Social Connect – Do it Right.

The trending factor in any organisations marketing program is social connect or social engagement. But organisations often fail to analyse the message it is trying to deliver. If your goal is to create a Winning Social Strategy, one should focus on tracking the growth and measure the success of the effort.

Correctly said that- In marketing, $50 is always a waste, but the BIG question is WHICH $50. 

Every Marketing Channel has its own Pros & Cons. Infact there is limited resources where we only have so much time, money, or energy to invest into something at one time. So the basic question to ask before we venture into social is – whats right for the organisation.

Social experts narrow down the equation by saying if you’re primary goal is to increase sales, then you should obviously invest in marketing tactics that give you the best returns.

1. Paid search for new visitors
2. Email marketing for repeat visitors.

But even there we have tremendous under-utilization of resources. An important marketing tool is undoubtedly the most under-utilized factor with marketers. I fail to understand why. May be its not trendy as the social media but it’s still way more efficient because you can automate almost everything. 

Most companies spend their social media budget without a targeted goal. Do we expect Fans, Followers, Likes and Pins to fall from the sky?

Driving a consistent social campaign, matching medium with the message and integrating your social platform with other channels should be the key focus to drive the challenge. Do a reality check and before venturing into social, ask: When? How? and most importantly Why?

In Dec 2009, Dell made headlines with $6.5 million in Sales riding on Twitter. Reality check: Dell recorded $61 billion in revenue the same year. So we are actually talking 0.01% of actual revenue here. 

So it is important to understand the medium which will empower you to deliver your message in an interactive manner and develop the audience or prospects for you. This can also be done by funneling people from your existing resources like existing website traffic or email database or it could simply mean your foot-traffic and other offline sources.

Recently in an interview speaking about the trend in Digital marketing, Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe, said: 

” Globally, digital is about 20% of overall marketing spends. TV still dominates. But digital provides the opportunity to get far more measurement in terms of return on investment. Which is why search spend, social spend is increasing dramatically. 

    But getting people to look at ads on mobile devices, especially on social media sites on smartphones, is still a challenge. 
    I certainly believe social is going to be far more important in the future than it is today. Like any other piece of technology, marketers have to learn how to use it. You will find innovation in the mobile space. There are retailers who are saying, if I have a mobile device and I’m in a physical store, I should be able to press an in-store application button on the phone and as I’m walking down the aisles, I will find coupons that are appropriate to me. Does the medium offer opportunities for tailoring the right ads, absolutely. Is it as advanced as we would like it to be, probably not. “

Thus before venturing into any form of Social connect one need to keep in mind if that is the correct medium that will also put a tick mark on the important check boxes of

• Connecting to share the correct message.
• Reaching the targeted segments
• Ongoing conversation to Share more and more

Remember, the success of your marketing campaign does not depend on the number of Fans, Tweets or Pins. It is judged on the ROI of your campaign.