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Category: Social Media Strategy (page 2 of 3)

5 ways to score with your social media strategy this Valentine’s Day

As everyone knows, February 14 commemorates the Roman Empire’s murder of Valentinus of Terni — twice: when Emperor Claudius Gothicus’ original sentence of death by clubbing and stoning somehow didn’t do the trick, he was re-sentenced to beheading outside the Flaminian Gate, and this worked. (That’s amore.)

Of course, if you choose to focus instead on St. Valentine’s work as a matchmaker this February 14th, then you know there’s no better time of year to review your social media marketing strategy through a romantic lens. Based on our work measuring and optimizing the performance of social media marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands, here are some simple steps to help you get your leads to say “I do” — without even overpaying for chocolates.

Go long

Just as with real life, there’s nothing stopping you from using social media to score some fleeting romance … but Mardi Gras isn’t for another month, and Valentine’s Day is more commonly associated with finding true love. The smart marketer aspires to acquire and retain customers for the long haul. Social can do more than generate interest for your brand: with proper planning and careful execution, your social campaign can actually lay the groundwork for a mutually fulfilling, committed relationship.

DTR

If you have only a fuzzy notion of what you want out of your social media marketing, you’ll get fuzzy results, so ask yourself in advance, What do I want out of this? Many brands stop at the mere flirtation of Likes and Retweets, but you can — and should — engage customers with an actual business goal in mind and an ROI to measure against. Your goal doesn’t have to be a transaction: it could be a coupon download, webinar registration, mailing list signup, or video view. But know in advance what you’re pursuing. This will guide you as you create your social content and plan your execution.

Emulate this guy

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova planned his dates like you wouldn’t believe. Entire books have been written about the Casanova method: complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes, coupled with meticulous attention to small details, all engineered to overwhelm his beloved with excitement, gratitude, and infatuation.

First of all, think about that the next time you spend 4 minutes lining something up on OpenTable while concurrently brushing your teeth. More importantly, consider every element of your marketing funnel as part of a courtship to win over your customers.

Beyond the superficial charm of a witty Tweet, does your site’s user experience surprise and delight your visitors? Do your copy and interaction design help guide them to a more fulfilling conversion? Do your visitors find content worth sharing, and feel invited to engage more deeply? Like Casanova, script every element of your interactions to attract your prospects to commit. Nowhere does the old adage about failing to plan is planning to fail ring more true.

Pay attention

We don’t recommend going on a date without making eye contact — did he like the wine I picked?, is there something in my teeth?, was that story about my mom funny?… — and you shouldn’t fly blind with social media marketing, either.

When it comes to tortured romantic metaphors, think of social media marketing less like a flock of doves you release once and watch take to the sky, and more like a moonlit gondola which you continue to steer down the canals. The tools now exist to monitor every post from the moment it goes out, and not just the Likes or Retweets it gets out on the social networks, but the site visits, pageviews, and funnel conversions that result. Use this feedback to adjust and optimize over the course of the campaign.

If a given social network or a given style of content performs better, don’t be afraid to switch things up. On one recent campaign, an awe.sm customer launched with the intention of relying heavily upon influencer tweets, but less than a week in realized that earned social posts attracted more valuable traffic, so they quickly upped the size of their share buttons. Don’t be afraid to switch things up and do more of what works — just like those killer stories about Mom.

Be yourself

Keep your messaging true to your brand voice, and be transparent about your intentions. You can only truly love those who love you back, so pre-qualify your customers by accurately representing the value you provide. If you steer clear of gimmicks or gotchas, those who engage with your content, visit your site, and proceed down your funnel stand the best chance of converting into a life-long fulfilling relationship … or at least a happy customer.

Love is a battlefield, so suit up. This Valentine’s Day, you’ve got this, you old heartbreaker, you.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Your customers’ conversations span multiple networks; why don’t your analytics?

December 31, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

In case you missed it, this week I’ve had the opportunity to post on Jack Myers’ MediaBizBlog Network which explains why, in order to understand the recent sensational spike in holiday shoppers’ use of mobile devices, it’s essential to understand consumers’ social media activity.

Focusing on the mobile device is only half the story. You’ll get truly valuable insights to help fine-tune marketing plans by also looking at how consumers are acting on that device.

It’s a quick and useful read — I recommend you check it out — but I wanted to highlight one of the points I raised there: Not only does social activity drive mobile commerce, but specifically social conversations that span multiple social networks and channels.

