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Social Media Marketing is the latest buzzword… and one of the fastest growing segments of online marketing. The value of good social media marketing is immense – direct consumer interaction creates brand evangelists and advocates.
While there are many success stories out there, few South African brands truly understand the medium and how to interact with their consumers inside of social spaces.
Here’s a brief overview of how to run a social campaign:
1. Planning
Planning is crucial, but gets the least amount of attention when brands consider marketing in social spaces. You need to figure out what spaces you’re going to populate, what content you are going to distribute, and what resources you are going to allocate.
Another important part of planning is to work out your goals and measurement tools upfront. This will ensure that at the end of the campaign you actually have some data that can tell you something and prepare you for the next campaign.
Planning is not just about ticking the right boxes, it’s about having clear intent and direction around the programme.
2. Creative Execution
Once you have selected the social networks that you are moving into, find out how customisable they are. Create Myspace skins, upload your logo to your Fan Page or create a custom landing page, skin your blog or brand your Twitter background. There are various ways to customise each of the different social networks and it is important that your brand is integrated and correctly shown on all of them.
3. Talking To Consumers
One thing most brands get wrong is that they fail to realise that social network marketing is vastly different to television advertising or print advertising. Remember, Social Media is not a broadcast medium. Consumers expect you to talk and act like them. This means that you need to be relevant and always available. Having the right resources is critical. It’s also critical that these resources have the time to monitor the networks and the authority to answer questions.
4. Incentives and Promotions
A leading global agency, Razorfish, recently published their annual feed report. One of the findings was that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users, and 44% of Twitter users. Knowing this, brands should set aside budget to keep the consumers incentivised to talk about the brands. Promotions should be used to drive both talk-ability and awareness.
5. Exit Strategy
One thing I have seen quite a lot of is the lack of exit strategy. Once your campaign or programme has ended, have you thought about how you are going to close down your various properties? Leaving consumers in an online brand limbo creates a negative impression. The nature of search and SEO also lends itself to the fact that your old social profiles will be easily found via Google or Bing, and potential consumers could think negatively of a brand should they come across a space that hasn’t been updated in months.
Your exit strategy should include ways to close down the space but also keep the consumers happy and entertained.
Conclusion
Social media is unavoidable as a marketing tactic today. Be sure that you have a strategy and a plan in place before you jump in headfirst.
As we round off an amazing 2009, we traditionally don our augmented reality goggles and come up with sage predictions for the new year. This year I’ve taken a different view and instead of following the masses would rather give you the bucket list of who’s sprouting what about 2010 and beyond.
Stonewall+ recently completed a video production project for Global Vision to showcase Adora, their next generation relationship marketing software. The project filmed 4 consumers who were venting about irrelevant and incorrectly targeted messages they received. The Adora application then captured unique demographic and psychographic information about each of them, building up an accurate profile of their interests, customer status and appropriate communication channels.
Our aim was to create an “application HUD (Heads Up Display)” as if the Adora software is constantly aware of the keywords it needs to capture to be able to manage the customer communication correctly in the future. We brainstormed and visualised the individual character’s iconography and style guide, and identified the important keywords the Adora software needed to capture. Once we had the scene layed out with thumbnail previews, they were mocked up using Illustrator & Photoshop. We then pulled the designs apart in After Effects and animated each of the elements according to the individual emotion & style of animation. Using a variety of overlaying post production effects and animation techniques, we managed to create a slick and polished final product.
On Tuesday, the Cape Town Stonewall+ team had the opportunity of meeting with Chris Colborn, Chief Experience Officer at R/GA, who was in South Africa to judge the entries of The Bookmarks 2009, an initiative founded by the OPA to award outstanding digital work in South Africa.
During his session he presented insights on two very significant and well-known campaigns produced by R/GA, NIKEiDand NIKE+. He talked about how these were built to be scalable engagement platforms that enhanced the digital brand experience for Nike customers. He also discussed R/GA’s theories on bought, owned and earned media using brand platforms as well as looking at branding in the digital space using signifiers & behaviours and ultimately blending user experience with e-commerce.
It was extremely insightful for the Stonewall+ team and a very active Q&A followed afterwards, which delved into, innovation in an agency, approaches to campaign measurement, an info session on RGA University, R/GA’s expansion into Singapore & Sao Paulo and Agency dynamics.
A big thanks to Chris for his time and sharings, hope you enjoyed your stay in South Africa!
Google’s engineering VP Vic Gundotra may not be bullish on mobile applications, but that doesn’t mean that his employer isn’t serious about cellphones.
Just after announcing its plans to go it alone with the Android phone, Google has made another step into the mobile marketplace. The search giant already extending its AdWords network to mobile devices. Now you can get mobile measurement through Google Analytics.
What does that mean for brands? Better measurement and actionability on campaigns across platforms.
As part of an upgrade to Google Analytics announced today, Google is introducing a numer of useful enhancements, including the ability to track traffic to both mobile sites and applications, and explanations of what device is being used. Meaning that marketers will be able to track digital campaigns across web and mobile platforms.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call this week, CFO Patrick Pichette said mobile searches were up 30% this quarter from the same period last year, calling the current shift to smartphones “transformative.”
According to AdWeek:
“The mobile-tracking features are part of a broader update to Google Analytics that includes the ability to set and track engagement goals, add customized audience segments, track unique visitors for segments and set ‘intelligence alerts.’”
Amy Chang, group product manager for Google Analytics, says that this move into mobile is just a step in the right direction. And while there is a lot further to go, “The idea is to give advertisers the actual data they need to make better decisions.”
As consumers start engaging in more activities on their mobile devices like this, it will be important to track their activity there.
In addition, Analytics Intelligence will now provide automatic alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of site metrics and dimensions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. With these changes, Google is not only making it easier to track effectiveness of campaigns, but also helping its customers make changes that can increase the ROI of their campaigns. Those are all good things.
We started as a simple digital production company in 1997 and have emerged as a dynamic full service digital marketing agency.
As one of South Africa's leading and most established digital marketing agencies, Stonewall+ has built its business on solid marketing principles with a shared vision of creating ground breaking work in a style that is unconventional and fresh.
As an independently owned agency with offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, our team of 45 is made up of talented individuals with the flair to create the exceptional.
