How successful will your social marketing campaign be?

To continue from my last post, marketers must not only look into the past but peer into the future to determine how successful a social marketing campaign can be.  Although no one can predict the future, we can nevertheless use some sophisticated tools to ‘learn from the future’.
With these insights we can help marketers make better decisions in how they design their marketing campaigns.  Many of these insights are covered in my recent book, Marketing Calculator:  measuring and managing your return on marketing investment (www.Marketing-Calculator.com).
Just as consumers make product and brand choices when they choose a product at the store shelf, so too do they make choices when they participate in a social media campaign.  A couple of fundamentals on how to understand consumer’s activities:

1. Consumers spend their valuable ‘time’ and choose between other entertainment events (e.g., American Idol), consume news (e.g., read commentary on the election) or they choose to participate in a social media activity about your category. 
2. When consumers choose to participate in a social media activity a small percentage are very active and highly engaged while the majority simply read and consume what has been previously submitted.
3. Consumers can either participate with your branded social media activity, your competitors’, or some other unbranded (but category related) social media activity. 
4. Both traditional and non-traditional media can deliver awareness of your social media event.
5. The entertainment value of your social media activity will drive either higher or lower engagement with more or fewer social media consumers.

What does this mean for marketers as they design their social media campaigns?

1. Regardless of how creative their campaign is, it may get sideswiped by exogenous and competitive events.  Successful social marketers are rewarded by the time consumers spend, not the dollars they spend.  Marketers must invest in measuring this time component of both their sites, their competitors’ sites and other unrelated entertainment and news venues.
2. Marketers must market to social media consumers at two levels: those that are highly engaged contributors and those that are simply consumers of contributed material.  Social media contributors deliver value to simple social media consumers by providing highly valuable content.
3. Understanding how consumers make choices in the social media category is key to success.  Questions include: 
4. • How does the emotional value of your brand compare to the emotional value of your branded social media site? 
   • b. How does it compare to competitive sites in the category?
   • c. How does the functional value of your social media site compare to the functional value of competitive sites in the category?
5. Lastly, the success of your social media campaign is also determined by how effective your traditional and non-traditional media are at driving awareness and engagement for simple social media consumers as well as social media contributors?

With these questions answered, prior to the launch of your social media campaign, you can start to gauge whether your social media investments will deliver the desired results in terms of awareness and engagement in the social media space.  My next post will talk about how to connect this awareness and engagement to purchases in the store.
If you’d like more information or discussion on this topic, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/guyrpowell) or at www.DemandROMI.com or on my blog at www.MarketingTactegy.com.