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MODERN MARKETING ESSENTIALS GUIDE

SOCIAL MARKETINGA Prescriptive Guide Fortified to Build Stronger Marketing

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing 2

INTRODUCTIONThe sheer volume of marketing information available today is nearly impossible to sift through, and it can be hard to decide how to allocate your valuable time. Ain’t nobody got time for that. We’ve got marketing magic to make!

The Modern Marketing Essentials Series gives marketing leaders and practitioners the opportunity to supplement their existing marketing strategies with helpful insights into the topics you hear marketers must know about, and more importantly those that are affecting your bottom line.

It’s more important than ever—essential even—to ensure that you’re keeping up with smart marketing tips to maximize your success. We’ve got you covered. Modern Marketing Essentials Guides are a quick but detailed, compact but thorough resource for topics and education Modern Marketers need the most. Think of them as helpful vitamin supplements to your daily marketing diet.

Like any nutrition plan, this one will continue to evolve and help your marketing stay healthy and thrive. We have several guides in the works, but we want to know which topics are essential to your marketing! Tell us via Twitter @OracleMktgCloud.

https://twitter.com/OracleMktgCloud


MODERN MARKETING ESSENTIALS: SOCIAL MARKETINGTHE PROMISE OF REAL-TIME COMMUNICATIONS

It’s here. It’s now. It’s unfiltered. And it can’t be turned off! Social media is a unique force in that it’s a channel that provides distinct value for both the user and the marketer. While it’s been compared to other evolved channels—such as TV and radio—the special appeal of providing a means of “talking back” allows for a evocative, mutually beneficial dialogue rooted in the most precious (and scary) marketing asset: Customer opinion.

It’s the word of a million mouths. All speaking at once. All about your product or service. Direct that in a positive way? Your message will resound forever. And with the advent of better monitoring, marketers have a clearer view of who they are speaking to, and can glean more granular insight into how to extend the value of the conversation for the user’s benefit.

According to the 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report—conducted by Social Media Examiner—marketers place very high value on social media, as a vast majority (92%) indicate that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2013.

Tactics and engagement are top areas marketers want to master, as at least 89% of marketers want to know the most effective social tactics and the best ways to engage their audience with social media.


Touch the untouchable. Find the unfindable. The ubiquitous nature of online social activities presents a tremendous way to extend the reach of any program to engage with new audiences. For instance, social marketing helps jettison the “broadcast marketing mentality” and allows marketers to refer traffic back to their own properties: the very place where they can better execute on tactical automated practices of tracking and deploying messages.

5 PILLARS OF SOCIAL SUCCESS

To help marketers better navigate the sea of social change, we’ve put together this Essentials Guide based on 5 Pillars of Social Marketing:

1 Listening

2 Engagement

3 Marketing Communications

4 Social Advertising

5 Analytics

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PILLAR 1: LISTENING “Listen to many, speak to a few.” —William Shakespeare

The Bard could have been a Modern Marketer. He recognized the necessity of wide-open, yet discerning ears.

But make no mistake: The empowered consumer is calling the shots. Social media usage, fueled by mobile growth, has forever transformed the way consumers and businesses interact. And today’s empowered and social consumer is driving and forcing change across the enterprise.

Social channels are native to the everyday lives of consumers. They are hyperconnected and consult their social feeds for an increasingly blended mix of tasks, both personal and professional.

The insight that can be gleaned from social media lends value to nearly every department, both internally (for employees and stakeholders) and externally (for customers and brand). Just by simply “listening” online, brand marketers can then more effectively act on emerging trends and conversations with relevant messaging and high value offerings that delight audiences rather than annoy.

The average user spends 1.72 hours per day on social platforms, which represents about 28% of all online activity (6 hours a day on average), according to GlobalWebIndex.

https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/daily-time-spent-on-social-networks-rises-to-1-72-hours


HOW SOCIAL BUSINESS CREATES VALUE ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION

Department/Area How Social Business Creates Value

Marketing and Communications Continually engage with customers throughout the customer journey

Sales Build connections with prospects, create rich customer profiles, discover “unspoken” motivations and needs, and integrate commerce and social

Customer Care Social support provided by customers as well as by the company enables rapid response time via customers’ preferred platform

HR and Talent Management Enhance recruitment efforts and track employee achievements

Internal Collaboration Provides context and drives internal social engagement and teamwork across the organization

Source: Delivering on the Promise of the Social Business/Altimeter

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL LISTENING

Listen for and learn from business insights. Audiences often take to social media to voice their hopes, desires, and concerns with respect to the products and services they use. Seize the opportunity! Formally document the key words, phrases, and overall sentiment central to your social media strategy. Pay attention to what people are saying about your brand. Then cross-reference their sentiment with your documented terms and refine the list over time to reflect the wisdom of the crowd.

