With consumers logging into social media sites across the world — writing on walls, liking, interacting and influencing like never before — the face of marketing, buying and selling as we knew it has been transformed.
Businesses can connect directly with consumers and create lasting relationships as they inform, entertain and educate consumers about new products and services and also acquire a goldmine of information through social media. Social media marketing is set to grow at an annual rate of 34% — faster than any other form of online marketing. Forrester estimates that US$ 3.1 billion will be spent on the medium in 2014.
The consumer adoption curve of social media has been far ahead of that of enterprises. According to a survey report, a significant 90% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business. Even as businesses strive to leverage the opportunity that social media offers, they face varied challenges. The market does not offer enterprise-class, business-ready solutions for businesses to engage with this phenomenon. Moreover, businesses are unsure of where and how they should start with this relatively new social media phenomenon. As a result, they have either been testing the waters with initiatives that not-so-actively engage with consumers or their efforts have failed to garner the expected return on their investment.
Since there really is no one-size-fits-all social media strategy, businesses would greatly benefit by following a few ground rules. These can help them cut through the hype and get to the essence of engaging with customers, while optimizing their social media involvement.
Let us take a look at a few pointers that must be kept in mind while building your company’s social media initiative.
Devise a Strategy of Continuous Consumer Engagement
Social media offers unprecedented insights into understanding consumer sentiments, behavior, motivations and preferences in a cost-effective manner. Unlike traditional routes such as marketing surveys and focus group discussions, social media offers continuous customer engagement while reducing costs, labor and time taken to connect and interact with consumers. While traditional models need not be substituted with social media, the latter does offer a complementary solution that significantly enhances consumer engagement and, hence, the outcome.
With social media, companies get to make a real-time connect with consumers and create a positive cycle of engagement. Social media enables one-on-one, consumer-to-consumer conversations that are likely to capture real insights into consumer motivations. Leveraging this very personal interaction with the consumer, companies can engage with the customer on a continuous basis and go through multiple cycles of product innovations to offer consumers novel products, creating significant brand value.
Choose the Right Social Media Platform
Businesses must select an enterprise-class, business-ready platform that encompasses the entire social media phenomenon. It must offer comprehensive solutions that cover sales, marketing and customer services through consumer engagement. Beyond that, the platform must encourage employees to collaborate among themselves and with partners. An integrated, low-risk, low-upfront-investment and pay-by-value proposition reduces operating costs while enhancing value.
Leverage the Current Competencies
One of the most important things to keep in view when adopting social media into marketing is your organization’s skills and competencies in the real world — these can be critical in engaging with consumers in the virtual world. Companies must extend their real-world strengths to the social media environment to drive customer engagement and brand presence for products. The nature of communication in social media is one-on-one. Moreover, in social media the conversation is in real time, two-way or multi-way and mostly public. These aspects require a well thought out organizational framework (policies, workflows, systems, enablement, training, etc.) to promote such engagements. Through a robust engagement framework, companies can build and strengthen the brand visibility of products over a period of time through customer engagement via social media.
