ROI Archives | waveSpawn Marketing

April 24, 2012

Social selling with social media

Increasingly, small businesses want to understand how to leverage social media to increase sales. In previous topics, we’ve discussed methods for creating a social media marketing strategy and using metrics to measure the return on your social media investment. Having a plan or roadmap should always be the first step in any marketing initiative including social media.

Can social media be an efficient, cost-effective channel for finding new customers and selling to business clients?

By now, you’ve probably heard the term social selling (or Sales 2.0). Social selling is about engaging prospects on their terms. It involves learning their marketing, communication, and buying preferences and then positioning yourself to be of value. Social selling (and social media) is not about blasting offers in your tweets and posts. With social selling, you need to recognize that the buying process is controlled by a better informed and more connected customer. Keep in mind, sales still remains a relationship-driven business. The concept of prospect networking through social media enables sales professionals to learn about and connect with potential customers. More importantly, they can tailor sales information and product specs to accommodate the needs and concerns of each individual rather than the mass – enabling relevance throughout the sales cycle.

The amount of prospect information available has increased the need for comprehensive sales intelligence. This generally brings together both traditional data and social media. It can be very beneficial for sales professionals to leverage the social web to simply listen, engage, and add value to the customer conversation. Being in the right place at the right time can create the top of mind status needed when the prospect is ready to buy.

Social media outlets are great places for starting conversations, but they’re not the only place to have them. When the time is right, take the conversation offline. With all of the modern conveniences and technical advances, still nothing can replicate the power of a face-to-face meeting.

The challenge with prospect networking and social selling is that it requires a lot of time and daily commitment. It’s impossible to automate messaging and conversations through social media. While many sales professionals don’t have interest in adding another “to do” item to their daily routine, finding the right balance is key. Each individual needs to assess their industry, audience, product, positioning, and price to form a strategy that fits their business and equally as important – their schedule.

If you have comments or questions, we’d love to hear from you. If you’d like more information on developing effective strategies for social selling, please contact us.

February 2, 2012

Is the price of a Super Bowl commercial too high?

Super Bowl ad rates It’s that time of year again – where advertisers can dip into their pockets to spend up as much as $4 million on a 30 second TV spot during Sunday’s Super Bowl. However, the average cost is only $3.5 million. That’s a rate of about $120,000 per second. Is this too much money to spend? What is the threshold?

All things considered, this is the one opportunity each year to reach more than half the total US population. Last year the “total number of viewers watching at least some part of the game also set a new record with 162.9 million” in the US.

So how do you accurately put a price tag on the massive audience at your fingertips? Another way to analyze this is to say advertisers are only paying 21 cents per person to reach 162.9 million people (3.5/162.9). For large car manufacturers, beverage and stack companies that seems like a small price to pay to introduce a new product and/or strengthen their brand. Depending on the overall marketing objectives, 21 cents per head could be money well spent if executed flawlessly.

Typically we see humor injected into these Super Bowl ads. In fact, a large percentage of people tend to watch the game for the commercials rather than the game itself. A memorable Super Bowl ad can stand the test of time and dramatically increase a company’s visibility and brand recognition. In the past we have seen successful examples of small/startup companies which have hit it big with Super Bowl advertising results. Companies like eTrade, GoDaddy, and Monster were all able to leverage success during Super Bowl ads to help catapult their businesses.

As always, it’ll be entertaining to watch the commercials – even though many of therm are available online ahead of time. Hopefully the game will be close and competitive as well… go Giants!

March 15, 2011

Creating your social media strategy

Create your roadmap Is it wise to start a business endeavor without a plan? Most people wouldn’t build an office before they determined what their business would actually do. Without a strategy there is simply no structure, no clear objectives and no real way of determining its success.

The same principles apply to social media. Establishing a roadmap with clear objectives can help you determine the success or failure of your program. For example, what is your business trying to achieve through social media? Is it to:

Interact with customers and prospects
Increase visibility and strengthen your brand
Reach new audiences
Create loyalty
Deal with customer service and support issues
Boost revenue

Regardless of what you decide, you should plan to create measurable metrics for your social media program. These types of statistics, if tracked properly, can help to measure and monetize the results of your social media campaigns. Let’s say, for example, you have a small business and your goal is to interact with customers and prospects. In this case, you’ll want to define what would constitute success. For instance, the number of:

Completed customer satisfaction surveys per month
New features suggested by users (that are implemented)
People who post something about us
Blogs that link to us

There are a variety of criteria which you can use to measure progress. The idea is to define relevant success metrics that translate into meaningful business context for you. For example quantitative metrics may include number of sales, new leads, new qualified subscribers, while qualitative could track satisfaction levels, loyalty, visibility, amount of interaction, feedback. For qualitative goals, don’t get too complex, use simple rules as metrics.

