MarketingSherpa Blog

To truly gain ROI from social media marketing, you need to take a strategic approach…as you would with any other marketing discipline.

So, at 1 p.m. EDT in today’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by Facebook) – Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach – I’ll be moderating an hour-long session with Todd Lebo and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe from MECLABS and Tamara Rosenbaum from Facebook, to arm you with some ideas as you embark on a strategic approach to social marketing.

But before we share our research, we asked your peers what advice they would give fellow marketers to help you transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Here are a few of our favorite responses…

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation

The best advice I can offer is to look at social media as an extension to your Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, and Growth strategies. The majority of companies look at it as a function of PR – what about marketing, sales, and support? Isn’t a happy customer worth more than a random fan?

Don’t forget the most important part of social media: listening. Look at all the companies that pride themselves in having thousands of followers/fans but in turn only “listen” to a couple of hundred… that’s more of a monologue isn’t it? Don’t measure your success by the number of people listening to you.

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation. Listen, and only then “talk” about things that are relevant to your audience. Do it in a timely way. Measure reactions to your conversations.

Using social media as just another channel to “get your message out” is not the way to build the dialog needed to create and nurture a close relationship with your prospects and customers.

– Roberto Lino, Skype Enterprise Global Head of Ecommerce, Skype

Research, strategize, and then get going

My top 3 tips for success in social media would be…

1. Do some research to find out where your customers are having the conversations before trying to join every single social site. Monitor what’s being said about you and your competition.

2. Go in with a strategy!!!

Who will be in charge of this effort? How many times a week will you tweet? What kinds of content will be useful for your audience?

3. Start small so you make sure you have time to keep it up. What we find is many companies have such limited resources to devote to social media marketing that time is wasted in the wrong groups, content is too weak, and schedules get too busy and the first thing to drop to the bottom of the priority list is the social stuff. Consistency is key when it comes to social media, so it’s important to find a way to keep it up.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s advice and joining the webinar!

– Michelle Etherton, Creative Director, Nurture Marketing

A dissenting opinion

My advice to marketers is to not transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Social media is all about being random and experimenting. Show up. Participate. Be random.

Social media marketing differs from traditional marketing in that you don’t just set it and forget it. Successful social media marketing requires interaction. It requires actively networking, meaning you are responding to others and your status updates are more than predetermined calculated scheduled posts.

By being random, you will find new and unique ways to gain ROI. I think you take all the fun out of social media marketing if you are rigid with strategy.

– Lara Nieberding, The Data Digger

Related Resources

Free webinar, Today June, 9th 1-2pm EDT — Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach

Social Media Marketing: You value (and earn ROI on) what you pay for

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters



Free. Look inside any copywriting book or on any marketing blog, and it will tell you that “free” is one of the most powerful words in marketing. However…how often are you, as a marketer, susceptible to that magic word?

For most media we use – from PPC ads to television spots – we recognize that an investment must take place. Yet social media, with its tantalizing lack of an invoice, seems almost too good to be true. Thanks to the power of technology, you no longer have to spend money to make money!

Some say the best things in life are free…

Well, the attitude may not be that severe, but take a look at this quote from the 2011 MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Benchmark Report…

“I do not look at social media marketing as something I invest in. I advertise on Facebook and consider that an online advertising expense like Google AdWords. I consider the time I spend creating, maintaining and promoting my Facebook page as “free” because I do the work myself so the costs are all soft, not cash. I know this approach isn’t really accurate and may not help me understand my costs, but it’s how I think of it for now.”

This marketer is not alone. According to the Benchmark Report’s lead author, Sergio Balegno, “On average, 15 percent of organizations think social marketing is free and wish to keep it that way. When we segment this group by primary channel, we find that B2B marketers are, by far, the least likely to believe this misconception. Social marketing is a time-consuming practice requiring significant staff commitment to execute effectively.”

…but you can keep it for the birds and the bees

As Sergio says, all of that social media buzz comes at a price. But, you may say, what is the harm in viewing soft costs as, essentially, no costs? There’s no outlay in cash, so what’s the difference?

The savvy CMO is looking for money (that’s, what he wants). Specifically, ROI. So it takes an attitude shift. From my experience, when people (and especially marketers) don’t pay anything for a product, service, or media, they don’t value it. And if they don’t value it, they don’t invest in it. And if you don’t truly invest in a tactic, you will never nail the ROI.

