Digital By Design

With so many social media platforms available to the marketer, should a company adopt only one platform as its main/primary channel? 

Companies should consider using multiple social media sites but with a strategy that is specific to their business. Defining goals and understanding who the target audience is is the first step in defining which social channels to use.

Social media has changed the way companies reach their customers. Consumers are using social media to purchase as well as communicate with brands and to share their love and disdain for a brand. "Sixty-six percent of Twitter users have discovered a new small or medium-sized business (SMB) through the network, 79 percent have retweeted an SMB, and a whopping 94 percent plan to make a purchase from the SMBs they follow."(Newberry, 2016)


How should a company identify which platforms to use and how to allocate its marketing resources? 

Every business has different goals, objectives and target audiences which can help to define the social media channels that they should use. 

Start with defining your audience by creating persona characters. Define personal demographics such as age and gender, lifestyle characteristics including income, education and residence location. If your audience is a 65+ woman with disposable income living in San Diego, she is going to be using different social media sites than a 32 year old male in the technology field in Seattle.

Once you've defined your audience, pinpoint the social channels that they use.

“For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors. Instagram not only increased its overall user figure by nine percentage points, but also saw significant growth in almost every demographic group.  (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, Madden, 2015)

• "Facebook -  72% of adult internet users/62% of entire adult population. Usage continues to be especially popular among online women, 77% of whom are users. In addition, 82% of online adults ages 18 to 29 use Facebook, along with 79% of those ages 30 to 49, 64% of those ages 50 to 64 and 48% of those 65 and older.

• Pinterest - Women continue to dominate Pinterest – 44% of online women use the site, compared with 16% of online men. Those under the age of 50 are also more likely to be Pinterest users – 37% do so, compared with 22% of those ages 50 and older.

• Instagram continues to be popular with non-whites and young adults: 55% of online adults ages 18 to 29 use Instagram, as do 47% of African Americans and 38% of Hispanics. Additionally, online women continue to be more likely than online men to be Instagram users (31% vs. 24%).
  
• Twitter - 23% of all internet users/20% of entire adult population. Twitter is more popular among younger adults — 30% of online adults under 50 use Twitter, compared with 11% of online adults ages 50 and older." (Duggan, 2015) Learn more about Twitter demographics.

How to Allocate Marketing Resources:

In order to effectively allocate marketing resources, it is critical to establish measurable goals. Defining measurements will help to establish ROI, Return on Investment.

Use the S.M.A.R.T. system to define measurable goals for each social media channel. S.M.A.R.T. = Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Based.

Example: 

Specific: Increase social media ad click throughs by 20% in 2017 Q1.
Measurable: Measure the click throughs against a benchmark.
Attainable: A 20% increase is attainable compared to a 100% increase in that time frame.
Relevant: The goal is relevant to a social campaign that drives traffic to the website.
Time-based: Defining the 3 month first quarter period of 2017 sets a measurable timeframe to reach the goal.


“The networks you dedicate time to should yield the highest ROI for your niche and target demographic; otherwise, your time, money, and resources would be better spent elsewhere.” (Hamm, 2015) If you determine that Facebook has the highest return on your investment then allocate a greater amount of your resources to Facebook. Splitting your financial resources based on return in each social channel will help you to reach your SMART goals. 

Social media also requires a resource of time investment. It is unwise to post the same content on every social channel. There may be crossover of audience but one of the points of using multiple channels is to tell your story differently.


Social Media Time Management

Platforms like Hootsuite allow marketers to manage all of their social media sites in one place. Content can be created, scheduled and measured all from a single dashboard. This is a huge time save over submitting, viewing and measuring on multiple sites.



Marketing has moved past push advertising to conversation with consumers. To stay engaged with the consumer, an ongoing conversation needs to happen and using multiple channels such as social media and blogging help to keep a company vital. 

In a 2010 article, "Why Conversation, not Content, is King" by Catherine Novak, she discusses the idea of conversation being the real King of digital marketing. "“Content is just something to talk about” puts human interaction at the centre of the picture.  And it explains the rise of social media on the web, the growth of multi-user games on all platforms, and the persistence of people meeting in real life, and not just in “cyberspace”.  Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising." (Novak, 2010)

Not only is it critical to promote your business on multiple social channels and engage with your audience there, but to truly have a conversation, you must also participate in social media with other businesses and individuals. Conversation is not one sided.  It also requires being a good listener.  Listen to your audience and respond with what they are asking for.

