Why an Experiment?
From my perspective, life is one big experiment. We are all just trying to get the formula right. In our personal lives the formula we seek may revolve around achieving happiness, security, love, acceptance, appreciation, or power – whatever we think we need to be successful at life. With social media, we’re also trying to discover the perfect formula to help us meet various marketing objectives, such as increasing revenues for the company or reducing the sales cycle. In business as in life, the perfect formula isn’t always obvious and can often take years to master.
Social Media Experimentation
When it comes to social media as a component of your marketing plan, you’ll read and hear a variety of ways you could or should be using this medium for business. But the practice of using social media for marketing objectives is still relatively new and the answers aren’t always clear. In my experience, there aren’t cookie cutter approaches to making it work either. Whether you are the ‘Social Media Czar’ for a large marketing department or you are the Marketing department, if you want to determine how social media can be incorporated into your company’s marketing plan then it’s time to don the lab coat and head for the beaker station – you’ve got some experimenting to do!
- Experiment Step One
Think of testing out social media the way that you would test traditional marketing tactics. First things first, figure out what you want to accomplish and how you will determine and measure your degree of success. When it comes to social media, perhaps you want to learn from customer perceptions about a campaign, use it to enrich your market research, build customer loyalty, drive more brand awareness, add value and set your company apart from the competition, promote a product, or uncover ideas for product innovation. You wouldn’t put a marketing plan together without knowing what you want you want to accomplish in the way of increased acquisitions or improved customer satisfaction would you? So don’t rush into a social media plan without having your end goals outlined!
- Experiment Step Two
The rest of the experiment is a cake walk… okay, not exactly. Similar to the starting point for a traditional marketing plan, you still have to pick out a social strategy that makes sense for your company, your objectives, and your resources. If you think increasing visibility to key employees with a corporate blog would build customer loyalty and retention but then you’ve got no one to keep it updated with fresh content, you’d fall flat with that approach. I recently started working with a small technology company who had taken the time to create a Twitter page, but made the error of using their marketing manager’s bio for their profile description. I pointed out that rather than the technology pros they want to attract, they mostly had marketing professionals following their handle! Not investing the time to do something right can hurt or diminish the effectiveness of your efforts.
- Experiment Step Three
Once you’ve picked the main social media options to employ, whether it’s one or several, you’ll want to test the results before you devote more resources to it. For example, let’s say you think Facebook would be a great way to connect your Customer Service team directly to your customers. Before redoing all your business collateral, consider inviting a small test group of customers to connect with your support team on your Facebook page. You may discover that the initial plan for using that particular social media platform needs to be tweaked a bit before you announce it to your larger customer audience.
- Experiment Step Four
Remember to track your efforts and results – you want to be able to show success rates for your key objectives. As with any good marketing plan, even once you get the formula to a place where your social media plan is consistently producing the outcomes you want it will need periodic updates to ensure it is optimized to create the best results.
Social Media as Part of the Marketing Plan
Social media planning is an essential component to your marketing plan and therefore impacts the other components. For example, formal surveys or questionnaires can be updated to determine the impact your social media efforts are having. Are more clients finding out about you via your blog or Facebook than an ad in a trade magazine? This is information you’ll want to know in order to make the right adjustments to your overall marketing plan. Another important area in which social marketing and traditional marketing meet is in your collateral, which needs cohesiveness whether print or web. As best you can, you want your social media pages and content to represent the look, feel, and tone of your other branded material.
Marketing is for brave and creative souls who aren’t afraid to try something new. Social media has quickly become a key ingredient to building brand awareness and customer relationships but, like with every good marketing plan, the formula for how you use social media will be unique to your business and not an exact replica of anyone else’s formula. Vive la différence!
Happy experimenting to you,
Vicki Blair
Social Media Yogi in the Making
(and Director of Account Management at Visible)