On the flip side, you don’t understand the true costs either. Even soft costs are costs. For example, you have the opportunity cost. A sole entrepreneur must decide whether to engage in Twitter for an hour or call some customers and see if their needs are being met. A content marketer at a major company must decide whether to invest in writing a blog post or spending some more time testing and optimizing the Web site.

In the above-referenced Social Marketing Benchmark Report, there was an interesting chart about how CMOs perceive Social Marketing ROI…

Almost half of marketers that are taking a strategic approach to social media marketing are realizing a measurable ROI.

Yet, as you look at the bottom of the chart, all too many marketers (especially those who haven’t reached the strategic phase) just look at social marketing as a freebie, not a marketing discipline.

So, in this week’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by Facebook) – Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach – I’ll be moderating an hour-long session with Todd Lebo and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe from MECLABS and Tamara Rosenbaum from Facebook, that we hope will give you basic info to help you begin to take a strategic approach to social media marketing or give you ideas to optimize your current approach.

Oh, and did I mention? The webinar is absolutely free.

Related Resources

Free webinar, Thursday June, 9th 1-2pm EST — Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach

Study: Marketers Reporting Social Media ROI of 100, 200, Even 1,000 percent
— via Forbes

In Social Media, Your Return Represents Investment –via Fast Company

Social Media Marketing: Facebook news feed optimization

Social Media Marketing: How to optimize the customer experience to benefit from word-of-mouth advertising

Social media continues to have a profound effect on marketing, and the use of this channel for marketing purposes is rapidly evolving. This week marks the fielding of our third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey to determine exactly how this important new marketing channel has evolved and which strategies will work best going forward.

Last year’s study revealed how social marketing was maturing, resulting in a shift from tactical to strategic thinking. However, we found that most organizations, even those in the strategic phase of social marketing maturity, had not yet figured out how to measure the return on their social marketing investment.

Without the ability to prove ROI, social marketing budgets were, and in most cases still are, being driven by perception. What is the perception? As this chart shows, only 7% of the 2300 social media marketers responding to our last study thought social media was producing ROI and, as a result, were willing to budget liberally. While 49% thought it was a promising tactic that will eventually produce ROI, nearly the same numbers (44%) are much more skeptical and unwilling to invest more.

But social marketing has evolved significantly in the past year and many marketers are not only promising ROI, they are proving it.

So, in our new survey we examine how organizations are overcoming the challenge of social media monetization, and which tactics are most effective for achieving this important objective, in addition to the comprehensive coverage of social marketing topics in general.

To share your insights on social media marketing, please take our third annual Social Marketing Benchmark Survey. This survey is being fielded now and will only remain open through Sunday, February 6, 2011.

Related resources

Social Media Marketing: Turning social media engagement into action at Threadless

Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 tactics (Members’ Library)

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

There is a certain tribe of marketers out there that are Pied Pipers for a new way of thinking. Email is dead. Get social.

Well, there are many metrics I can give to refute that stance, but here’s my favorite – paid attendance to next week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 is up 40% from last year.

Horn tooting done, my point is that the best strategy for most marketers is to engage in both email AND social media marketing, despite what the rhetoric-filled and biased bloggers out there may say. This may not be shocking news to you. Your bigger question is likely – but how?

Well, that’s why we have the Email Summit to begin with, to learn from all the high-performing marketers out there. So, I turned to Lindsay Massey, Marketing Director, Freshpair to share some techniques and tactics that might help your efforts.

Lindsay is a panelist for the how-to panel at Email Summit entitled, “Growing Email Lists and Engaging Customers with Social Media.” Freshpair.com is a leading intimate apparel retailer. You can find them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. But first, read on…

So, the first thing that jumps out at me from your successful campaign is that Facebook is the “next big thing” in email, while email is supposedly “dead.” Yet, essentially, to me your campaign was really just a traditional email send where Facebook was the conversion goal. “Dead” delivers I guess? How did you approach this send similar to other promotional sends, and in what ways was it different?

Lindsay Massey: We look at email and social as great complements to each other, and we definitely don’t see email as “dead.” After all, how does Facebook notify you that you have new comments or messages? Email!

By engaging our email subscribers in another relevant channel, we are able to interact with them on a more personal level, share unique content to generate buzz and ultimately engage more people in our brand. We approached this send like other promotional sends that are part of a larger campaign in that we developed an offer, segmented our list to target customers with the highest propensity to participate and, where this message would be relevant, created supporting content on Facebook and tracked the results.

