Social media is normal. No longer a novelty, it’s an integral part of everyday consumer and business life. Rather than wondering whether or not to use social media, today’s marketers are now facing the challenge of how best to exploit and manage it.
However, one thing holding them back is that far too many companies have little idea how their current customers and their prospect audience use social media. In fact, a recent GBGroup survey showed that half of the respondents identified a lack of clear social strategy as their main challenge.
One problem is that, for many organisations, there is a disconnect between separated operations areas, meaning that the marketers rarely communicate with the team holding the data.
Social media marketing and service is often isolated from other CRM activity at an operational and systems level, and the customer intelligence that social undoubtedly offers is rarely used to influence other channel interactions.
This is a huge mistake, as a customer’s online and offline identities must be brought together with other information to enable marketers to build the fullest possible picture of the individual. Despite this strategic disconnect, social media is forecast to see the largest rise in adoption of any marketing channel over the next 5 years.
By analysing and learning from the social identity of their customers, businesses can use the resulting intelligence to inform all their customer interactions. They can recognise their customers across any channel, enhance their experience, reduce operational costs and boost overall marketing effectiveness.
Today, you have to be social. Social media has tremendous reach and its viral nature can harness word-of mouth like no other channel. But prioritising social doesn’t automatically lead to successful adoption. The rush to invest frequently takes companies down blind alleys, with the urge to “do something with social” resulting in expensive, tactical campaigns whose tweets, posts and updates offer little or no real measurable business benefit.
The simple fact is that social “success” is usually achieved without reference to the bottom line. The nebulous metric of engagement, typically expressed in numbers of fans, followers and likes, is all too often the only goal.
Rather than searching for success via vague measures of engagement, businesses need to focus on traditional sales and marketing goals; precise targeting, increased income and profit, or improved customer support.
Customers are demanding to be recognised, but the question is; how do marketers use social data to reflect this? The difficulty in marketing is how to personalise more effectively – and if customer data is housed in different silos across the business, you are already starting on the wrong foot.
Social media offers incredibly rich information on the preferences, behaviour and identity of hundreds of millions of individuals. Their profile data, combined with the views and opinions they share and the pictures, events – and brands – that they comment on are spontaneous expressions of lifestyle preferences and interests.
Even better, social data is arguably the most up-to-date customer information available. When combined with other data sources such as transactional history and web behaviour, it has the potential to drive unparalleled outbound targeting accuracy across ecommerce offers, email programmes or in-store promotions.
Right across marketing there’s a shift to the use of individual-level data to drive personalisation. To play its part, social data must also be stored at a far more granular level, right beside the other information the company holds on each consumer. This integrated customer view can then be used to optimise outbound message targeting, timing and offer creation in other channels.
With this infrastructure in place, social can be used optimally either on its own or as part of a multimedia strategy. Developing this capability is no trivial challenge and will require serious commitment from a business and its suppliers, but the results will finally enable social to reach its true potential.
Because let’s face it, the honeymoon is over. To pay its way, social must deliver to its full potential – and prove it.
By David Green, Head of UK Software Operations at GBGroup.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus