Social Media ROI: 3 Strategies for making your social investment pay off

As worldwide social media use continues to rise, social media budgets are rising as well. More spending means more responsibility and more expected return on investment. ROI has always been in question when spending on social media, but even more in today’s economy. According to eMarketer establishing measurements for ROI tops the list of social strategy goals in 2011.

How do we measure social media ROI and what strategies help us reach that return? That question is answered differently by brands, small businesses, and agencies.  By looking at how we use social media, we can build some basic metrics for measurement: Revenue, Knowledge, Protection.

Revenue: Social Commerce and Location-Based Services

Just look at how social commerce grew in 2010 and it’s hard to dispute how social media can directly provide ROI and even become an integral part of your business. Most importantly, you’ll recognize social commerce (purchasing direct from social media platforms) can directly reflect how well your brand engages consumers and positions itself on social media.  This proves that revenue can now be a key indicator of an effective campaign, even in social media.

Location-based services continue to prove a great tool for driving in-store traffic that may otherwise walk right by, and if they are utilizing a check-in deal/coupon, tracking those sales becomes much simpler than measuring brand awareness through social media.

Knowledge: Consumer Insights and Competitive Intelligence

According to a MarketingProfs study, 80% of CMO’s reported customer suggestions help shape product decisions. This means that gaining a better understanding of your consumers, competitors and your market is one of the safest bets for social media ROI.

By listening to your consumers through social media you can gain insight into their wants and needs, informing your product innovation and marketing campaigns. Through listening to your industry broadly, you can uncover industry trends as well as glean an immense amount of competitive intelligence.

Leveraging social media for market research is often less costly than traditional market research.  Additionally, the leveraging identifies shifts in trends earlier, and can span across the entire enterprise providing a return on investment all departments can see.

Protection: Brand Monitoring and Threat Awareness

Brand monitoring continues to top the list of must-haves for social media strategists in 2011, but is it enough? Having a brand monitoring dashboard is essential for brands, but does it solve a problem if no one is looking at it?  There is no ROI in data, it’s all in how you use it. Having the expert manpower and a sound brand monitoring & threat tracking strategy is just as important as the technology behind it.

What should you be looking for? Customer complaints, mentions in online and news media, employee activity, and of course videos in reference to the brand. We all know how fast news in social media can spread and if you’re not actively monitoring your brand, there’s a good chance that a large portion of your customers will be aware of an incident before you are. Don’t just get a dashboard, develop a brand monitoring and threat tracking strategy to actively monitor your brand.

Where are you searching for ROI when it comes to social media? Is it all about building brand awareness or does revenue reign supreme now that monetizing social media is becoming more achievable?

3 Ways social media market research can impact your business

Over the past year, social media listening has grown from an engagement tool to market intelligence that is being leveraged by brands worldwide. Still, many marketers often question whether or not listening to their brand or market will provide any real value. Market research is now beginning to leverage social media in a revolutionary way that provides insights and impact across the organization.

Whether your focus is on advertising, marketing, or product innovation, social media can be used to drive your business performance.

1. Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

When it comes to marketing campaigns, knowing as early as possible whether or not your million dollar campaign is resonating with your target consumers is vital. Even the most well-thought out campaigns can quickly under-perform or possibly exceed expectations. Sales data only tells part of the story, as it doesn’t provide the ‘why into the buy’.  Is the campaign contributing to the success?

Social market research allows your company to measure campaign performance from the start, alter course mid-stream if needed, and even compare units sold with online consumer conversations giving you a full view of campaign effectiveness.

2. Purchasing Decisions

Consumer purchasing decision starts with a want or need and typically end with a product sale. The path a consumer takes to get from point A to B is often greatly influenced by their social circle. Often the path to purchase includes consideration of competitive products, feature and benefit evaluation, recommendations from others, reviews and of course price. How do you know which factor is the biggest barrier or driver to purchase your products?

By leverage social media research you can quantify and qualify which step in the path to purchase continuum is stopping consumers dead in their tracks. Does your brand have a bad reputation? Is your product too expensive in the market? Is there a lack of product information readily available? Social market research can provide answers that the marketing team can utilize to generate more sales.

3. Product Innovation

Innovation is a driving force behind many market research departments.  What needs are not currently being met in the marketplace? How can we improve our existing products? Social market research can help answer these questions by listening to not just your products, but your target market.

By listening more broadly you can capture consumer conversations from the world’s largest focus group, social media. Read more on how to use social media market research for product innovation in this previous post.

Find out more about how you can leverage social market research by pre-registering for our next social market research webinar

4 Steps to Product Innovation through Social Market Research

“The process of product innovation involves the introduction of a good or service that is new or substantially improved. This includes, but is not limited to, improvements in functional characteristics, technical abilities, or ease of use.” – Wikipedia

Product innovation is a driving force behind business today. From automotive to pharma and food to finance, leading companies are looking to capture the available white space in the market by filling a consumer need with product.  A company’s future is often its ability to quickly innovate, identify consumer needs and develop new products and improve on existing products to fill those needs.

The world’s largest focus group

Social media has quickly become the hub of unbiased and unsolicited consumer opinions allowing brands to gain deep insight into market needs.  Social media has given consumers a strong audible voice and product innovation teams can now leverage these consumer conversations and opinions.

There are 4 easy steps to inform product innovation through social market research:

Step 1: Listen Widely

Listening is undoubtedly the most important part of the social market research process. It’s important to cast a wide enough net in order to gauge industry conversations while also listening to consumer conversations about products at the same time.