This email campaign was different from other promotional sends in that the main goal was to encourage people to follow us on Facebook rather than go straight to freshpair.com. We measured the success differently than other campaigns – number of fans in addition to standard email KPIs.

Why email? Why not, say, Twitter?

LM: We definitely promote our Facebook presence on Twitter as well. The email was just one piece of our overall campaign. We chose to promote Facebook over Twitter for this particular campaign, mainly because Facebook allows you to customize the experience more than Twitter.

We were able to show more content tying back to the email. As soon as a customer fanned us, we were able to display new content that gave them the offer and let them click to freshpair.com to shop. A different approach could definitely be utilized on Twitter and would be a great follow-up campaign.

What is the importance of a Facebook fan-acquisition campaign? What is the value of a Facebook fan?

LM: For us, the goal of a Facebook presence is to strengthen our brand and reach new customers. By encouraging our existing customers and brand loyalists to join, we are able to build our relationship with them, as well as encourage them to share us with their friends.

Buying intimate apparel online can be challenging, so we try to educate fans with photos and take on a friendly tone by sharing funny statistics, like what percentage of people own a lucky pair of underwear. By keeping followers engaged and giving them unique content, we leave a favorable impression, so they remember us when it’s time for a fresh pair!

When it comes to measuring social media, the focus must go beyond traditional e-commerce analytics. We use Omniture to gauge the impact of our Facebook presence, specifically the conversion rates of visitors coming from Facebook. However, we consider Facebook to be more of a branding tool, so the exact value of a Facebook fan goes beyond the data in Omniture.

We also look at fan count and interactions. The customer insight you gather through social media will help you develop strategies across all marketing channels to get new customers in the door and keep them in the door. For example, we test different types of content within posts to see what people are most interested in interacting with. We then use this to inform marketing campaigns to further shape our other social initiatives.

Why aren’t social media sharing buttons enough?

LM: The social media sharing buttons are also important, and we include those in our campaigns as well. However, we see the main content receive the majority of clicks, while the share buttons receive a very small fraction of the clicks in each email campaign. We felt it was important to dedicate an entire campaign to acquire fans, but we also continue to push social through emails and onsite messaging as well.

It’s important to note that one dedicated email is not enough. Acquiring Facebook fans or Twitter followers should be an ongoing effort across channels in order to see the best results. Social isn’t just about sharing content, it’s also about extending interaction to new spheres and providing additional value to your fans. Share buttons are limited in that they don’t allow you to proactively communicate with interested parties and build your brand.

What is the downside of a dedicated send to try to attract Facebook fans?

LM: We didn’t see a downside to this specific campaign. The unsubscribe rate was not higher than a regular promotional send, and the segment of customers we mailed was highly engaged. The subject line actually led to an open rate that was 40% higher than average.

For all the marketing VPs and directors out there, what are the biggest lessons they should take away from your success?

LM: Email can be a very effective driver for Social. Before you begin a Facebook acquisition campaign, be sure you have a clear goal and strategy in place, as well as a supporting content strategy for your Facebook page.

Also, you could start small with a test to your most engaged customers to gauge response before you roll it out to a larger list. Then continue to marry your email and social strategies, so customers can get the information they want in the form they like best.

One of the things that we struggle with is catering to multiple demographics – some people want to see pictures of men in underwear and some people want advice on which bras go with what. Before you push your social presence to your entire list, make sure that you have a defined content strategy (either focus on one demo or have something for everyone so no one feels left out).

As for Facebook specifically:

• Be sure to develop a clear strategy for Facebook overall, so new and existing fans continue to be engaged. If you are just on Facebook to be on Facebook or because your competitors are there, take a step back and rethink your long-term strategy.
• Be sure to devote resources once your strategy is in place, so your Facebook page stays current. Take time to engage with your fans and continue to provide them with unique and interesting content.
• Promote your acquisition campaign across multiple marketing channels – not just email, and be sure to track your results.

Related Resources

Email Marketing: Finding the time to improve results

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training

Email Marketing: A customer-focused mindset at ATP World Tour

I am in awe of the amount of online buzz generated by ABC’s recently completed television series, Lost. On its Facebook fan page alone, wall posts about the finale each captured 1,200 to 19,000 comments to date.

In fact, Lost generated the most social media engagement of any television show from February through April, the New York Times reports.

