Social Media Informs Online Purchases

Lynley Meyers agues that marketing and customer service need to work together on social media.

Typically, marketing and communications are the corporate brand guardians, regulating brand communications and managing customer acquisition. Marketing hold the budget too, so therefore social media should belong to them – shouldn’t it?

Brands now know that they are not in control. It is their customers who decide what they want to see, think or buy. There is, therefore, a real business case for marketing ‘@brand’ on social media.

• 78% of consumers trust personal recommendations over search result rankings
• 94% increase prospect click through rate when exposed to relevant branded social media
• 48% of online purchases used both search and social media to make decisions

Greg Allum at British Gas says marketers who monitor social platforms have an advantage. “We get to hear real customers talk on a daily basis about our brands in real time. This can be extremely potent if used in the right way – not just for brand marketing but to inform the business about competitors and enable the development of new products and services.”

Target your marketing

Mine the data from your social sites and enhance your ability to segment, target and personalise future communications. 83% of all organisations do not analyse the demographics or profiles of the customers that are active or influential on social media.

Ask yourself, does your business clearly understand what will differentiate your product or service? Are you marketing to the most applicable people?

Monitoring

Monitoring sentiment or complaints for all competitor products highlights quick wins.

Learn where improvements will make the most impact. Recognise your key influencers and brand advocates and engage with them.

SEO and search engine rankings

Increasingly, search engines will reference rankings from social networks, meaning that comments from customers will now affect your marketing web and digital outreach and your position in search results.

Carefully consider any investment and check that you are able to:

• Monitor activity and sentiment in real time to understand the reasons for interactions
• Keep all parties informed and up to date with integrated campaign planning
• Ensure visual appeal of every action with pre-flight image editing
• Deliver content consistently
• Automate capture of competitor mentions to improve monitoring and awareness
• View and use tailored real-time reports

Marketing can make a strong case for their ownership of your organisation’s social media platforms. Imagine the added value to your brand and customers when you use ‘@brand’ to represent the main social forums and ‘@brandhelp’ to represent your customer service social forums.

However, best practice shows that when ‘@brand’ and ‘@brandhelp’ work in partnership, your customers and prospects both win!

With thanks to Lynley Meyers at Netcall