Set your social media campaign goals based on these metrics. Monitor often and course correct as necessary. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, but by establishing benchmarks you can filter out channels and strategies that don’t return good results. Trial and error can be your best ally in discovering where to focus the most energy.

June 11, 2010

How are you establishing brand preference?

Brand preference Branding, for many companies, is low on their priority list – or perhaps even off the radar screen. Many businesses simply do not give sufficient focus to their brand initiatives. How many times have you heard – branding is too intangible or “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”? Since branding isn’t directly reflected on a company’s balance sheet or financial statements, it’ often overlooked.

The reality is, branding, while difficult to accurately quantify, is a powerful marketing tool that can enable tremendous returns on investment. Branding is the primary reason consumers are willing to pay triple the price for one product over another.

Executed properly, corporate or product branding creates a perception that targeted prospects and customers gravitate towards. Perhaps the brand symbolizes an active lifestyle, innovation, caring, luxury, reliability, a company’s policy on environmental issues, etc. An effective brand evokes a feeling which creates long-term customer loyalty. It is the result of a clear vision that fits with the overall corporate strategy.

Branding is directly related to the perceived value of a product or company. While brand awareness is essential for name recognition, strategic awareness occurs when you have differentiated your brand in the mind of your market. This is often referred to as your unique selling proposition. This tells the market what you do, and more importantly, how you do it differently or better than your competitors.

To go one step further, establishing brand preference should be the desired outcome of a company’s branding initiatives. This allows the market to understand what is unique about a particular brand, allows them to emotionally connect to the brand, and creates a bias for selecting that brand over competing brands.

Fortunately, there are many effective marketing and branding strategies to help companies improve their brand visibility. Social media has opened a vast number of opportunities for businesses of all sizes to rapidly disseminate information, generate buzz, and establish brand recognition. Social media enables companies to get immediate customer feedback. Truly listening to your customers and responding to each of them can have a significant impact on the credibility of your brand.

Social media also facilitates an effective means for companies to monitor their brand image. There are a number of analytical tools which generate valuable reports and statistics. This is beneficial for a number of reasons – it can create an objective profile of the current landscape. It also allows you to set benchmarks and measure specific metrics. These could include the number of times your brand is mentioned, the number of links to your product or site, the number of retweets, etc.

Social media is gaining momentum every day; it is a powerful form of communication that is not going away. Companies can either watch on the sidelines or actively participate to help establish the communication channels that will drive brand preference.

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May 26, 2010

Facebook aims to simplify privacy settings

Facebook announced it will simplify their privacy settings for users. After feeling the pressure from large groups of protestors, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said “We needed to simplify controls… We want people to be able to share information in the way that they want.”

The newly configured privacy page is intended to be a central dashboard for adjusting all content and privacy settings. There are streamlined capabilities to monitor and adjust global settings. In the past, settings for new applications would not adhere to the preset options. In other words, a user would need to realize that they need to go back to the settings page each time an application was added or information was modified, etc.

Having default settings should be sufficient for the majority of users. Advanced settings will still be available for those looking for total control over their shared data. “We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications,” said Zuckerberg.

While heightened privacy control is good news for many avid users, Facebook is battling an interesting dilemma. Their prime revenue source is from content driven, targeted advertising. By restricting access to 3^rd parties, they may be directly limiting their ad revenue growth potential. This will be curious to see how Facebook is able to work around this hurdle. Are they able to compromise personal information in any way? Can they arrange a deal where personal information is exposed to high paying media research agencies?

March 26, 2010

Social media confirms that many companies have nothing to say

Social media confirms many companies have nothing to say Have you ever noticed how many business-related social media accounts have little, if any, postings or messages? You know the ones… they hastily ran out and setup a corporate Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog account without a plan or clue as to what they were doing. Somewhere along the way they strayed from logic. It’s as if they’re proclaiming “hey we’re not only slackers, but we’re cutting edge slackers.”

These companies should consider buying a full page ad in a magazine, forgetting about it, and then letting the publisher print the issue with just their logo on the page and maybe a line that says “too lazy for anything more”. That’ll be a consistent branding message that integrates well with their social media campaign. After all, a holistic approach is good. It’s actually taking a page out of the Seinfeld series “it’s a show about nothing”. Instead, it’s a company that is shouting “we have nothing to say”.

The simple point here is neglected social media accounts can be detrimental to a company’s brand. You wouldn’t create a website with no content, would you? Social media should not be treated any different. Many companies seem to underestimate the value and scope of social media – assigning minimal resources to manage them. Companies that engage in social media need to map out their long-term strategy and approach. Moreover, they need to delegate responsibilities of monitoring and maintaining social media account activity. This shouldn’t be dumped into the hands of an intern or temp. This should be taken serious by someone that understands the platforms and knows how to interact with customers and prospects.

The good news is that there are companies to help guide businesses through the process of engaging in social media. As a starting point, waveSpawn has assembled a comprehensive white paper entitled Understanding social media ROI.

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March 1, 2010

Maximizing Social Media ROI

There’s no denying the magnitude and increasing impact that social media is having upon the business world. Marketing professionals in every industry are reevaluating their business plans and strategies to incorporate this growing phenomenon – which is clearly here to stay. Sometimes this means including a Technorati claim token: G3J8CMQZPY79.

Social media ROI is arguably the hottest topics in the social media eco-system as it relates to marketing. Social networking is changing the way businesses and individuals connect. Online communities create an immediate forum for solicited and unsolicited customer feedback, commentary, suggestions, referrals, and yes even slander. These consumer messages can be powerful and detrimental at the same time. Organizations should give careful consideration to the variety of vehicles and response options available when implementing a social media program.

Each social media initiative takes time, planning, and attention. Perhaps the biggest mistake organizations make is thinking that these accounts can function on autopilot. A blog is created, a Facebook account is activated, Twitter is turned on… and then nobody adds content or monitors these sites. They fail to execute a plan or strategy. In my opinion, neglecting social media accounts is worse than not being involved at all. It’s a direct reflection of a business’s lack of follow-through.

What constitutes effective social media marketing? More importantly, how can marketers accurately measure the results of past social marketing campaigns and how can they predict future results? waveSpawn has compiled a white paper which presents a framework for businesses to better understand and measure the ROI of social media. It outlines the key dimensions of marketing metrics which are critical to determining the success of each social media campaign. It will also help marketers to learn from social media, react to what consumers are saying, and help influence future results.

Download the entire white paper here.

January 22, 2010

Measuring Social Media ROI

Measuring Social Media ROI For many small businesses, measuring the return on investment (ROI) for social media is a mystery. While some of these businesses actively engage in blogging, tweeting, and perhaps even Facebook, they have no idea on how to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. The remaining businesses that have not entered the social media frenzy are hesitant to get started because they too are looking for an accurate method of determining the ROI or impact of their social campaigns.

Since this has been a burning question for many small businesses, I’d like to share my thoughts. For starters, let’s take a quick look at measuring ROI for a traditional marketing vehicle – direct mail. The first step is to determine the goal of the campaign. Are you trying to create awareness, generate leads, close sales, or drive traffic to your website? Once you have decided on your goal, establish an attainable benchmark and track responses against that baseline. For example, let’s say you are anticipating a 2% response to your campaign. It’s good practice to direct your recipients to respond to a unique URL or web address. Since this page is not part of your standard web traffic, you can easily determine the number of people that initially reply to your mail piece. Furthermore, if you have an offer, you can have them submit some basic information to access a whitepaper or other incentive. This will further screen your qualified leads and allow you to monetize the results of your campaign. From this point, you should have some metrics that determine your conversion rate – from interested prospect into valued customer. The most accurate ROI calculation takes into account a customer’s lifetime value, or the amount of sales generated by that customer over time.

So if measuring the results of traditional marketing is so tangible, why is social media different? The answer, it’s not. Many of the same principles of conventional marketing analysis holds true for social media campaigns. For example, let’s say you want to start a company blog. Unlike the options for traditional marketing, your goal should be to share, educate, and create awareness. In other words, you post information that is timely and of interest to your customers and prospects. You do this in a non-invasive manner to attract potential customers. You can create awareness and drive traffic to your blog with an e-newsletter and direct mail, but additionally you want people to seek you out and subscribe to your content on their own.

This brings us back to measuring the effectiveness of your blog (or Facebook page or Twitter account). There are many tools available such as Google Analytics which can generate a number of meaningful reports. You definitely want to monitor the traffic of your blog over time. This will help determine trends and most appealing topics. Again, without a clear benchmark, you won’t be able to accurately determine your ROI. Set realistic goals… perhaps set out to obtain 2 new subscribers to your blog in the first month, 5 in the second month, 10 in the third, etc. I won’t get into how to attract new subscribers in this article – but rather stay focused on the success-rate of the initiatives.

Using a combination of website traffic statistics, new subscriptions, and specific page views, can help you determine where to focus your energy – and the effectiveness of your social media campaign. Unlike a single direct mail campaign social media is an ongoing campaign. It takes time, knowledge, and patience to get it right. Over time, you can build long-term relationships and interact with customers and prospects in a friendly manageable format. With the proper tools in place, you can accurately determine the ROI of your social media efforts.

Don’t be discouraged. We can help.