Step 2: Segment the data

Once the data is collected there’s a ton of great anecdotal mentions, but that’s about it.  Without knowing “Who is talking?”, “What are they saying?”, and “Where are they saying it?”, it’s difficult to act on the data.  Segmenting is an important step and provides key information such as: Age, gender, ethnicity, location, education level, and even hobbies/interests and the ability to identify the needs of a target audience.

Step 3: Dig for trends and key insights

Understand the involved consumers’ attitudes towards products in the marketplace, what they want and what they need.  Social market research provides an innovation playground where brands can track consumer unmet needs over time and dig deeper to answer the two important questions: 1) What does my consumer want? and 2) Why do they want it?

Step 4: Validate the findings

Apply the findings from Social Market Research to more traditional forms of market research to test ideas.  Smaller focus groups and online panels are great ways to test against target demographics.

For innovation it’s important to have a deeper understanding of consumer attitudes, wants and needs in the consumer’s natural habitat, the Internet.   Social market research can help you achieve that understanding quickly and economically.

Social Media Intelligence Case Study – Consumer Packaged Goods

Situation:

A large consumer packaged goods company wasn’t getting the sales expected on a new product line.  The client is in a highly competitive industry and wanted to understand the consumer attitudes toward the product and identify the reasons for/against purchasing.

Solution:

We used our proprietary social media intelligence methodology and analyzed all public online mentions about the product line.  Four (4) relevant themes were identified within the consumer conversations: brand reputation, cost and value, product quality, and product packaging.  We further analyzed the demographic and geographic information within the discussions to further segment and uncover rich consumer insights.

Results:

Within two (2) days, ListenLogic collected and analyzed 17,000 comments over a 30 day period.  We determined the following:

• Consumer attitudes toward the brand, reputation and value were relatively positive for all age and gender segments, no issues there
• Quality was seen as a slight issue, but not enough to explain the lack of adoption
• For female consumers, specifically 18-34 which was one of the product’s primary targets, packaging was the issue

Through social media analysis, we were able to determine that females, specifically 18-34 located in the Northeastern United States, had real issues with the packaging design and were choosing a competitor’s product.  The packaging size was too big, and during the cold stormy winter in the Northeast women didn’t want to carry the large package out to their cars from the retailer.  The competitor’s packaging was 25% smaller.

Armed with this qualitative and quantitative data, the client made a well-informed decision to quickly alter the packaging size to make it more universally acceptable, as well as create a new campaign targeting female consumers.

For more information and to see how we can help you leverage social media for consumer intelligence, please contact ListenLogic at 1-888-ROI-ON-SM or info@listenlogic.com.

What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social media monitoring has significantly changed the way brands and marketers leverage social media for business. The constant stream of mentions on sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs provide a great way for companies to monitor their brands, products, and consumers in social media. While monitoring has been useful primarily in customer service and buzz-tracking, there is far more value to be realized.  Enter the age of social media intelligence.

What is social media intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the combination of quantitative and qualitative insights gained from monitoring a specific brand, product, or subject matter in social media.  All in real-time.

How can social media intelligence benefit my business?

Social media is the world’s largest focus group with millions of participants sharing their unbiased thoughts each day. With this massive data set, businesses now have the power to mine and further understand consumer opinion and slice and dice data by gender, age segmentation and location.  Here are 5 specific case studies on social media intelligence:

Applebee’s Restaurants – Campaign (in)Effectiveness

Seven (7) days after the launch of Applebee’s ‘Real Burgers’ national TV ad campaign in March 2009, the campaign was really striking a cord with consumers. The only problem was that we saw it was overwhelmingly negative (80%) with most wondering ‘What were they serving us before?’  Applebee’s ended up running the campaign for 4 months too long.  Imagine the money saved and harm avoided if they had learned that it was bombing sooner.   Their competitor, with our help, knew all of this as it unfolded, whoops.

Membership Association – Why are members canceling?

A national membership association was seeing a sharp increase in membership cancellations over a 3 month period.   Through social media intelligence they learned they had a material age segmentation issue: the organization’s stance on key political issues and a changing membership demographic was making a segment of members very unhappy.  The association segmented their member-base into three distinct buckets and now speaks to each segment with a unique voice.

Soft Drink Company – New Product Launch

With the launch of a new soft drink in 2009, a soft drink company saw that young men loved the the new product while women had mixed opinions.  Through social media intelligence the company quickly learned that older women were taking offense to the TV ad creative, not the product (the taste was great).  The soft drink company replaced the creative to better reach its female target.

Major Restaurant Chain – Location-based Issues

In September 2009, a restaurant client saw  ‘tough meat’ being discussed by its guests in social media.  Through geo-location, we helped the restaurant chain learn that the issues were regional in nature and all specific to the northwest US.  The client traced the problem back to a regional meat purveyor who had outsourced to a third party.  This issue was resolved within 3 business days.

Cable TV Network – Rapid Consumer Insights

In TV and Entertainment, learning what viewers think of programming is critical to success.  In Q2 2010, a cable TV network aired its hit show’s season finale on a Friday, by Monday we delivered the network intelligence on what viewers thought of the finale, the show’s entire season, and reported on 100’s of fan suggested story-lines for next season.

Social Media Intelligence Empowers Decision-making

Social media intelligence gives actionable insights into business and detailed and segmented information about consumers.  If your organization wants to understand questions like “why teenagers choose a competitor product, or how females in the northeast US feel about your service”, contact us.   We deliver the intelligence.