Grow, Engage and Monetize - Wildfire provides the tools

Social Media is quickly moving into a more mature phase with marketers trying to figure out how to grow their brand awareness, engage their customers and monetize their social marketing efforts. 

If you look back just 15 years it’s not so much different from how corporations and marketers embraced the internet, web 1.0 and eCommerce.  There was plenty of skepticism for this thing that was not proven, the playground of computer nerds and hackers and research scientists. As the trendsetters, and influencers began to realize the opportunity, and potential that the web provided, the pressure to justify ROI grew. As it was back in 1997 that pressure exists today from executives of top corporations that want to ensure their marketing dollars allocated to the winning strategies.

Companies like Wildfire have identified this need to measure social media ROI and have developed easy to use tools that make it easy to engage your followers, and track and measure their interaction with your brand. Wildfire is espousing the thought that prior to 2011 social marketing was focused almost exclusively on growth, they predict that moving through 2012 that engagement will be the most buzzed about social phase and will spawn the monetization of social media. They believe that marketers will begin to (just like with web 1.0) begin to measure their ROI "through a more traditional definition: attributable sales and costs."

http://blog.wildfireapp.com/2012/01/13/2012-in-social-media-the-next-generation-of-social-marketing/

Click on the Best Story: Measuring Social Media

Because every click we make on the Internet leaves a data trail, it’s possible to use a number of tools to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing. Social media metrics are both qualitative (in the form of comments) or quantitative (measurable with a variety of tools).

To analyze sentiment qualitatively, organizations can use content analysis tools. For example, you can set a daily alert feed to search the “universe” (the web) or specific publications for terms. You can search for an organization’s name, its brands, and its competitors’ brands. To screen comments, you can use machine intelligence, but it’s probably preferable to hire someone who understands your organization’s goals to sift through what can amount to thousands of posts per day. With qualitative research, you can measure awareness, perception, preferences, consideration, trust level, commitment level, satisfaction level, and relationship level. In other words, you can measure brand and customer equity.

Traditional marketers love to measure clicks. Some popular analytics tools include Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Twitter tools (such as Hootsuite). Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about visitors to a website. (Google is not entirely accurate; for example, it thinks I’m an 18- to 24-old man.) The service can track visitors and displays a high level dashboard for reviewing data, with more in-depth data available. You can use some of the following benchmarks to measure data: unique visitors, repeat visitors, length of time on the site, click throughs, registrations, and conversations. The question is how to determine success: How many clicks is good?

The company I work for hosts a blog and all employees are invited to participate. For the year 2011, one of my blog posts received the most traffic. The company is implementing numerous analytics tools for measuring its reach and success. It is generally understood in my industry (content development) that the best story gets the most traffic. 

Benchmarks

For social media, first and foremost, I believe the benchmarks must be purposeful in how they relate to the business. For example, my brand runs quarterly sweepstakes. We utilize these sweepstakes in a variety of ways - off- and online - to drive awareness to the brand, and engage, excite, and interact with our consumers.

Throughout the sweeps, we run online advertising campaigns, employ QR codes on the POS at retail, send communication through our email blasts, and talk about the sweeps in our conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

All of these items are tracked - how many clicks and when; how many scans; of those who opened the email blasts, who clicked on the sweeps link; how many people responded to/liked the conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Then, evaluating those numbers against the number of overall people who actually signed up for the sweepstakes will allow a broad overview of how effective each of the connection points were. Ultimately, this information informs the base, or our starting point.

From there, we establish communication and promotion strategies that will improve upon our previous results. Those strategies are then, in turn, communicated as benchmarks for what we think is realistically achievable and (maybe, more importantly) what is within the budget.

Whitepaper: Customer-driven Online Engagement

Issues with sales attribution

A challenge related to this is proper sales attribution. Over the last few years, the Internet has become the principal starting point for people looking to educate themselves about a product before deciding to make a purchase either online or offline. According to market research, back in 2008 two-thirds of all people looking for financial services such as a mortgage, a credit card or a loan were already using the Internet as the first step to evaluate various options10. Particularly for more complex or expensive products and services, a multi-step, multi-channel purchase process is very common. This makes correct sales attribution difficult. Only if you as marketer know which path your customers followed in closing their deals, can you try to guide prospective buyers taking the same route. If you can attribute a sale to specific sites or channels, you can make well-founded decisions on how to spend your marketing dollars across all channels. On top of that, proper sales attribution significantly supports marketing departments in their annual budget discussions; after all it‟s not only the sales department who closed the deal…

Proper sales attribution requires a much deeper insight in your customer‟s whereabouts. Sometimes this can be solved for those customers who exclusively use the sites that are wholly owned by the marketing team, but it can become quite complex if you want to monitor a customer across different brands or departments. Obviously, this lack of shared customer information is counterproductive to overall company strategy, as there will be little synergy between channels and between departments. The company is sitting on top of a wealth of customer-related information but this information is only fractionally used, if at all.

More info in whitepaper http://www.findwhitepapers.com/force-download.php?id=12321

Prove it with metrics

Metrics. Data. Numbers.

In the world where I work, if you aren't tracking what you're doing then you can't say what you've done and haven't done. Metrics rule. They can prove that what you do has value, that choosing this option instead of another is valid, and that ultimately that your company is successful.

Which brings me to one of my favorite tools: Google Analytics. It's free. It's incredibly powerful, easy to implement and use. If you are running a website or blog, install it. It tracks everything. It allows you to set goals and measure against them. You can see how your email campaigns are driving traffic and how it converts traffic. All of your Google Adword campaigns can be tracked, making it easy to see how spending your is performing. And did I mention it's free?

It's one of the best tools out there to measure your marketing ROI across multiple channels.

"So, What Do You Do?"

The title of this post is a phrase I hear on a near-daily basis. "So, what do you do?" I've refined it to about a sentence, even if it is a lengthy sentence. I help Microsoft marketers within the US track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns through ROMI enablement. So there it is, one sentence that describes what I do.  

So now, how does it work? One example I like to use (because I've spent hours and hours on it) is Microsoft's TechEd North America. On that page, you can see various links that drive visitors to registration pages for the event. While marketers setup these events, I input them into our internal tools to enable marketers to see which types of demand gen (FB, Twitter, E-mail) are most effective and allow marketers to see the effectiveness of one Facebook post versus another. By connecting marketers to the proper internal tools, we are able to streamline marketing spend for future years and capitalize on the effectiveness of certain campaigns.