Monitor buzz, but with a new goal in mind
Before you start overtly marketing to your fans and followers through promotions and special offers, find out what type of offers they want to receive. The beauty of social media is that it's a two-way street. In the old days, marketers researched basic demographic and sales data and then blasted out offers, hoping people would take notice and buy products. On the other hand, with social media's inherent ability to directly connect brands with consumers, marketers can now find out with certainty exactly what type of promotions their customers want.
Use your buzz monitoring tools to find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. But instead of just getting a vague reading on brand buzz, instead use the tools to track the actual pass-along of your brand's social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings etc., to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. For example, you may find that mothers have been sharing information about your chemical-free sunscreen products via posts on popular mommy blogs. You can use social media analytics tool (see list below) to track this level of detail. Then you can seed offers of 20 percent off the sunscreen on the mommy blogs where the discussions are taking place, or create a Twitter promotion such as "Moms: Get 20 percent off the only truly chemical-free sunscreen this week only."
Tracking this level of word-of-mouth is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions, because you must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people's immediate interests.
Test out some promotions
Once you figure out what people want via social media tracking, give it to them. Try out a few promotions based on the intelligence you gathered from the first step above. And make sure to then track the performance of these promotions using your social media analytics tools again. For example, you might try a promotion for 15 percent off your whole order today. Once it's over, track how many people clicked on the promotion and completed a sale (classic click-through and conversion metrics), but also continue to measure buzz, monitor conversations, and measure pass-along of the promotion using your social media analytics tools.
You might find that everyone loved your 15 percent off promotion -- it was shared with hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email -- but that many people complained that shipping costs were too high. Problem solved: In your next promotion, offer free shipping. Or, you might find out that one of your new products is getting incredible buzz, but that people are making comments such as "Can't wait to buy this product, but I'm waiting to see if the price drops."
With this type of information, you can then seed a targeted, one-day-only offer of 20 percent off that's exclusive to Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Remember to be creative and have fun with your offers; unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don't have to spend months planning and budgeting for social media promotions. Just do it!
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