THE BENEFIT

This will help you learn about customer preferences—what they like and don’t like about your product—so you can harness the insights to create products and marketing programs that move the needle.

https://go.oracle.com/LP=1184?elqCampaignId=2387


PILLAR 2: ENGAGEMENT They’ve raised their hands. They’ve spoken out. They’ve expressed curiosity. Do you just blunder in and start a conversation about product A or offer B. No!

Keep ‘em coming back for more. Take a look at your own favorite pages to follow as a consumer: What do they offer you that keeps you coming back for more? Content, of course. And that content is valuable to you because it offers focused information pertinent to your interests, and/or helpful to your everyday life. Perhaps your favorite pages to follow simply offer you feel-good images, or articles that help your knowledge building on subjects significant to your lifestyle. You engage, respond, and share when these basic, fundamental needs and wants are met.

Know their likes. Like what they know. To effectively engage with your communities, it’s important that you have a solid understanding of your audience’s behavior and give them the tools they need to help grow the relationship and connection.


Here are some integral tips for enhancing your social engagement strategy:

Be an inquisitor: Most of the time, readers are content to ingest content and move on. By asking a question, either outright or in the form of a poll or survey, you send the message that their opinion matters. They will usually respond to a question where they might otherwise keep scrolling.

Take the time to mine the right topics for your audience. Also known as newsjacking, the practice of posting content around trending topics on social sites is an easy way to get meaningfully involved in the conversation and engage both current and potential customers. Facebook recently made it easy by posting trending topics alongside the newsfeed. Caution: Don’t overdo it. You can quickly lose credibility.

Remember that “sharing is caring.” Make it easy to spread the good word. Streamline social sharing so that your followers only need to take one or two clickable actions to share your content. Enable the action by embedding social sharing buttons, but not too many.

Make ‘em say your name. In the spirit of keeping your brand name top of mind, #Hashtag @YourCompany. Using @mentions helps create a sense of community by sharing content with the right audiences and groups, and by getting the attention of specific people you want to nurture a relationship with—like influencers. Social media is about relationships and connections, so use those #hashtags and @mentions to help you build them.

THE BENEFIT

Make the social connections to grow your business with engagement and insight. Get the listening, engagement, and analysis capabilities across social channels so you can better understand your customers and maintain a social dialogue.

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PILLAR 3: MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS Time to align the business application of your social efforts. “Word of mouth” has become “word of millions.” Social influences (those trusted peers and experts) have more sway than old school press and analysts. They’re the voice of the common man, after all.

All successful companies respect and utilize these independent advocates to spread messages to customers and prospects, amplifying brand, thought leadership, and awareness of products and services.

This strategy is essential to a brand’s earned media, or today’s version of “word of mouth” marketing strongly rooted in the positive extension of your brand’s appeal with a wider net of audiences.


ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL MARCOMMs

Ask your next marketing candidate about his or her established influencer relationships. The responsibilities of smart social media marketing call for much more than the mere posting of Tweets or Facebook updates. Make sure that your social marketing superstar has a solid understanding of how to identify target audiences across networks, improve the amplification of your messaging as a result, and—most importantly—how to establish meaningful relationships across your industry’s key influencers.

THE BENEFIT

Having the inside scoop on the influencers and stakeholders most noted in your industry will give your social media activities a leg up on your competitors.


PILLAR 4: SOCIAL ADVERTISING Advertising is paid. Isn’t “paid” a dirty word in the free-for-all world of social channels? Nope. It’s become expected. Like ads in the subway or on the radio.

That’s great for us. The natural tendency of people to form groups with similar tastes and views has made it easier for us marketers to reach out to the most receptive minds.

The social stakeholder—a social marketing or community manager—works closely with content, demand generation, and PR teams—as well as potentially a third party agency—to extend the value of marketing activities onto social channels specifically.

Social networks continue to evolve their advertising offerings and policies to capitalize on the opportunities that enable brands to extend their reach across audiences.


ADVERTISE ACROSS THE PLETHORA OF SOCIAL NETWORKS. HERE’S HOW:

Facebook: The social giant boasts more than 700 million daily active worldwide users, presenting a significant opportunity to drive eyeballs and engagement in a consumer-native environment. Facebook Ads are optimized to enable brands to garner additional website traffic and increase conversions. Marketers can create ads that are shown in the right column of user pages, or shown in the main News Feed to be viewed by people on both mobile and desktop. More organizations are trying to leverage their databases to drive granular marketing based on demographic and geographic insight, including running ad modeling based on known contacts.

