Here's a simple plan for creating a unique brand experience with social networks, created by Powered Inc.'s account management VP.
Today's market offers a unique opportunity to build communities around your brand through social networking, then use them to accelerate consumers from consideration to purchase. But there's a lot more to social networking than putting up a MySpace page for your brand or adding ratings to your product page.
The power of social marketing
Social marketing allows you to extend your brand communication from B2C (brand to consumer) into C2C (consumer to consumer) and expand your reach while improving your insights. It's hard to find a better way to understand your consumers, learn how they use your products and move them to a purchase more quickly.
The Never Ending Friending Project, a recent study commissioned by Isobar and MySpace, shows that incorporating social marketing into your overall program can increase your advertising exposure more than 70 percent. It also improved purchase intent and a positive brand image.
Despite these numbers, many brands are still holding back from creating a social marketing presence. Since the current explosion in social media shows no signs of slowing down, the salient point to remember is this: Conversations involving your brand are happening, whether you're there or not.
This article identifies three vehicles for your social marketing strategy and three key objectives that can help you leverage the social space to create a unique brand experience.
3 + 3: vehicles and objectives
To craft an effective social marketing presence, you need vehicles to get you there, and objectives to keep you on track.
The three possible vehicles for your social marketing strategy are:
- advertising on social networks like MySpace and Facebook
- embedding your brand in the social network with brand pages, widgets, video and promotions
- building you own branded social network
For the fullest social marketing impact, these three need to work in conjunction with each other. And within these three areas, you'll need to keep three key objectives in mind:
- Design your brand's persona so it drives value
- Give community members a reason to meet, communicate and share
- Provide relevant content that has value within the community
Now let's cover each of these components in more detail, starting with the objectives, since you'll want to build them into every social marketing initiative you launch.
The objectives, explained
These may all seem obvious, but it's amazing how many brands fail to follow three key objectives:
- Create a brand persona that drives value. Consumers want to connect and be a part of something. It is this connection that will result in higher purchase intent. The social space allows you to craft unique messages that will help connect you to your communities.
- Give consumers a reason to meet, communicate and share. Provide tools, widgets and promotions that help foster the momentum effect. This will provide you with invaluable data no other advertising campaign could supply. There are different approaches when executing this program in your embedded social marketing tactic and your branded social marketing site.
- Remember that content is still king. A social network site or a community without content is nothing more than a message board. Your consumers are seeking information, and the right content will spark ongoing discussion. Embedding your brand in social networks is all about creating your brand persona with assets that cool content users can download, share, create or use. The content should be more focused on C2C, allowing your users to generate much of it themselves. It can also serve as an information hub, where you can announce new product launches, company news, promotions and more.
Weaving these three objectives into a branded social network allows you to extend C2C content into lifestyle information to help users understand and communicate about how to better use that product.
Once you've locked down your three key objectives, it's time to focus on the three vehicles for delivering your social marketing strategy:
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