We’ve tried social media (read Facebook) and it didn’t work for us!

I’m referring to an article in Entreprise romande magazine of 12^th October, entitled “Les entreprises suisses trop timides sur le net”.

This article refers to two Swiss studies produced during 2012 and discusses the reasons why Swiss SME’s are reticent to embrace digital marketing. One major concern appears to be a perceived lack of return on investment.

Both studies may be downloaded here.

Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik E-Commerce May 2012

Bernet_PR & ZHAW Blog in German Social Media Schweiz March 2012

Stephane Koch, competitive intelligence advisor, is interviewed by journalist Emilie Veillon.

Are SME’s barking up the wrong tree?

Stephane stresses the importance for companies to nurture a holistic approach to digital marketing. Business must be more selective about the social media tools and platforms they employ.

Indeed, says Stephane, companies need to craft a digital strategy linked to business goals, and define measurable outcomes. This must to happen prior to making investment and other tactical decisions.

I can only agree with Stephane Koch and would add another key point: a business needs to gain insight about its target audience, for example by creating customer personas.

There’s nothing revolutionary about knowing thy customer. Ever since humans trade – be it at the souk 2000 years ago or online today –  entrepreneurs know that nurturing trust and long-term relationships is good for business… and to create such relationships, it matters to have a good understanding of who our clients are and what they care about.

To summarize, we need 3 things:

1. Business goals – what exactly do we want to achieve?
2. Measurable business outcomes – how, when and where does social media influence our customers? Experiment & measure.
3. Target public – whom are we talking to?

No more fuzzy thinking!

More often than not, the disappointment with Facebook (and other social media) stems from fuzzy strategy: no business goals, no measurable business outcomes, no clearly defined target public.

When decision makers deplore the lack of conversion (transforming leads into customers) it’s less about Facebook and more about not knowing how to harness social media’s power.

Ways to measure.

There’re is no single but myriads of ways to measure the impact of online marketing.

Short of ideas about measurable business outcomes? Here is a list to inspire you.
NB: start with only one or two!

1. Revenue Goals
2. Engagement Goals
3. Cost Savings Goals

Revenue Goals:

• Speed of sales cycle
• Percent of repeat business
• Percent of customer retention
• Transaction value
• Referrals
• Net new leads
• Cost per lead
• Conversions from the community
• Members
• Posts or threads
• Comments
• Inbound links
• Tags, votes, bookmarks, shares
• Referrals
• Post frequency
• Issue resolution time
• Account turnover
• Employee turnover
• Hiring and recruiting
• Percent of issues resolved online

Engagement Goals

• Members
• Posts or threads
• Comments
• Inbound links
• Tags, votes, bookmarks, shares
• Referrals
• Post frequency

Cost saving Goals

• Issue resolution time
• Account turnover
• Employee turnover
• Hiring and recruiting
• Percent of issues resolved online

Conclusion – 5 recommended tips

1. It pays to consider social media engagement in a holistic way.
2. Before embarking our money and human resources on costly and labour intensive digital marketing projects with fuzzy objectives, let’s focus on our clients.
3. A most direct way to craft a customer-centric digital marketing strategy is to brainstorm in house and achieve a holistic approach.
4. Brainstorm with front-line employees: support engineers, call centre receptionists, sales account managers, subject matter experts, customer facing assistants.
5. Get everyone on board, i.e. motivated about your digital marketing strategy. Because, to make it work, you need to be a team. Together, identify a few (only a few) key issues your organisation wishes to focus on.

You might well realize that Facebook was never a good match for your business.

But other tools and platforms tell quite a different story!

 Credits

I’m much obliged to Lee Odden and his book Optimize which inspired me to write this article. The Business Goals listings are transcribed directly from his book, Chapter 13, pages 202/203.