on how your company accounts will be created on them, followed by cross-marketing between different social network sites and finally by utilizing the different online marketing tools to drive membership to your accounts in the social network. Since you’re determining the process, it goes without saying that you and your team own this activity and will have to allocate resources for the same.
4. Conduct a competitor analysis: What are your competitors doing on social networks? Have they achieved a lot of success? Learn from their mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes that organizations did was jump on the Facebook Application bandwagon two years ago when Facebook opened up their API. The result was that there was an influx of Facebook applications and after a while the numerous invitations to see which movie star you were on what make you and your friends alike by eating habits became lame. Needless to say that Facebook application invites were almost like spam.
Also, just because a competitor has a sponsored page on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that you have to. Look at his membership numbers, see what comments are being posted on the page and see how well it’s being maintained
5. Select the right networks: A prerequisite to this is having a thorough understanding of your customers. Use your web analytics to get that insight. Analyze your eCommerce data to see where your customers are coming from. That gives you the geographical region to focus on. Next, you need to find where your customers assemble online. Search the social networks using keywords relevant to your business to find the right platforms to do this. You cant just promote a B2B business on Facebook and spend $50K on a specialized Facebook group. Neither does promoting a B2B brand on mySpace work. So, if you find a discussion thread relevant to your business on Twitter, that means that there’s a community that’s interests in your products. Or you could build your own community on Ning.
6. Implement with dedication : Don’t just create a username and login for a social network. Fill out the profile.Take the time to describe your business, your intentions and ideas. Have outbound links to your primary web property.
Steps :
- Create account on social network.
- Fill out profile completely.
- Enroll group members.
- Send one-on-one messages to new members asking them to spread the word.
- Maintain the social account – post updates, links, comments, videos, pictures etc.
- Cross market one social network on another. e.g. Promote your Twitter account on YouTube in the form a brief promo and a link.
- Use other marketing avenues to drive membership. For e.g. promote your Facebook group on your website or ask folks to RSS your blog or use email to ask your subscribers to join your social network groups.
7. Monitor the initiative : Once you’re done with the above six steps, you need to evaluate your success metrics suing Omniture of your Google Analytics tool. Set up your conversion code so that you can track your email sign-ups, product inquiries and product sales activity. Monitor the traffic from all the social networks to see what kind of impact they’re having on these activities. Additionally, look at your daily/weekly/monthly visitors, the quality of visitors, their time on site, bounce rates, content viewing statistics etc. If necessary, create special landing pages for social network visitors only. But, keep monitoring the impact of your SMO, make changes if necessary and ensure that all your social network initiatives are interactive and busy.
SMO is a potential goldmine if its implemented in the right manner. Apart from a plan and process, patience and creativity are two things you need to have to keep this activity vibrant and ensure success. Begin, build, spread, monitor and repeat the first four again and again.