Understanding how word spreads across these networks is essential, and it’s also tricky. Neither traditional site analytics nor any individual social network’s tracking is accurate; you need closed-loop social attribution.

Referrer madness

You’re likely somewhat familiar with referrers. As a simple example, imagine I’m browsing the page http://www.coolsite.com/article123, I see a neat writeup about one of your products, and I click a link from that article back to your site. Once I get there, I view a page, maybe a few, and then make a purchase.

Your site analytics tool captured that I was referred by coolsite.com/article123, and attributed my visit, pageviews, and conversions to that source. That’s valuable knowledge for you to have, and it’s the backbone of site analytics. So far, so good.

But, now, suppose that instead of learning about your site from an article on coolsite.com, I learned about it from one of my friends while browsing Twitter on my phone? Plenty of research (and common sense) suggests these Tweets are far more persuasive than site links, let alone ads. But if you try to find these Tweets in your site analytics, you’ll come up short.

If you’re lucky, you’ll see traffic referred by Twitter’s domain t.co — and even this isn’t guaranteed. And you definitely won’t see which specific Tweet drove the visit.

Hairball of Confusion

If you can’t track which specific Tweet drove a visit, pageview, or purchase, then you’re in the dark. Good luck sorting out whether my valuable visit came from my friend’s Tweet or your own social media marketing team’s activity on Facebook.

But what if you try to work around this using Twitter’s analytics platform, and their recently announced conversion attribution tool? No dice: this only works with promoted Tweets.

And even if my friend’s Tweet were promoted, so that Twitter did track conversions from the promoted Tweet, you’d still be missing a major piece of the story: why did my friend Tweet?If word of mouth is so effective, you’ll want to know what motivates these valuable conversations. And referrer analysis or any individual network’s conversion tracking are completely ineffective here.

The Pin is mightier than the sword

SPOILER ALERT: Here’s what actually happened. Your social media team made a Pin about one of your cool items. My friend, browsing Pinterest, liked what she saw and clicked through to your site. Once there, she made a purchase and Tweeted about it — perhaps by clicking a social sharing button on your site, or by using her smartphone’s share-to-Twitter feature. I saw the Tweet, clicked back to your site, and made a purchase.

Brilliant! This is why you pay a marketing team to hang out on Pinterest all day… and it worked!

But that conversation spanned your Pin, my friend, Twitter, and my iPhone. And using referrer-based attribution and individual networks’ analytics tools to connect the dots between posts on multiple social networks and visits from different referrers isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible.

This is a big problem. If a growing amount of online shopping happens on mobile (it does), and mobile activity is driven by social (it is), and conversations span multiple social networks (they do), then gaining visibility into how social drives ROI is critical, and relying on old methods just won’t cut it.

Help is on the way

There is good news: it is possible to connect the dots. awe.sm does this by creating a closed attribution loop, capturing details about every social post made by you and your site visitors, and tracking multiple generations of sharing, even when they span multiple social networks.

As mobile drives more and more of your traffic (and conversions), it becomes critically important to understand how to engage customers in mobile. The data shows that social is one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach and engage mobile users. Simply put, being more successful in mobile than your competition requires that you accurately understand the viral pathways and ROI of your social media marketing. Let’s get in touch.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

IBM’s Black Friday study got it more than a little wrong

December 3, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

At awe.sm, we know that social media is currently delivering significantly more value than it gets credit for, and that a closed-loop system like the one we have built is essential for marketers to understand clicks, conversions, results and return-on-investment (ROI) on par with the performance of other digital media.

Case in point: IBM’s much-publicized weekend Black Friday study cast a big net on online shopping activity, but we think they missed a big part of the story when they claimed that only a fraction of 1% of e-commerce traffic was referred by social media.

IBM strategy director Jay Henderson told AllThingsD that in 2013, social media “hasn’t proven effective to driving traffic to the site or directly causing people to convert.” IBM is writing off social media conversion as a rounding error. But they themselves admit they don’t look at the entire social picture. Big Blue’s assessment misses a big part of the story because it’s tracking the wrong things.

IBM focuses on buzz and referrers as a proxy to measure the impact of social media. The problem with this approach is that buzz is at best a directional indicator of engagement, and referrer data on its own is a poor way to attribute traffic from social sharing.

