Figure 4. Example of marketing process flow
We might have a segment of trolls with limited reach that we don’t care about, but another segment of trolls who are very influential exists and we need to understand that they are customers who also voice opinions about your brand. Marketers now have the tools to understand authors of social media content, their history, and amplification of voice. Further, marketers can link social media profiles across the ecosystem of social media and also to traditional customer profiles using various strategies. So how can a marketer put this understanding to good use? Where I’ve seen success is simply applying your marketing strategy as usual and using whichever tactics make sense for your business without forcing the use of social media to broadcast your marketing messages. In short, use social media to better understand your customers and use this information to enhance dialogues with them. See Figure 3.
seen is to leverage traditional customer intelligence, things like lifetime value and risk, while also supplementing these things with robust digital profiles and segments. See Figure 4. We can leverage existing campaign execution techniques in place today and augment them with information about our customers extended by social media. We can separate out the customers that use social media and then market to them directly, armed with topics of interest and sentiment that apply to them, but also understand the indirect ramifications of their influence in social media. Finally, we can measure success and test these techniques and compare lift.
Marketing Execution As we have learned, direct marketing is rapidly changing. In my experience, most marketers agree that conversion rates of traditional outbound channel-based campaigns are on a steady decline. Today, consumer attention is at a premium and it’s becoming less effective to interrupt them with marketing messages in the mailbox or on the phone – if the message is not relevant to them. One of the most effective strategies I’ve
Chris Long is a strategic technical and marketing consultant in the SAS Canada Customer Intelligence practice. He has over 15 years of experience helping organizations with analytical marketing and real-time marketing strategies, including social media. He can be reached at Chris.Long@sas.com.
vue | MAY 2014
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