How did ABC’s team use Facebook to build such a gargantuan amount of chatter? Here are some tactics I can see from Lost’s fan page:

1. Build anticipation

As far back as three weeks before the show’s May 23 finale, the team posted reminders and teasers about the event. We’ve seen a similar tactic used in Twitter to tease a sales event.

During the final week, ABC posted at least one mention per day. It posted four times on the final day, capturing tens-of-thousands of comments.

2. Provide relevant content

Throughout the countdown, the team sent fans links to Lost-related content, such as:
o A Facebook event page
o A musical tribute
o Video clips

Providing relevant, high-quality content is important to keeping fans engaged. Otherwise they may decide to interact elsewhere.

3. Promote other channels

ABC set up a chat service on its website for fans to discuss the finale in real time as it aired, and posted about it on Lost’s Facebook page. The team also posted a link to a free archive on its website of previously aired episodes and asked fans to “revisit all their favorite moments.”

I am not naive enough to believe these tactics alone were enough to generate the level of buzz the team realized. Lost is a widely popular and well-promoted national television show — it’s going to generate some buzz. However, I do believe these tactics helped ABC bring more attention from its Facebook fans to Lost’s finale.

Facebook this week launched a free Guide to Facebook Ads to give advertisers more information on how to build successful campaigns on the social network.

The guide covers the basics, such as the types of ads Facebook offers, as well as detailed information on how to budget campaigns, target an audience and improve performance.

For example, the guide’s “Best Practices” section provides the following tips:

– Choose one goal for your campaign to better focus your efforts and set a budget

– Create ads with captivating titles, relevant images and a strong calls-to-action

– Use demographic and psychographic reports available in the Ads Manager to determine which audiences your ads best resonate with

– Closely relate landing pages to ads

– Test multiple ads to uncover the best approach for your audience

For marketers already advertising in Facebook, the guide is worth going through to round-out your knowledge and to fill in any gaps. For marketers who are just getting started, or who are considering a campaign on the network — it’s a vital resource.

A well-timed and well-crafted message always has a chance to generate buzz through social media. If people like your message enough, they’ll send it to their friends. But they have to see it first.

During a call with Gary Wohlfeill, Creative Director, Moosejaw Mountaineering, I realized that getting attention is easier through some channels than others. Wohlfeill and I discussed his team’s recent holiday promotion (keep an eye on our free newsletters for the article). They ran the effort mostly through Facebook and Twitter.

Leading up to launch, the team sent messages through the social channels to build anticipation. They got some attention through Facebook, but it was harder to gain traction in Twitter, Wohlfeill says.

“Twitter is much more like a river. You drop a pebble in the river and you have to be standing there to see it go by. So you have to drop a lot of pebbles to reach a lot of people.”

Wherever you send a message, it’s going to have to compete for attention. Whether it’s a billboard competing with highway traffic, or an email competing with an inbox, competition is there.

Twitter, it seems, thrives on limited attention. Being seen can be a challenge. And once you’re seen, you can only hold attention for 140 characters–unless you get a click.

Two good ways to increase your chances at capturing more attention:
1. Be interesting enough to entice people to share with friends
2. Link to relevant content

When a budget gets cut, experimental marketing dollars are often the first to go. Management cannot afford to dabble in unproven strategies. They want to focus on predictable, reliable tactics.

What a bore, right? You’ve been reading about social networks and viral marketing all year–and now you can’t get the budget to test them. Fear not, help is here.

Read more…

The New York Times ran an article this week describing the challenges of advertising on social media sites, Facebook in particular. The article describes Procter & Gamble’s experience with brand advertising on the world’s largest social network and leads the reader to believe that it’s been less than fruitful.

Read more…

Regularly connecting with clients and customers on social networks can be a lot of work. You have multiple accounts to log into, feeds to watch, messages to respond to, etc. Can it be fun? Sure. Can it be tedious? Absolutely.

I stumbled on a free Web-based tool that helps eliminate some of that tedium. Fuser will take all your messages from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and your email accounts, and put them into one, easy-to-use interface. (Unfortunately, I did not notice LinkedIn as a supported platform)

I just gave the beta service a quick test and it’s definitely fast, easy, and free. Fuser takes your messages–everything from wall posts on Facebook to Tweets on Twitter–and lays them out like emails. You can view and sort all the accounts at once, or select which you’d like to view.

So if you’re struggling to keep up with your business contacts’ online banter, Fuser can help eliminate a few steps. Hopefully it will give you more time to contribute to the conversation.