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business objectives "social marketing"It’s no big news that more and more businesses are diving into social marketing—500 million Facebook users are just too hard to pass up! But aside from the obvious audience potential, businesses need to set clear objectives for their social marketing activities in order to develop measurable value for their effort. What are the core business objectives for social marketing? What should businesses be striving to accomplish?

  1. Brand awareness.
    • Basic objective. It’s a common and basic objective for a brand or business to want to increase brand awareness through social marketing.
    • Measurement. Brand impressions are the core measurement, based upon the social following and tangible results from those brand impressions, including web traffic and SEO.
  2. Grow the social community.
    • After the brand or business has established their social presence, the next objective usually is to grow that follower or fan base. The same metrics apply—number of friends/followers, brand impressions, web traffic and SEO.
  3. Identify and develop advocates.
    • Inexpensive marketing, sales force. It’s less expensive to develop brand advocates than to run advertising campaigns. Additionally, brand advocates voices are seen as more “genuine” to consumers than the brands themselves.
    • Product claims made by brands are met with resistance.“No one believes advertising; we live in a time of disbelief.”
    • Consumer brand advocates provide an authentic voice. Authenticity is key. Brand advocates speak to their target segment(s) and enable authentic messages that resonate with their peers. You can’t create and run enough ads and messages to blanket all the potential target segments.
    • What makes a good brand advocate? They need to have established expertise. Whether it’s your peer, your uncle or a blogger, people will look at their prior content to see if their opinions are valuable and reliable.
    • How do you find and engage a brand advocate? Well, we won’t lie. JitterJam does this very well. But in general, you need to search through the Social Web to find these voices. You then need to evaluate their engagement with your brand, their influence and reach, their prior content, their engagement with others, etc. You want to engage people with genuine enthusiasm for the brand. Use social searches to find those conversations and begin your outreach.
    • How does sentiment analysis fit in? Overall sentiment analysis can help you determine how your social marketing is being received. You can track the trends and see the long-term impact of your outreach and advocacy. You can then try to correlate that sentiment analysis with the impact to your business.
  4. Provide new channel for customer feedback.
    • You may or may not find the true customer voice. Many companies ask direct questions to elicit feedback, but they often don’t get much response. Curb your expectations.
    • Larger brands have a better chance to get feedback. Consumers are usually more willing to respond to a larger brand. You need a larger audience to capture that small vocal percentage. However, that vocal public may not be wholly representative of your market. Social media is like talk radio. Those on the extremes are the ones most likely to “call in.”
  5. Provide new channel for customer service.
    • Be ready. Customer service over public social media channels can have an extremely positive impact on how consumers view your brand. But a single poor experience can also become a very public, viral spiral of negativity and a PR nightmare. Make sure you are prepared to provide excellent service and have policies (including a very clear escalation process) in place to ensure customer satisfaction.
    • One size does not fit all. You are not going to be able to please all the people all the time. However, how you handle the situation and work towards resolution will help you even if you can’t completely satisfy the customer. Make sure all your staff is responsive and execute well. They are not only providing customer service, they are acting in a PR role as well.

What are your business objectives for social marketing? How are you measuring your success! Let us know!

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