Google+ (Google AdWords): According to Social Media Examiner, 65% of marketers say they want to learn how to utilize Google+ better. While Google+ doesn’t offer any advertising within the platform, you are able to promote specific posts on the Google Display Network, thus turning your post into an interactive display ad.

Instagram: Instagram is new to the advertising game, but many companies were quick to start utilizing the new feature. With 70% of their 200 million active users checking the platform at least once a day, many brands are starting to create advertising strategies for this platform.

LinkedIn: Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers a few different ways to advertise your content as well as your company page. The network also feature very granular targeting to ensure you’re reaching the right audience, including choosing those with a specific job title.

Twitter: Similar to Facebook and LinkedIn, you can promote your Twitter handle (or page) as well as specific posts/Tweets. When trying to promote your Twitter page, it’s important to have copy that tells people WHY they should follow you. What value are you going to add to their already busy tweet stream? What kind of content will you be sharing?

Promoted Tweets are a relatively easy way to advertise content or events. Because of the sheer volume of Tweets (Twitter boasts about 500 million Tweets are sent every day) you want to make sure that you’re sharing something that is going to be relevant to a targeted audience. Because Twitter Ads works on an auction model, it’s easy to adjust your bids and budgets accordingly.

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THE BENEFIT: A CASE STUDY OF SOCIAL ADVERTISING IN ACTION

How Oracle Marketing Cloud Cooked Up Social Demand To extend the promotional value and support demand gen efforts for our Demand Gen Pro’s Cookbook, the content and social team developed a strategic program featuring marketing influencers profiled in the asset. The eBook profiled seven case studies in a recipe format, and paid homage to the brand’s respective marketing leaders by profiling their marketing teams, as well as their roles and responsibilities with respect to the campaign. We had illustrators create caricatures with chef hats for each of

the “Master Marketing Chefs” and used these images in social advertising over the course of approximately two months to drive interest.

Results With a $20,000 budget, we were able to generate a significant social stir:

• 1,332,764 social impressions

• 305 social shares

• 900 new “Likes” on our Facebook page

• 364,828 impressions and 189 shares on LinkedIn for just one ad

These metrics do not include other organic, non-paid posts we did on both channels over the course of two months.

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL ADVERTISING

Know your audience and their locale. Test, test, and test again. Just like with email, you can A/B test your ads with different text and images to identify which is getting the most engagement. Make sure the content you’re sharing is going to resonate on the channel you choose to advertise on. Get granular with your targeting. The more targeted your message the better your money is going to be spent.

THE DEMAND GEN PRO’S COOKBOOKTasty Tips From Marketing’s Master Chefs

http://demand.eloqua.com/LP=4703


PILLAR 5: ANALYTICSYes, it’s difficult to quantify the value of social vanity metrics such as Likes, Follows, or even Comments, but marketing technology is evolving to support the mining of more meaningful performance insight far deeper than engagement.

Here are a few tips to follow when developing a strategy to calculate the ROI of your social media efforts:

• Align with the goals of your business. Are you a new startup and trying to build brand awareness and/or establish yourselves as thought leaders? Do you need to field a lot of customer service questions and complaints? Are you trying to establish a community through a social network? Do you want to use social to capture new leads? Make sure that you’re aligning with specific business goals and choose to establish a presence on the channels that have the best chance of achieving those goals. Simply put, don’t create a Facebook page just to say you’re on Facebook. Gravitate toward the channels where your audiences are playing.

• Define relevant metrics. For thought leadership, maybe it’s reach and impressions across the web. For customer service, maybe it’s response time, and sentiment. Tie metrics like these together to tell the complete story of your campaign efforts. Investing in tools that offer listening, publishing, reporting, and customer support will enable the collection of these important metrics.


• Reconfigure and repeat activities. Now that you have your goals and metrics, it’s time to align with the other teams in your marketing department to establish a publishing schedule based on your content calendar. Align with your demand generation team for a more definitive view of which campaigns are coming down the pipeline. Sync with your PR team on which announcements are happening and when, and find out which publications the organization is working with. Talk with your events teams so you know what webinars and conferences you have coming up that you can drive people to.

• Nurture and build. Once you’ve captured data on the people you’ve brought in from social in your cross-channel marketing system, you can then put them into a nurture campaign and track what other interactions you’re having with them. From there you can score that lead and potentially pass it on to your sales team.