Referrals from social networks across the board continue to increase steadily each month, up 40% on a year-over-year basis according to one study. But this impressive growth notwithstanding, the referrer yardstick was designed for measuring traffic in a world limited to websites; it generally under-reports social traffic; and it doesn’t reveal the context of social media’s impact in a world where user engagement has shifted towards mobile apps, social streams, and dynamic web applications — each of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism. (Check out this post on referrers and social media from awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss if you want to explore this issue more deeply.)

Beyond missing out on a significant amount of social activity in mobile apps, social streams, etc., referrer tracking also misses the most massive area of sharing activity that ultimately drives conversion: “Dark Social”. Specifically, the shares that users initiate by cutting and pasting out of the browser address bar. Studies show that about half of social media messages fall into Dark Social’s hard-to-see abyss when they get passed around: one consumer cuts-and-pastes a URL or promo code into a text message or email. Another copies a web address from one social platform to post into another. Tracking how social messages get shared in these in-between-the-cracks areas can be very enlightening. We know because we help our clients do this all day long, and we know IBM didn’t bother.

Here’s just one example: a major fashion brand using awe.sm’s social performance measurement recently learned that a huge majority of consumers who amplified a recent social media campaign — more than 90%** — did so by following promoted social posts into the brand’s site, then by manually re-sharing the page with their friends by copying and pasting the URL. The brand’s usual measurement tools missed all this downstream sharing. With awe.sm, it was possible for them to see that social contributed to a much bigger amount of site activity and conversation than they’d originally thought.

We developed awe.sm as a closed-loop system to measure social media marketing — from the very top of the funnel (reach, engagement) to the very bottom (click-to-buy, for example). On the other hand, traditional analytical tools are often built to look at one specific channel, or they only scratch the surface and miss the big picture. awe.sm was built to allow brands to build measurement tools into a campaign at the start so they can see causal relationships and observe how posts performed on different social channels. Using awe.sm, marketers can identify alpha influencers and understand which social platforms perform best. They can collect insights in real time as a campaign proceeds, and then rapidly fine-tune and optimize the execution of their campaigns, amplify the most successful channels and posts, cut back on inefficient channels, and get more bang for their marketing buck.

Consumers are spending ever more time engaging with social media as a primary activity, so having accurate ways to measurement their engagement with these burgeoning social platforms is crucial. IBM’s conclusions under represent the conversions and sales social media is driving. Retailers and marketers who understand the whole picture — from the top of the funnel to that conversion at the very bottom — have a leg up on the competition.

*Originally published on awe.sm blog

Infographic: CPG Advertising on Facebook

November 13, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Nearly two trillion dollars are spent on consumer packaged goods (CPG) globally each year, and smart CPG marketers have found remarkable success using Facebook to reach consumers.

Our latest infographic explores how the consumer package goods industry differs from other vertical markets on Facebook, why the mobile News Feed is key to marketing success, and how men and women differ in their interactions with CPG advertising.

Read on to learn more about what drives marketers’ CPG success.

As with all of Unified’s infographics, feel free to repost using the embed code you’ll find here.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Facebook Advertising Benchmarks

Benchmarking Facebook Advertising Performance Across Fourteen Different Industry Verticals

October 28, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

The Unified research team has unique access into one of the social marketing industry’s deepest data sets. One of the most common requests we receive is “Can you give us benchmarks specific to our industry? Average benchmarks aren’t useful to us because everyone in our industry [under/over] performs the average.”

When you think about it, such requests make complete sense. For example, an ad for a new movie will perform very differently than an ad for a bank.

In response to repeated requests, today we’re releasing a new report measuring Facebook ad performance across fourteen different industry verticals.

tl;dr: Want to go straight to the report? Download it here:http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

This report examines cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC), and cost per like (CPL), as well as clickthrough rates (CTR).

Some highlight findings:

Ceullular & Telco advertisers acquire fans 91% cheaper than average.

Food ads are 58% more likely to be engaged with than the average Facebook ad. This is twice as high as any other vertical.

These are the industries we benchmarked:

Alcohol
Automotive
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
Education
Electronics
Entertainment
Financial Services
Food
Gaming
Home Improvement
Consumer Web Services
Desktop Software (No games)
Cellular & Telco
Travel

Download the full report here: http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

If you’re a social marketer, one of the first questions that should spring to mind when looking at this data is, “How can I use this data to improve my campaigns?”

Use the metrics to identify where you should focus on improving. Some industries excelled at getting initial user engagement but struggled to turn those users into fans. So those industries should optimize what happens to a user after they initially engage with an ad. Some industries had a lower than average engagement rate, but those users who did engage were highly engaged. Those industries should work harder to drive that initial user response because the rest of their marketing funnel is already highly-optimized.

These verticals had lots of clicks, but relatively low percentage of clicks converted into fans:

Food
Automotive
Financial Services

Ads for these verticals had a low engagement rate, but users who clicked were very likely to convert into fans:

Cellular & Telco
Gaming
Desktop Software
Alcohol

If you’re in this group, experiment with broadening your targeting a little. Yes, the followthrough rate will probably slightly decrease, but you might be surprised to find that your ad cost decreases even faster, resulting in an overall lower cost per acqusition.

As you flip through the report, you’ll notice there’s a massive disparity between different industries. Two primary reasons for this:

First, different target markets vary in competition for users’ attention. For example, an industry that primarily markets to moms tends to have far more competition than an industry that markets to teenage girls. Moms have a lot more spending power so there’s a lot more advertisers who want to have their ad placed in front of that mom, so they bid up the prices for those ad slots. An advertiser who can make 50% more profit from a mom is happy to pay 40% more to reach moms than teenagers because that leads to a 10% profit boost.

Second, even within the industries vying for the same target market, some of those industries are more interesting to users, which means the more interesting ads will require fewer ad impressions to drive the same engagement level. For example, an ad for a popular movie generally requires fewer ad impressions to convert a user into a fan than an ad for insurance. So any ad prices that include user behavior, such as cost-per-like or cost-per-click will be lower for more interesting industries. This isn’t a bad thing—less interesting industries often have business models that make more per customer so as long as they’re making a profit on the user, those industries are happy to pay a bit more to acquire customers.

Based on our findings, these verticals are the least expensive for Facebook:

(CPM):
Consumer Electronics, Consumer Packaged Goods and Home Improvement were over 60% cheaper than average.
(CPC):
Gaming, Electronics, Entertainment, and Automotive were 20% cheaper than average.
(CPL):
Cellular/Telco, Gaming, Desktop Software, and Consumer Electronics were over 50% cheaper than average.

Similarly, these verticals were most expensive:

(CPM): Automotive and Education were over 60% more expensive than average.
(CPC): Education, Alcohol, and Home Improvement were over 40% more expensive than average.
(CPL): Education, Food, Home Improvement, and Financial Services were all over 20% more expensive than average.

Finally, there is a wide disparity between verticals based on CTR:

Food, Gaming, and Automotive were over 25% more likely to be clicked than the average Facebook ad.
Alcohol, Education, and Home Improvement had a 70% lower clickthrough rate than the average Facebook ad.

Download the full report here: http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

If you have questions about this research, or would like to be subscribed to future research reports, please email us at research@unifiedsocial.com.

Track social ROI across multiple channels

October 21, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

*Content originally written by Fred McIntyre and published on awe.sm blog

When I joined as awe.sm’s CEO a few months ago, I outlined the excitement within the social marketing landscape, and the incredible opportunity to help business better navigate and understand the growing global social media audience.

By the end of this year, there will be over 1.8 billion people using social media — and the dollars brands are budgeting in outbound social marketing are growing at a fast clip too.

In July, we rolled out awe.sm for marketers, which built on the capabilities of awe.sm’s excellent developer platform to equip marketers with easy-to-use social media analytics tools. Uptake in the market has exceeded our expectations.

Brands are looking for ways to connect outbound social marketing efforts with real, dollars-and-cents, consumer actions. Marketers today — 85% in a recent CMO study — either don’t know or have only a “qualitative feel” for how the dollars they spend on social marketing deliver performance against real business goals like purchases or newsletter sign-ups. Finding ways to measure the ROI of the dollars being spent on social media marketing, and using this intelligence to reach business goals, has eluded most marketers.

Today, awe.sm is taking the wraps off a solution. What we’ve built gives marketers a single source — think of it as a powerful telescope — to get a clear picture of what had been a murky “dark social” universe. It’s an all-in-one dashboard within awe.sm that gives brands and agencies a very precise view of how different social channels drive conversions — sales, registrations, or other consumer actions — in direct comparison. I’ll be demonstrating it today at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit’s Next Wave Competition & Showcase in Austin. You cancheck out our media announcement here.

We’re big believers in social media’s potential and influence. Helping business more effectively navigate and measure this world will drive innovation and growth. I’m really excited about what the team here at awe.sm has built and can’t wait to show you how well it works.

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