Sustainably acquiring high-value customers from social marketing efforts for less cost than traditional channels is now not only possible, but a business requirement. While companies continue to spend on Facebook and other social networks, the chasm between simply dedicating resources to social advertising and true social marketing optimization provides just the space needed to truly excel and directly impact business objectives.
For starters, it’s essential that marketers control both the media strategy and execution within social as well as the landing experiences and conversion objectives. In my opinion, it is this combination that unlocks our success. Here are four steps to getting from here to there.
Reach Your High-Value Customers
Growing your fan base may be an important step. But, it’s just that. A step. Focus instead on building key user segments. Know who your high-value social mobile customers are. Analyze what you know about them and what you wish you knew. And apply everything you know to build your key segments. While age, gender and geography are great, being able to delve deeper into topic areas like, ‘fit moms who buy organic foods’ is even better.
Publish Content That Converts – Engage and Convert, Every Time
Facebook is a premiere content-distribution platform and native news feed content interacted with spreads organically, quickly. As a result, marketers must focus on working with social advertising experts to plan their creative and post cadence. Start with a test-and-learn phase then scale it. I suggest everyone have a plan for creative testing that includes not only combinations of ads but also segment/ad/landing page combinations as well.
Driving click-through is top priority, so it’s essential to publish short but valuable content that engages and compels conversion. Really, you just can’t have one without the other. However, you need to consciously ask yourself what you will offer in exchange for customer information. Customers are increasingly savvy; the solution is to find the right offer for your key high-value segment(s). Remember, the more information you want to collect, the more valuable your offer needs to be. Which brings me directly to…
Capture Customer Info
We’ve all seen the stats by now that over 70% of daily users of Facebook are on a mobile device and 70%+ of Twitter users are as well. As social and mobile become increasingly synonymous, it’s vital that social marketers think like mobile marketers. This means that to effectively capture customer information, keep forms to no more than four fields. Integrate your forms directly into your relationship management system and make the data immediately actionable to create custom audiences, run email campaigns and retarget.
Optimize!
Marketers can easily optimize both landing experiences and media buying against conversions. From post-click to content engagement through to form submission, we send “conversion signals” back to Facebook to scale outcomes. Once you’ve found the best creative combinations, scale your media spend and results!
And, above all else, focus on driving real brand and business value through your social media marketing efforts, what I’ve come to call Social Performance Marketing. While it may simultaneously sound overly simple and somewhat lofty, the combination of targeting high-value audiences with content that engages and converts while tuning your media buying and landing experiences to drive the best performance, is a real formula for success.
Some people I’ve talked to say it looks a lot like Marketing 101. It is. Just in the new and dynamic social mobile context which requires a new set of expertise and tools around targeting, programmatic media buying, social mobile landing experiences, and content and data-driven optimization.
