As a marketing leader you are tasked with driving more qualified leads into the funnel, increasing revenue while decreasing ad spend or increasing brand visibility. While the market you play in helps define which objectives rise to the top for you, at the end of the day you need optimal performance. While there are many channels for you, especially in the interactive space, you need to make sure you have a firm grasp of the entire portfolio of options and which ones will provide you with the greatest return.

That is why at Rise we take the approach to operate as Interactive Investment Managers. By working with a client and understanding their defined goals we look at the entire interactive portfolio, including technology, training and services and operate as the investment bank for the CMO. Interactive Investment Management (IIM) is about taking a channel and technology neutral approach and providing marketing leaders with a diversified plan to enable them to achieve optimal ROI. By not being bound to a rigid plan, Interactive Investment Managers can truly operate in the best interest of their clients.

At the end of the day, marketing is not about how many people click a link, download your white-papers or watch your videos on YouTube.  At the end of the day marketing is about business, your business and how you can make it stronger and more profitable.  In short, marketing is about ROI – getting the best return on investment that you can for your marketing dollars. At Rise, we believe that IIM is the future of online marketing.

To start, this is not an exhaustive list of steps you should undertake.  This is simply a guide to the primary considerations you should include in your social media strategy.  As with all digital marketing, each program (and channel) should include marketing goals – otherwise, your efforts may be destined to yield lackluster results.

Population (Follower Acquisition)

One of the biggest (if not THE biggest) challenges upon entering social media is follower acquisition.  Nothing is worse than creating a beautiful Twitter profile page and watching your follower count flatline.  As such, you need to have a follower acquisition plan before you go live with your program.  Some commonly used strategies include:

- Piggyback on Influencers: After determining who the social influencers are within your market, begin following their followers and a portion of them will (hopefully) follow you back.  Rinse your list of unreciprocated follows and repeat.

- Topics of Interest: Find the people actively discussing topics of interest to your company and follow them to see if they return the favor.  For extra traction, offer value in their current conversations (see Interaction, below)

- “Follow Us” Links: Make sure to include a link to follow you on all social networks on your website.  If it fits within your other marketing goals, you may consider including URLs on marketing materials as well.

Syndication

After you develop your initial follower base, you want them to become an extension of your marketing team, spreading your message to all of their followers.  In order to do this, you may need to be creative.  Many companies make the mistake of posting all their website’s blog entries on the social networks, failing to provide any conversation or added value to the followers.  One of the keys to syndication is content.  Provide valuable content (with some variety) as RT-bait (or share-bait).  The simple question to ask yourself: “Is the information I’m providing of interest to my followers’ followers?”  Phrased another way, are you posting information of wide interest?  As with Population, Syndication has some common strategies:

- Contests and Promotions: While syndication should occur beyond promotions, these can serve as a great benchmarking tool.  If designed appropriately, they’re the most shareable content you’re likely to provide (in the users’ eyes).  Consider syndication during contents/promotions as the target for other content.

- Keep it Short: One mistake companies often make is attempting to incorporate all of their message in each and every post.  Considering space constraints and limited attention span of social users, research shows keeping posts short improves interaction and syndication.  In the case of Twitter, make sure your posts can be retweeted (which will include your handle) without being truncated.

- Offline Information: If your company has physical locations, consider posting information for your brick-and-mortar locations online (especially in-store sales), as personal users will often syndicate this if they consider it of interest to their friends.

Interaction

Simply put, if you don’t plan to actively engage and interact with followers, save your resources and stay out of the social space.  If you don’t interact, you will lose followers (hindering any progress you make on Acquisition) and users will be less likely to interact with you or share your content (which affects syndication).  By engaging your audience in dialogue, you have significant opportunities:

- Customer Service: Able to address customer service concerns promptly and within a public space.  It’s a great way to show your genuine interest in your customers.

- Lifetime Value: Social media can be effecting at reinforcing the relationship between your customers and your company.  Especially in businesses where direct contact with customers is difficult, this is one way to turn a one-time shopper into a lifelong customer

- Acquisition-bait: If a user arrives at your profile page (regardless of platform) and observes that you regularly interact with your customer base, they are much more likely to follow you.  Compare this to a page with little “real” conversation, posting only blogs and articles.

- Ask Questions: This is one of the simplest steps you can take.  Especially when posting website content, consider what questions you can ask the readers.  For example, if you post a blog about taking the perfect digital picture (highlighting your product, of course), ask your audience to post their perfect pictures. 

Final Thoughts

I’ve provided 3 very broad areas to consider as part of your social media program.  All three are very important to consider at the outset and during management of your social media campaigns.  If you choose to remember only one of these, make sure it’s the necessity of interaction.  Without this, consistently growing your followers (and getting them to syndicate your content) will be an uphill battle. 

What do you consider most important in your social media program?

A Rise employee found the article this morning and emailed it to the whole company leading to a “Are you kidding me?” reaction throughout our staff. How is it that CPC (media spend), conversions, and ROI are believed to be “Least Important” by 59% of the marketing execs out there. I mean isn’t generating revenue at the crux of all things a business, much less a marketer does.  Of course there is the branding argument that engagement today will lead to loyalty and sales in the future. We would argue that even if it is a branding initiative, when using the Internet as the marketing channel, there are too many metrics available not to measure and keep track of your ROI.

We would be interested to know what type of companies the respondents to  the survey in question work for.  The only way their disinterest in Internet marketing ROI can make sense is if a high percentage of them work for companies that still sell the vast majority of their products through bricks & mortar channels.  I mean if I was a marketing executive at P&G, Coca Cola, or McDonalds I suppose time on site and unique page views would be the best KPIs to  measure success.  Interestingly enough one of the comments that went across today during Rise’s initial reaction to the table was:

“Not to mention that time on the site can also mean that people cannot find what they are looking for.  It does not necessarily mean that people are engaged.  It might mean that you need to work on user experience.”

The above could very well be true and should definitely be taken into consideration if you have to rely on ‘engagement’ metrics to measure your success.

Rand Fishkin at seomoz.org has also written a blog responding to the topic at hand. We recommend giving it a read as we concur with most everything he said. As one of the Rise staff said after reading his blog today, “Amen Brother!”