A great example of listening and responding quickly is when Oreo Cookie put out a memorable tweet in response to a power outage at the Super Bowl in 2013, "You Can Still Dunk In The Dark." "AdAge reported that the graphic released during the blackout was “designed, captioned and approved within minutes,” thanks to members of 360i — the cookie company’s agency — gathered at a war room during the game."  (Huffington Post, 2013) 

Did it increase sales? Difficult to measure, but it definitely started a conversation.

"While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media lies in the direct connections between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest." (Solis, 2010)


Resources:

Duggan, M., Ellison, N., Lampe C., Lenhart A., Madden M. (2015 January 9) Social Media Update 2014.  Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. SocialMediaToday.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://socialmediatoday.com/wordspring/152636/why-conversation-not-content-king 

Duggan, M. (2015, August 19). The Demographics of Social Media Users. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/
Newberry, C. (2016, August 11).Top Twitter Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers. Hootsuite.com. Retrieved from: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-demographics/

Hamm, S. (2015, March 6). Allocating Time and Resources in Social Media Marketing. Business2Community.com.
Retrieved from: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/allocating-time-resources-social-media-marketing-01176630#K1PrsJPv5rDBUS4v.97

Solis, B. (2010, May 18). 21 rules for social media engagement. Mashable. Retrieved from: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Huffington Post. (2013, February, 4). Oreo’s Super Bowl Tweet: ‘You Can Still Dunk In The Dark’. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/oreos-super-bowl-tweet-dunk-dark_n_2615333.html

In my first post we looked at Landing Pages and why they are important to a nonprofit fundraising campaign. Assuming that we've implemented the landing page and campaign, both online and nonline, we'll examine the analytics to look at the conversion rate.

Conversion Rate - The ratio of conversions over a relevant denominator.

We started our analysis by looking at the sources that drove traffic to our landing page.



From here we can dig deeper and look at our social media channels.


Here we can compare the conversion rates based on the social channel that drove the visit.  Remember that the visit count does not necessarily result in a conversion. People may visit the site but not take the next step in responding to the call to action.



We defined our goal as a completed donation on the landing page. Examining the conversion rate report for this goal can show us when, where and how visitors are converting. 

Since we are probably paying for advertising in some way for this campaign, its important to know the return on investment, ROI. Measurement helps us define that.

“According to the 2015 Nonprofit Benchmarks Study, 76% of NPO’s invested in some form of paid advertising – the most popular being text and display ads.” (Vrountas, 2016)

By looking at a specific time period we may find that certain days of the week or time of day have a higher conversion rate. This helps us know when to spend our online ad dollars for the campaign.

Where the highest conversions come from help us to focus on where we should be advertising.

The "how" of the equation might be based on device. If we see a higher conversion rate for mobile devices we must make sure that everything on our site is mobile friendly.  We might also target future campaigns to mobile users.

Additionally, if we see that bounce rates are highest with mobile devices, then there is perhaps an issue with the responsiveness of the site.

Real World Results:

When performing A/B testing for new campaigns, measuring the conversion rate for each of the different offers will help define and achieve the high possible goal outcome.

Let's look at CharityWater again. CW used A/B testing in an email campaign using the same image but a different call to action; matching, location specific, and location plus match.

This testing required four different landing pages and four different email campaigns. Beginning with a control page, they were able to test against the specific variables.




The results showed that people spent more time reading the "match only" email.  

Additionally, comparing the opens, click throughs, and conversions compared to previous campaigns, resulted in a higher open rate and conversion rate using the "match only" campaign. People felt that they were making a greater impact with their donation with the matching opportunity. (Mongeon, 2014)

Conversion rates provide valuable information when we compare them against our goal, against sources and in testing, all of which lead to more successful campaigns.



Resources:


Charity Water Images and Case Study:

Mongeon, M. (2014, October 16). Case Study: Using Analytics to Optimize your Content Strategy. Email On Acid. Retrieved from https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-marketing/case_study_using_analytics_to_optimize_your_content_strategy

Elements of an effective landing page:

• A call to action form
• Simplicity in design
• Images that support the goal