So you have 500 ‘likes’ on Facebook and Twitter is a-buzz with talk about your brand … but how many of those people have gone onto buy your product? And how can you tie all this insight into the metrics that really matter – revenue, site visits and so on? Simon Morris, Marketing Director at Adobe Systems, explains how to remove the guesswork and connect social media to real business results, using real life case studies of brands that are ahead of the curve and using this intelligence to drive revenue.
Evidence of the rise of social media is not hard to find. In recent months alone Facebook exceeded 800 million users, LinkedIn went public, Twitter generated 1bn tweets a week and Google launched its own social network, Google+, which in its first few weeks attracted 10 million users.
Being able to engage directly with a huge customer base using just 140 characters or via a Like button is every marketer’s dream. But we’re being asked ‘so what’ by the board – they want to see how social media activity connects to their core business objectives.
Up until now tools have failed to answer the ROI question because they are essentially disconnected from the systems that measure business performance. Indeed, leading brands have been relying on data from disparate tools using slow and manual processes which end up providing little or no useful insight. Fans and mentions are great, but what really matters is how these impact your bottom line.
We surveyed European Marketing Directors recently and 78% felt they don’t have a complete and up-to-date view on how much they are investing in, managing and delivering social media campaigns. Yet 58% claimed that deciding how to measure social media investment is their top priority.
We’ve been working to solve the quandary and launched SocialAnalytics, part of our Digital Marketing Suite.
It removes the guesswork associated with social media engagement, and replaces it with strategies and experimentation. For example, most brands are guilty of implementing the Facebook Like button without realising its potential so we’ve developed a best practice guide to help CMOs pinpoint how conversations and social media engagement such as ‘likes’, comments and page visits, drive important actions such as orders and revenue. It’s also able to drill down into the actual conversation in terms of tweets, comments and blogs so marketers are able to see the type of people driving discussion and influencing others.
Virgin America is a great example of how this can work: Virgin’s core objective was to use its Facebook page to ‘turn more fans into flyers’. It used SocialAnalytics to tag and measure the impact its Facebook content was having on online sales to help it ensure it was including content which would really strike a chord with its customers. For example, if a certain post drove more people to click through to the booking centre – how many people of these then converted into sales? By updating the content based on customer actions and feedback, Virgin America saw an overall increase of 15% of bookings from Facebook and was able to make social media a vital part of its overall marketing programme.
Gartner Group, predict that by 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will “regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets,” because of lack of information, processes, and tools. CMOs and marketing professionals now have an opportunity to turn that around and demonstrate to the board they know how to harness the power of social media and boost the bottom line for brands.
To find out more, check out our SocialAnalytics website.
For more insights follow us @AdobeUK, @OmnitureEMEA, @smorris75
By Simon Morris
Marketing Director
Adobe Systems
www.adobe.com
