Report: The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing (Pt 2)
Phil Mandelbaum
Fractional CMO | Agency President + CEO | Brand, Digital, Social, Content, PR and Political Strategist | Award-Winning Writer, Ghostwriter and Editor | Sold 1 Business
Artificial Intelligence, the Customer Journey, Influencer Marketing, Social Media Marketing KPIs, and Everything Else You Need to Know to Develop, Test, Analyze and Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy and Campaigns
There are nearly five billion social media users worldwide; only 7% of people who use the internet do not use social media. The average consumer uses seven different social media platforms per month. And, at two and a half hours per day, the amount of time the average user spends on social media has never been higher. As a result, businesses are now spending more on social media advertising than paid search for the first time ever. And then there's organic social media and influencer marketing!
Social media is the best place for brands to connect with their target audiences, build brand awareness and online engagement, and generate leads. Plus, with all the AI enhancements to social media automation tools and influencer marketing networks, it’s never been easier or more effective to kick off the customer journey on social media.
In Part 1 of this two-part social media marketing series, we cover:
In this final half of your official social media marketing guide, we'll walk you through:
I. SOCIAL MEDIA AND INFLUENCER MARKETING
Influencer culture isn’t going anywhere. Nearly 90% of Gen Zers and millennials initially learn about things they want to purchase on social media — and four in 10 teens trust influencers more than their friends. This is why nearly nine in 10 companies plan on working with a social media star in the next year, 71% intend to increase their influencer marketing budget, and almost 20% expect to dedicate more than half of their entire marketing budget to influencer marketing.
Smart thinking, since influencer marketing is the fastest growing online marketing channel and produces a 520% return on every dollar spent.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing leverages endorsements, reviews and product/service mentions from celebrities, trendsetters and social media stars as social proof to increase sales, brand awareness and online engagement. Companies that rely on influencers believe they can piggyback on the trust built by the influencer to build trust for their brand. Smart companies do their research, and reach out only to those influencers with influence in their organization’s industry or niche. Some marketing teams send influencers free products; others pay influencers to promote their brand.
The Top 6 Tips for Implementing an Influencer Marketing Program that Works
1. Prioritize Ongoing Influencer Relationships and Communities
One-off projects and short-term influencer relationships can play a pivotal role in testing new campaign ideas, expanding into new niches, and trying out new influencers. They can also help you scale your influencer marketing program.?
Of course, when you find an influencer that loves your product or service, showcases your brand in line with your messaging and maintains strong engagement with their followers, you should consider offering them a long-term contract. These influencers can generate higher ROI because of the authentic connection they’ve developed with their online communities, and by nurturing these relationships and communities you can develop these influencers into brand ambassadors.?
You could then create a community or network of brand ambassadors to facilitate collaboration and cross-promotion, exponentially expanding the potential audience for the brand as well as each influencer (a win-win!).
2. Always Demonstrate Transparency and Authenticity
More than one-billion dollars is spent on influencers with fake followings, and nearly four in 10 influencers artificially inflate their follower counts. This is why two thirds of brands are concerned about influencer fraud, and 94% of consumers say they’re more likely to be loyal to a brand that offers transparency.?
As calls for transparency and authenticity have reverberated across the world of digital marketing, it’s become ever more obvious that even the most popular and compelling influencers can’t stir up enough fervor for a product or service they don’t genuinely endorse.?
Over time, your organization and your influencers will prove themselves transparent and authentic. And, fortunately, 85% of consumers say they’ll return to a brand even after a bad customer experience if the company has built a reputation based on a history of transparency.
3. Equitably Employ and Include a Diversity of Influencer Marketers
Another way to build trust for your brand is to demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion — and employing influencers with different backgrounds is no longer enough.?
Almost nine in 10 millennials say it’s crucial for brands they support to be aligned with their values, and more than 70% will pay more for a product if even part of the proceeds are donated to charity. In fact, 70% of all consumers now feel that it’s important for brands to take a stance on political and social issues, and two thirds have taken an action after seeing a brand ad or marketing message they believed to be diverse or inclusive.?
Although some brands have found incredible success emphasizing the exclusivity of what they offer, even while diversifying the models in their ads, creating a culture of inclusivity (and equity) is what allows your target audience to connect with your brand. As they say: diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.?
So what does that mean for marketers looking to develop an influencer marketing strategy? It means equitably including everyone — and it starts with who comprises your marketing team.?
