By adaptive - November 27th, 2013
Understand the sentiment of your consumer’s conversation and how this is impacting brand reputation is now vital for all corporations
Social media investment needs to prove its value to a business. The cost of implementing an engaging and dynamic campaign that attracts the consumer and builds the brand isn’t negligible and must have some benchmarks against which ROI is measured. Today, the customer is a far more demanding and discerning creature and to win them over, campaigns need to foster deeper connections than ever before.
Earlier this year, Wildfire commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the relationship between social engagement and buying behaviour in an attempt to discover how brands can benefit when they interact with consumers on social platforms. The report concluded that brands which offer focused content to their customers and who engage the most create even more valuable customers and a greater ROI.
The Google Social Engagement Analysis concluded: “People who engage regularly with brands on social media tend to be better customers. For example, 71% of customers who engage through social media with one quick-service restaurant chain were likely to prefer that chain to similar restaurants, compared to 47% of non-engaged customers, and 75% of engaged customers were likely to have bought something in the restaurant in the past 12 months, compared to 66% of non-engaged customers.”
Engagement is a vital aspect to any social investment, and it is equally important to understand the sentiment of your customer’s conversations and how these impact the brand. How you gauge and measure that customer influence is really what every business needs to know.
Christer Holloman, author of The Social Media MBA in Practice says, “The big problem is that social media isn’t a handful of sites like Facebook and Twitter that the marketing department can use to send out a marketing message. Today, social media is an approach to communication, collaboration, product development and customer service. Each department has very different KPIs and ROI models and therefore, cannot be bundled together; every department needs to find out what works best for them.”
The important questions
According to social media expert, Professor Steven Van Belleghem, there are three criteria that are important when measuring consumer conversations:
- The volume of the conversations. Reach is still a key element to assessing success.
- The sentiment of the conversations. Are people having positive or negative conversations about your brand? You want a positive impact on brand reputation.
- Engagement. Involved people have a level of emotional connectivity with your brand.
Your organisation will benefit from an engaged market – one that takes the content that you deliver and curates it into their social identity. Forrester’s research showed how the customer follows a life cycle pattern that can be utilised to benefit of the brand. They…
- Discover the brand
- Explore what you offer
- Buy the products or use the services
- Engage with you and share your brand with friends and peers
Using this cycle as a guide, organisations can improve on their conversations with customers and use each stage to build a loyal, active and engaged market. Customers that are made to feel as if their participation is valued and important can potentially become brand ambassadors that actively promote the business across their social networks and lives. According to iActionable.com engaged users spend 115% more time on sites and return 108% more often.
Lynsey Sweales, Social Media and Online Marketing expert at SocialB, says, “Social media doesn’t have to provide a monetary return on investment, it can reduce negative sentiment or recruitment costs, for example. Customers are your most important asset and your marketing tool to more business if you look after them and keep them happy. You cannot stop people who are not happy talking about your business on social media. However, you can respond in such a way as to turn the sentiment and potentially create a brand ambassador.”
Take the information generated by social, across all platforms, and use it to improve on business performance, fine-tune organisational goals and engage with customers. Many businesses have utilised their findings from social to explore new markets and grow the brand.
Evaluate and grow
The 2013 IDG Enterprise Customer Engagement Survey found that IT decision makers used social media to discover, share and discuss tech information with social networks offering an opportunity for improved vendor relations. It also highlights what has come out through all expert comments and research – content is key to engagement and engaging information is actively shared with peers. Social has a direct impact on brand perception and can be used to enhance an organisation’s identity, or sully it.
Engagement. Sentiment. These are paramount in a successful social campaign and for growing the brand and they can be measured against your business goals, not easily, but effectively enough.
If the goal was to increase website hits and reduce bounce rates, and traffic analysis reveals that it is doing just that, then it is working. Your last social campaign may have garnered thousands of Likes, but are they staying and are they interacting with your content? Do they share your brand with others? These are quantifiable and measurable outcomes to the work you are doing on social. ROI can be assessed against the business goals already outlined at the start.
The Forrester research outlined earlier pointed out that social networks are catching up with brand websites as 55% said they stayed up-to-date through websites with 52% using social media. Taking just a slice out of the social pie, a survey undertaken by Digitas and Curalate showed that 70% of brand engagement on Pinterest came from the users themselves (see infographic below).
Measurement can be achieved across social when attuned to the business goals of the organisation and the understanding of the engagement and sentiment of the consumer.
In the third and final part of this series we will be examining which platforms are worth using in your quest for brand dominance on social.