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Listening, Learning and Responding to Customers with Social Media

Organic is ideal for community management. We don’t need paid campaigns to listen to what people are saying about/to clients.

However, we can use paid campaigns to reinforce core messages that we’ve shared via organic posts. For example, if the company has been involved in a public crisis (think Volkswagen and the emissions crisis), then information you’ve provided to people who have contacted you can be used as part of a wider educational marketing program with paid ads to extend the message reach.

What’s important is that the listening and learning elements are part of your organic approach to social media; they should happen naturally by being actively involved with your community.

Harnessing #Hashtags and Threads

Smart social marketers look for ways to engage groups of people based on a shared interest/passion. While one-to-one communication is the much-touted holy grail of social marketing, the impact and efficiency of communicating to a wider audience simultaneously is important to understand.

Hashtags are a great example. We can create a hashtag for free, or simply dovetail with an existing hashtag if what we’re doing/saying is relevant to that audience.

By using a hashtag for a specific conversation, we can unify all posts into a searchable thread that helps individuals to be part of the conversation and follow what others are saying. It also helps foster new connections, as like-minded people can find each other based on a shared interest/passion.

Micro Targeting Based on Common Interests

We can target people based on self-identified interests. For example, if we are selling sports equipment, you can specifically target social media users who have expressed an interest in sports or actively talk about their kids sporting activities. Marketers doing this typically experience higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and conversion for social ads than for blanket campaigns.

Remarketing with Pixel Trackers

Remarketing is a growing marketing tactic that is a very powerful tool. Remarketing involves marketing to people who have already visited your website, then and tracking them with a pixel to continue promoting relevant content/offers based on the context of their visit. Basically, once customers visit a site the client’s ads will follow them around the internet every time they visit a website that is a member of the remarketing network.

Developing Custom Audiences with Facebook

Facebook supports email targeting, the ability to upload customer email addresses and then target those users on Facebook with tailored ads. This lets you micro-segment based on your existing customer database. One application is customer loyalty marketing, promoting offers to existing high value users via Facebook ads.

The challenge here is for clients to know their own audience. If the client has a good CRM database and can profile and segment meaningfully, then we can export highly targeted lists to social media accounts for advertising purposes.

Building Look-Alike Target Audiences

The ability to upload customer lists into social advertising accounts lets us create look alike audiences – so targeting other users on the social network who closely match the client’s existing customers.

This taps into a core acquisition marketing principle, the aim to understand core audience profiles and then invest in campaigns that appeal to others matching those criteria.

More Links to Research:

• Social Media
• Customer Engagement