4. Incorporate Influencer Marketing Across Channels and Devices
Google has found that 98% of Americans switch between platforms and devices on the same day. This is why marketers who simply use three or more channels in any one campaign deliver a 287% higher purchase rate. Of course, if you optimize how you use these channels, you can experience even better results.
While multichannel marketing allows you to cast your net as widely as possible to reach more consumers and build brand awareness, marketers who commit to omnichannel marketing provide a consistent customer experience across channels — and retain nearly nine of 10 customers (versus 33% for those who don’t)! So what does omnichannel marketing mean??
Ninety percent of all consumers expect consistency in their interactions, no matter where they are. Omnichannel marketing represents a rethinking of the customer lifecycle, with a focus on providing a seamless and personalized user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer journey.?
For organizations invested in influencer marketing, and particularly those who’ve nurtured influencer communities and developed brand ambassadors, this means leveraging your influencers and their stories across all platforms, and from lead generation to sales and customer experience.
5. Invest in an Influencer Marketing Platform
A lot has changed since 2006, when CX was all about call centers and IZEA founder and CEO Ted Murphy created the first influencer marketing platform, PayPerPost. At the time, blogs were still called “online diaries!”?
By 2016, 70% of influencers already felt the most effective way to collaborate with brands was through an influencer marketing platform, or influencer marketing hub; by 2020, there were 1,360 agencies dedicated entirely to influencer marketing.
Unless you’re part of the mere 22% of brands that think it’s easy to find the right influencer, you’re probably asking yourself:
Although some believe businesses should hire an influencer marketing agency to develop and oversee their marketing efforts, companies that truly know themselves, their mission and their products/services are best equipped to identify their target audiences, create their user personas, and present themselves publicly with passion and authenticity.
Thus, the pressing question for marketing teams is whether an influencer marketing platform or other tool can aid them in attracting, retaining and nurturing effective influencers and/or influencer communities.
The Top 10 Influencer Marketing Platforms
Influencer marketing platforms provide:?
To determine which performance-driven influencer or creator marketing platform is best for you, consider requesting a demo from two or more of the following 10 highly rated options:
Although all of the top influencer marketing platforms provide advanced analytics, it’s important, too, to ensure you’re tracking your influencer marketing performance against the industry-standard KPIs; 79% of respondents to an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey said the biggest of their influencer marketing challenges was measurement.
Influencer Marketing Performance: The ANA’s Measurement Guidelines
On June 13, 2022, the ANA issued the first-ever official guidelines for measuring organic influencer marketing, “reflect[ing] the current state of organic influencer measurement,” “designed to facilitate more consistency in measurement and reporting industrywide,” and subject to updates “to reflect industry changes, marketers' input after their implementation, and greater platform transparency and access to data."
II. SOCIAL MEDIA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Facts are facts: AI tech can enhance business productivity by 40% — and businesses that employ AI are expected to?double their cash flow?by 2030 while brands that don’t are expected to see a 20% reduction.?Already, more than three quarters of businesses are using or exploring AI; nearly three quarters of executives believe AI will be their greatest future business advantage; and by next year the global AI market is expected to exceed a half a trillion US dollars.?
For social media marketers, this is a good thing.?
What is AI?
According to researchers Dr. Shubhendu S. Shukla and Vijay Jaiswal in their article “Applicability of Artificial Intelligence in Different Fields of Life,” artificial intelligence refers to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention.” These machines “make decisions which normally require [a] human level of expertise” to, in turn, help humans improve their work and lives.?
According to Darrell West and John R. Allen of Brookings Institute, the “essence of artificial intelligence” is defined by three characteristics:
When we talk about AI in business, we’re typically referring to natural language processing, machine learning, and/or robotic process automation.
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) uses tokenization, stemming and lemmatization to identify named entities and word patterns and convert unstructured data to a structured data format. Humans leverage computer science, AI, linguistics and data science to enable computers to understand verbal and written human language.?
Natural language processing applications are especially useful in digital marketing, by providing marketers with language analytics to extract insights about customer pain points, intentions, motivations and buying triggers, as well as the entire customer journey. Needless to say, this advanced customer data can and should also be utilized by your customer experience team and customer support agents to better provide predictive, personalized experiences.?
Machine Learning
Machine learning uses data and algorithms to imitate the way humans learn. Humans train the algorithms to make classifications and predictions, and uncover insights through data mining, improving accuracy over time.?
Machine learning in marketing, sales and CX vastly improves the decision-making capabilities of your team by enabling the analysis of uniquely huge data sets and the generation of more granular insights about your industry, market and customers.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) uses business logic and structured inputs to automate business processes, reducing manual errors and increasing worker productivity. Humans configure the software robot to perform digital tasks normally carried out by humans, accepting and using data to complete pre-programmed actions designed to emulate the ways humans act.
