If you do nothing else with social media this year,
make sure you implement a Social Media
Monitoring service. It’s your
job as a marketer to understand what’s interesting & important to your
audience, and the chances are your customers are already online talking about the
issues that relate to your sector. It’s your job to under
stand how this relates
to your brand!
Understanding what’s going on across the social landscape is the first step
towards understanding the opportunities to engage with your audience through
these new channels, & it doesn’t have to be complicated.
We’ve run social media monitoring and landscape
reviews for several brands including Lloyds
TSB Commercial Finance, TNT & Lufthansa,
to understand the opportunities & implications of deploying social media
tactics for these companies, building a business case for Social Media Marketing Engagement Plans along the way.
The first step is understanding what your audience
is up to in the Social Media space. Proper analysis of Search Engine activity is a good place to start, & sound
knowledge of the Search Terms your audience is using means the intelligence is
based on real understanding of the topics & trends important to the
customer, the cornerstone of all good marketing!
Once we’ve highlighted the key Search Terms we can
start drilling into the Social Media channels. There are a number of Social Media Monitoring software tools out
there designed to measure social media activity, and with intelligent use of
these tools we can build a pretty good picture of the themes running through
the social media landscape impacting on your sector.
Like any analytics software, in the right hands, it
can revolutionise your understanding, but all the same data is not the same as
intelligence. That’s where our team of Social
Media Specialists come in, to add the real value to the data reports the
software tools produce. What’s measured empirically is backed up with desk
research, & most importantly married up with your business objectives, to
define the opportunities & risks to the brand offered through Social Media.
The final report is an invaluable combination of empirical
data, analysing audience behaviours, competitor activity & the trending
topics running through the Social Media landscape. This is followed by a
balanced assessment of the strategic opportunities for the brand to engage
through Social Media channels to achieve its marketing objectives. The report
covers Social Media Campaign opportunities,
as well as possible Crisis Planning &
Risk Management strategies.
Social media platforms can be a relevant communication
medium across a number of business departments, from Marketing & PR to Customer Service Teams, New Business &
HR, & we can focus in on these opportunities depending on your business
priorities. This could include obvious areas like maximising digital marketing efforts
& customer brand engagement, as well as reducing marketing overhead & engaging
with prospects to drive sales leads, to less obvious uses like using social
channels to augment traditional customer service channels, internal corporate
communications & raising brand engagement amongst employees through social.
Ultimately, investing in a Social Media Landscape review is about driving an understanding of
the social space as the first essential step to creating a roadmap for your
brand to engage in these channels. It’s about providing a strategic focus to
Social Media activity that can be clearly linked back to your business &
marketing objectives, & the needs of your customers. This investment has
provided brands like Lufthansa, TNT and Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance with a business case to open the debate with
senior management around investment, & return on this investment through
strategic use of Social Media Marketing techniques.
For more information contact Andy Wood, Strategy Director at
Freestyle Interactive.