Author(s) : Silverpop | Engagement Marketing Solutions

Buzz Building – 7 Steps to Social Media Marketing Success

Introduction: In 2012, customers and prospects spent more and more time on social networks,
which are now a major marketing method for companies. If you can gather customers and
prospects around your brand, it means that you are doing your job well and you can be optimistic
about future sales. If you can’t be, Silverpop brings you 7 steps to teach you how to build the
right “buzz” on the Internet.

Hypothesis: What do you need to create a great social marketing campaign, bring new customers
and gather them around your brand to keep them and help you to sell ?

1 – Determine your goals and your strategy
Stop focusing on tactical metrics: don’t believe. Think about the reason why you’re using social
media: acquisition or retention tool? Start small and surely: when you feel comfortable with
social media, then you can look for a precise objective. How to do it right? Don’t communicate
like a robot, with untimely ads (you can hire a community manager) but involve people who are
enthusiastic and driven.

2 – Understand your market
Choose your social network according to the habits of your prospects/customers. The key to marketing success on social media is the ability to target communities and customers that align best with your content.
Allocate your resources wisely by understanding customer social behavior. Directly ask the
customer their preferences via surveys or go directly inside the community (not only the big ones,
small ones are important as well). Also look for resources on the web.

3 – Align execution with key channels
Go further than “Twitter or Facebook?” debates. Integrate messages in every social channel.
Invite customers to choose their preferences, push them to be involved on every social network
you’re on (use their emails, spread the word on twitter…) because this how you’re going to get a
maximum impact. Customers are going through different networks all day long and by taking an
integrated multichannel approach, your message will have many more chances to reach them. Just
be careful to maintain a focused and uniformed message. Encourage sharing, make specific and
global campaigns.

4 – Create content that connects (with people and networks)
Content is king in the way that the more it’s relevant, the more it will be effective. 100,000
fans who can’t share valuable content are not as useful as 50,000 fans that can. To optimize this
content, follow these three rules: lose the corporate speak (stop selling, start being human and
transparent when you’re speaking), deliver valuable educating content and be consistent (have a
regular cadence, tweet/post everyday to be sure to be seen).

5 – Engage the marketplace
Going viral is the dream of every marketer and here are a few tips to maximize your chances of
doing so: build a solid seeding social network and community with the help of your valuable/
fun (a social network needs to be fun and not boring. It’s meant to be time-consuming) content.
Listen and respond to the community that you’re monitoring, don’t forget to seed to content with
articles which will generate reactions and conversation around the topic!

6 – Identify and Enable Influencers and Fans
Social media is at its best when you have customer to customer relations and the company isn’t doing anything in appearance. Identify brand ambassadors (Track them by key data) who are going to tweet or respond to questions instead of you. Ninety percent of people are going to trust them (it’s a study), so these ambassadors can have a huge impact. Obviously you’re not going to meet only brand enthusiasts and in this case, you need to resolve problems on a case-to-case basis. Also, don’t forget to treat your ambassadors well if you want them to become more loyal and invested.

7 – Monitor social activity
It’s great to be invested in social networks, but it’s important to know how effective your effortsare. You need to quantify your performances, improve your understanding of customers andprospects, learn to be more efficient in your programs (for example if something worked in acampaign especially on twitter, you can try to make a twitter-only campaign with this thing). Use analytics tools from your social network provider to monitor your efforts Question yourselves:where have we made mistakes, what’s efficient? Asking yourself these types of questions willhelp you to evaluate your progress and go to the next level.

Conclusion: The key to succeeding in social networks is to retain the customers who are goingto help bring new ones. This goes by several important points to never forget: the content is thepriority, you have to push the customers to “work” for you. Monitoring social activity also gives you a competitive advantage.