While RPA has long been leveraged in back-office operations, such as in finance and HR, its use in contact centers, sales and digital marketing is increasing exponentially — for communicating across systems, manipulating data, triggering actions and, naturally, processing transactions.
The Benefits of AI
When you incorporate AI and the applicable process updates — not as replacements for employees but as tools to make employees’ lives easier — you improve:
By using artificial intelligence to automate employees’ more mundane responsibilities, you can free them up to focus on the message, the big picture, and the most effective tactics for delivering a consistently personalized, empathic and authentic customer experience.
Among the many advantages it provides, AI can help you with:
AI and Social Media: The Top 10 Platforms and Tools
Social media marketers have been using AI for years, whether they knew it or not; all the top social media marketing platforms and social media automation tools leverage AI to learn, function and improve — and everyday there are new AI-powered apps designed to make every aspect of social media marketing easier and more effective.
The Top 7 Social Media Marketing Platforms
The Top 3 AI-Powered Social Media Apps
III. SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
With or without the support of influencers and artificial intelligence, good business isn’t about closing a deal, it’s about developing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers. The more often and deeply a consumer engages with your brand across their varied social media platforms and devices, the more likely you are to convert from a lead to a customer and then from a customer to a social media brand ambassador.
In fact, it could be said that if you’re adhering to the customer lifecycle, you’re posting regularly on social media — and, if you’re doing it right, you’re leveraging satisfied customers and impressed influencers on social media to boost your reach, awareness, engagement and potential leads.?
So, how does it work??
Although similar to the buyer's journey — which outlines the buyer’s path from initial awareness at the top of the funnel to purchase at the bottom — the customer lifecycle considers the value of a customer for the full length of the relationship, including any support they may need as well as any brand promotion they may provide on social media.?
The customer lifecycle has five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.
Stage 1: Reach
Before a consumer has any personal connection to your brand, they may:?
During this first stage, the consumer is comparing products and brands, conducting research and reading customer reviews. This is your opportunity to reach them through social media. And if the consumer requests more information (or, obviously, makes a purchase), you’ve been successful.?
Stage 2: Acquisition
Once the consumer visits your website or sends you an email or social media direct message, they’ve entered the acquisition stage. As the name suggests, this is your opportunity to acquire a new customer. But first you must convert the user to a lead.?
If the prospect reaches out by email or social media message, you’ll need to:?
If the prospect has made it to your website, they should be able to easily access interactive, personalized, value-add experiences and content that can help them better understand and relate to your brand — and, ideally, make an informed purchase decision.?
Of course, to convert website users to leads, you’ll need to offer incentives for signups and/or ‘gate’ some of your most valuable content.?
Stage 3: Conversion
Every customer makes purchase decisions on their own time. For some, no nurturing is necessary at all. For most, a drip campaign of value-add content and subtle sales messaging is required. No matter how long it takes, or what tactics are deployed, once the lead has made a purchase they have been converted into a customer. The buyer’s journey ends here, at the bottom of the funnel, but the customer lifecycle is really just beginning — and social media will continue to play a prominent role.
Stage 4: Retention
Once you’ve converted a lead into a paying customer, you have the opportunity to begin developing loyalty, in the hopes of creating a social media brand ambassador or influencer. Of course, you also have the opportunity to turn them off completely. In other words: this stage represents a balancing act between continually engaging the customer and being perceived as pushy.?
The number-one way to retain customers is to focus on the customer, and not the sale. When customers feel heard, respected and appreciated, they’re more likely to remain loyal to your brand.
Stage 5: Loyalty
You can't create brand loyalty out of nowhere; it must be nurtured and instilled throughout the customer lifecycle. If you’ve provided consistent, personalized and empathic experiences from initial awareness through retention, you have the opportunity to exponentially amplify your reach — and boost your ROI — by empowering brand loyalists to promote you via social media and online reviews.
IV. DEVELOPING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
Once you have a firm understanding of the use cases and capabilities of all the most important social media platforms, as well as all the tools and tricks to help you optimize your social media marketing, it’s time to develop your overarching social media strategy.
When developing your social media strategy, keep the following rules in mind:
领英推荐
The Rule of Thirds
Divide your social media presence into thirds, focusing a third of the time on your ideas and stories, a third of the time on direct interaction with your audience, and a third of your time promoting your brand, products/services or thought leaders(hip).