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

Align tools and teams to conquer! To make the most of your social media intelligence across all organizational efforts, map out a plan to integrate the appropriate systems, as well as the insights being gleaned from them. This will help not only your team foster a more seamless execution focus, but also create more meaningful customer interactions across touch points. For instance, you can better connect the communication messaging to your social audiences in a way that rewards their loyalty and interest.


GETTING DOWN TO SOCIAL BUSINESSThe Six Stages of Social Business Maturity as outlined by Altimeter Group1

STAGE 1: Planning: “Listen to Learn”—The goal of the Planning stage is to ensure there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution.

STAGE 2:Presence: “Stake Our Claim”—Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media.

STAGE 3:Engagement: “Dialog Deepens Relationships”—When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer nice to have but is instead a critical element in relationship building. This requires a commitment to two-way dialogs, which can be difficult for organizations unaccustomed to sharing.

STAGE 4: Formalized: “Organize for Scale”—The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4. As social media spreads quickly throughout the organization, groups in departments and business units often act within their own silo, with minimal coordination across teams.

LISTEN & LEARN

STAKE OUR CLAIM

DIALOG DEEPENS

RELATIONSHIPS

ORGANIZE FOR SCALE

BECOME A SOCIAL

BUSINESS

BUSINESS IS SOCIAL

SOCIAL BUSINESS MATURITY STEPSThe evolutionary trajectory of how companies organize and strategize around social

PLANNING

PRESENCE

ENGAGEMENT

FORMALIZED

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CONVERGED

1 This text is an excerpt from the framework that originally appears in the Oracle eBook Delivering on the Promise of the Social Business.

https://go.oracle.com/LP=1184?elqCampaignId=2387


STAGE 5:

Strategic: “Becoming a Social Business”—As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they increasingly generate real business impacts.

This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential and benefits of social. Key tenets of this stage include integrating social into all areas of the business, garnering executive engagement, forming a steering committee, and pushing social operations out to business units.

STAGE 6:

Converged: “Business is Social”—As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization. Organizations moving into this stage are driven by a vision that articulates how social media and digital overall improve customer and employee relationships and experiences. The key tenets to convergence are the imperative to make a commitment to a single business strategy process, merging social with digital, creating holistic customer experiences with converged media, and developing a holistic social culture.

MARRIOTT REWARDS CASE STUDY:

Marriott Rewards joined Facebook in December 2011 and quickly grew to be the largest and most engaged hotel loyalty brand on Facebook. The continuing mission of Marriott Rewards is to engage target audiences around the world through social media channels in a consistent, authentic and meaningful way. The Marriott Rewards social media philosophy is to keep life at the center of the story, not hotels, programs, or deals.

The 30 Beds In 30 Days sweepstakes was the second Facebook promotion in which Marriott Rewards gave away 30 Marriott Beds to 30 Facebook fans in 30 days. The sweepstakes was hosted on a Facebook enabled microsite, which was responsively designed for desktop, mobile, and tablet users. It also lived on the Marriott Rewards Facebook page as a tab. As with the 2012 sweepstakes, it was co-sponsored by partners ShopMarriott.com and the Marriott Rewards Credit Card by Chase.

The primary goal was to increase fan acquisition and engagement on Facebook and also to drive traffic to partner sites like Chase Marriott Rewards Credit Card and ShopMarriott.com. Marriott also hoped to drive enrollments into the Marriott Rewards program.

The 30 Beds In 30 Days sweepstakes increased share of voice during the campaign. It also generated more positive sentiment around the program in general outside of the contest. According to Oracle Social Cloud’s sentiment analysis, mentions of the Marriott Rewards program and the campaign outside of Marriott channels with a clearly defined sentiment ran 90% positive during the campaign.

Additional metrics include:

• 196,909 new Facebook Fans for Marriott Rewards Page

• 102% ShopMarriott.com sales increase

• 18,244 visits to Marriott Rewards Credit Card application page

• 602,334 entries into 30 Beds In 30 Days

http://www.facebook.com/marriottrewards

ABOUT ORACLE MARKETING CLOUD

Modern Marketers choose Oracle Marketing Cloud to build customer obsessed cultures, create and manage ideal customers, and power revenue performance. They transform marketing by truly knowing the customer, engaging with cross-channel marketing, and achieving data driven accountability. Integrated information from cross-channel, content, and social marketing with data management and activation along with hundreds of app and data partners enables them to target, engage, convert, analyze, and use award-winning marketing technology and expertise to deliver personalized customer experiences at every interaction.

Visit oracle.com/marketingcloud

Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

http://oracle.com/marketingcloud

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