Brands investing in social media marketing campaigns are finding that meaningful and creative applications are the ticket to engaging new audiences, maintaining strong ties with current fans, and boosting revenue. When implemented correctly, social marketing can reinforce a company's brand image and loyalty. But brands should only build applications that add value to the consumers' social experience on the platform that best targets them by focusing on what the consumer wants and how they represent themselves through their social networking profile.
To choose the right platform that will successfully target your consumer, it is important to ask yourself several questions to get the ball rolling:
- Why: Why is the social marketing campaign being launched, and what are the goals and objectives of the campaign?
- Who: Who is the target customer? How are they best engaged?
- How: How should customer relationships change as a result of this social application? How will the campaign be measured?
- What/Where: What applications should be built? Which technologies should be used? Where should the campaign be run? Facebook? MySpace? The iPhone?
Each social marketing platform has its own unique personality that is characteristic of its audience. Brands that strive to understand an audience within the context of their preferred platform are the ones succeeding in social media.
According to IDC's report (U.S. Consumer Online Attitudes Survey Results Part III), more than three-quarters of social networking site users log on at least once a week, and 57 percent do so daily. While traffic to these sites is up, brands should avoid blindly advertising across platforms without knowledge of the platform's audience. But by tailoring your social media campaign to the platform best suited to achieve your goals, you can more closely target your audience, and more directly meet their needs with your campaign.
Respect their chosen boundaries
As in any business practice, it is important to show your current and potential consumers respect by creating innovative and amusing applications that will reward them in an appropriate way. Facebook is not the same as MySpace, which is not the same as Bebo or the iPhone -- their audiences can all differ vastly, and thus so should the way you reach them, and where you reach them.
For example, OpenTable, the world's most popular website for making restaurant reservations online, sought to enhance brand awareness with existing site members and provide a new utility to users unfamiliar with their site by launching a social marketing campaign. They chose to develop the OpenTable iPhone application, which combines the very best of the iPhone -- its location-based features -- and the OpenTable service itself -- ease of use -- by allowing users to make reservations on the go from their iPhones. The iPhone, which typically attracts a more sophisticated, mobile and affluent audience, was the right choice to best reach this target audience.
Bebo, on the other hand, which is recognized as a platform that attracts a younger demographic, was the perfect choice for the Kellogg's "Chewz UR Own Pops Venture" social marketing campaign. Developed to engage the Bebo audience with the Corn Pops brand, the application includes a collection of movies targeting younger audiences and challenges users to select their path along a wild story line in an interactive social choose-your-own adventure game.
In another example, Facebook, often recognized as a platform that attracts well-educated professionals, was chosen for Palm Centro's social marketing campaign. Featuring music, videos, holiday-themed e-cards, and games aimed to promote the Palm Centro as the tool Santa used to transform his life and re-emerge as Claus, the campaign builds awareness of the Palm Centro brand in a way that meshes humor and intelligent content to engage the consumer.
Proving you made the right choice
Once determining the platform of choice for your application, it is important to employ a clear measure methodology to gauge the success of the campaign. Advanced reporting tools and analytics for usage and behavior should be built into the application to clearly identify the ROI of the application.
When evaluating success and ROI, it's important to examine four elements of the application.
- Appeal: Is it interesting? Fun? Engaging? Entertaining? Helpful? Self-expressive?
- Simple: Is the desired action clear? In this case, often less really is more.
- Social: Is the application better with my friends? Do I want to share? How does it spread?
- Addictive: Would I come back? Why?
The ability to answer these questions in the affirmative directly relates to the success of the campaign and the value of the investment made.
It is important that you understand your current audience when embarking upon the creation of a social media application. Can you accurately answer questions like where they spend their time online and what their interests and hobbies are? If so, leverage that information to build an application designed to enhance brand awareness within your target audience. By taking the time to learn how to incorporate social media into your branding, your application will be authentic and built on a foundation enabling a successful social marketing campaign.
Kevin Barenblat is co-founder and CEO of Context Optional.