The 80/20 Rule
Divide your social media presence into 80% content that informs, entertains and inspires, and 20% that promotes.
Adhering to either of these tried-and-true techniques should provide a productive framework within which to develop your unique strategy and tactics; if in-app engagement is a significant part of your strategy, the rule of thirds would be more appropriate.?
Of course, a lot more goes into developing a social media strategy that incorporates all the necessary elements, including content marketing, social media management and coordination, digital advertising, customer data and performance analytics, and even eCommerce and SEO.
10 Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy?
Step 1: Develop Your Brand Story
If you haven’t created a brand story already, you’re late. Figure out what your story is, and how to tell it — knowing, of course, you’ll have to adapt to each social media platform’s unique attributes.?
Start by asking:
Step 2: Define Your Audience(s)
Step 3: Establish Your Social Media Marketing Goals
To ensure clear direction for your social media marketing strategy:
Step 4: Conduct a Competitive Analysis
To understand what your competitors are doing well or poorly on social media, and identify successful tactics you can incorporate into your social media strategy:
Step 5: Audit Your Existing/Past Social Media Accounts, Content and Campaigns
Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your social media marketing, look back at what you’ve already created — and how it performed — to identify trends and determine what can and should be repurposed.?
Start by asking yourself:
Then, perform a Keep, Kill, Refresh on your social media platforms, content and campaigns, as follows:
Platforms
Content
Campaigns
Step 6: Outline Your Social Media Content Development and Distribution Responsibilities, Processes and Procedures
Before you begin planning and then creating custom content for social media, you need to secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:
Step 7: Create and Optimize Any New Social Media Accounts
Based on each platform’s use cases and best practices (contained herein), as well as your past experience across social media, create and optimize accounts for your brand on any relevant social media platform on which you haven’t already been active.
Step 8: Get Inspiration
Before moving onto content planning and creation, get inspired. Go to each social media platform and use proven user-centered design thinking techniques — like moodboards, mockups, storyboards and wireframes — to collect and brainstorm off the concepts, designs, media uses and storytelling techniques of the most effective marketers and influencers on each app.?
Step 9: Develop Your Social Media Editorial Plan and Content Calendar
Finally, you can flesh out your social media marketing ideas, based on your findings from each of the preceding steps.
Be sure to supplement what the customer data and platform and web analytics tell you by:
Once you’ve finalized your social media editorial plan, with sub-strategies for each social media platform, you can create your content calendar. Use the project management software you selected earlier to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.
Step 10: Monitor, Analyze, Report, Iterate, and Optimize
Based on the KPIs you’ve identified as being most appropriate for your organic and paid uses of social media, your social media analysts should be constantly monitoring your social media campaign performance and providing reporting to your social media strategists and coordinators to inform ongoing iterations and optimizations.?
The truth is: You can always split-test something else. And you can always optimize further.
Before you get started, be sure you’re set up to measure performance against the most important metrics.
V. MEASURING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE: THE 13+ MOST IMPORTANT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING KPIS
1. Reach
The number of accounts that see your content.?
Monitor your average reach and the reach of each campaign and post, as well as what percentage of your content reaches followers versus non-followers.
2. Impressions
The number of times your content is seen.?
Look out for high impression numbers, as it may suggest a uniquely high level of stickiness to the particular post or campaign.?
3. Audience Growth Rate
The speed at which you’re increasing your follower counts.?
To calculate your audience growth rate, track your net new followers over a predetermined time period, divide that number by your total audience and multiply by 100. To benchmark your progress, do the same thing for your key competitors.
4. Engagement Rate
The level of interaction with your account, campaign or content, compared to your reach, followers or audience size.?
To measure your engagement rate by reach (ERR) for a single post, divide your total number of engagements per post by your reach per post, and multiply by 100.?
To measure your average engagement rate across all posts within a campaign (or any series of posts, for that matter), add up all the ERRs from the posts you want to average and divide by the total number of posts.?
To measure the rate at which your followers engage with a single post, divide the total number of engagements by your total number of followers and multiply by 100. To measure your average engagement rate amongst your followers, add up the rates for all the posts and divide by the total number of posts.?
To measure your engagement rate by impressions for paid content, divide your total engagements on a post by total impressions and multiply by 100.?
To measure your average engagement rate by impressions, add up all the rates for all your paid content and divide by the total number of posts.?
To measure your daily engagement rate, divide your total engagements in a day by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.?
To measure your average daily engagement rate for longer-term analysis, add up all your daily rates and divide by the total number of days.
5. Amplification Rate
The degree to which your followers share your content.?
To calculate your amplification rate for a specific post, divide the post’s total number of shares by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.?
To obtain your average amplification rate, add up all your amplification rates and divide by the total number of posts.
6. Virality Rate
The degree to which your content is shared exponentially, expressed via impressions.?
To determine your virality rate for a single post, divide the post’s total number of shares by its impressions and multiply by 100.?
As with the previous KPIs, to calculate your average virality rate, add up all your virality rates and divide by the total number of posts.?
7. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)
The percentage of people talking about your brand compared to all other brands within your industry or niche.?
To calculate your SSoV on a particular social media platform, add up every mention of your brand, do the same for your competitors, add all sets of mentions to obtain the total, and then divide your brand mentions by the industry total and multiply by 100.?
To compare your SSoV to that of a specific competitor, perform the same calculation for their total number of mentions.?
To measure your SSoV across social media, add up every mention of your brand on all platforms, do the same for your competitors, and complete the same equation.
8. Social Sentiment
The feelings and attitudes behind the conversations that accounts are having about your brand on social media.?
Customer sentiment analysis refers to the examination of customer sentiment as expressed by customers (or users) across platforms and devices throughout the customer journey; this can include data collected via voice-of-the-customer programs, self-service portals, customer surveys, customer reviews and even social media posts, blog post comments or email replies.?
The customer sentiment score refers to the value applied to customer sentiment, expressed numerically in a range typically between 0 and 5, 0 and 10 or 0 and 100.?
To measure your social sentiment, or follower sentiment, you could develop your own manual scoring system; or, you could invest in AI.?
Social media sentiment analysis tools — including Brand24, Lexalytics, an InMoment Company, Talkwalker and Digimind - an Onclusive company — employ machine learning to generate sentiment scores from algorithms that, for social media, scan follower interactions, tracking phrases, words and behaviors with pre-assigned values, and then integrate measurements to gauge whether customers have positive, negative or neutral views; they also provide actionable insights based on when, where and why sentiments develop.
9. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)?
Typically a measure of overall satisfaction with a brand or its service/support, which can be used to determine strictly the level of satisfaction among your followers on social media, regarding your social media brand presence, the support you provide on social media or their overall satisfaction with your brand on social.?
CSAT for social media can be calculated for a specific platform or for all a brand’s social media accounts.?
To determine your social media CSAT, create a one-question survey asking respondents to rate their satisfaction and use a social media chatbot to deliver it to all your followers. Then, add up all the scores and divide the total by the number of responses and multiply by 100.?
Use a bot to automate and expedite the process.?
10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The likelihood someone will recommend you to others, typically applied to existing customers, past customers, sales leads or website users.?
To determine your NPS specifically among your social media followers or your followers on a particular social media platform, follow the standard process and use a bot to automate and expedite. To calculate your NPS for social media, use a one-question survey asking respondents to rate their likelihood of promoting your brand (or sharing your content) on a scale from 0 to 10, from “not likely at all” to “very likely.” Next, segment your audiences by score, with those providing a 0 to 6 labeled “detractors,” those providing a 7 or 8 labeled “passive” and those providing a 9 or 10 labeled “promoters.” Finally, to calculate your social media NPS, divide the number of detractors by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to obtain the percentage of detractors, do the same for the number of promoters, and then subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
11. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of users who see your content and click an external link for more, considered the most important KPI for analyzing how well your content strategy is working (or how well your content is promoting your offerings).?
To calculate your CTR, divide the total number of clicks for a post or campaign by the total number of impressions and multiply by 100.
12. Conversion Rate
Typically a measure of the percentage of website users that convert to leads or leads that convert to sales, which can provide great value to social media marketers as an indicator of the value of your social media content as a means of feeding your sales funnel.?
To determine your conversion rates on social media, be sure to add UTM parameters to all your links so you can track conversions down to the source (in this case, the social media platform), medium (e.g., organic social or paid social), campaign, campaign terms (i.e., keywords you want to track) or campaign content (i.e., individual posts within a campaign).?
Then, for any given post, keyword, campaign, channel type or platform, divide your total number of conversions by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100.
13. Cost Per Click (CPC)
The amount you pay per click on a paid ad.?
To calculate your CPC on a social media ad, divide the total cost by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100.
14. Revenue Per 1,000 Viewers/Listeners (RPM) (New Per Peter Conforti)
The amount advertisers pay per unit of access.
There are numerous ways to calculate "a rough RPM," including: