The Secret of Using Social Media to Attract and Retain Customers: A Recap from State of Search

  • Social Media

As we mentioned last month, members of our team often attend industry events to gather knowledge and make new connections. We occasionally are chosen to speak at the events, which is a huge honor for us and we love to do it! Speaking gives us the opportunity to share some things that we’ve learned – but even more so – continue learning along with our peers.

Earlier today, I (Katy Katz – Director of Account Strategy for Marketing Refresh), spoke at the State of Search Conference in Dallas and wanted to share my presentation for those who could not attend the event.

My Presentation

What are you currently using to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts?

Likes?
Comments?
Shares?
Impressions?

How much is this information really telling you about the value that your audience is gleaning from your content?

For any marketing initiative, it’s important to set the right goals and measurement points so that you can test, learn, and improve. For a long time, social media engagement has been the best that we’ve had to work with. But it’s extremely hard, if not impossible to align those metrics to your overall revenue goals. As many as 60% of businesses are unable to measure their ROI from social media!

So what’s a responsible, goal-following marketer to do?

There’s a Better Way

Avinash Kaushik published an article recently with a sobering opinion—that social media is dying at the hands of marketers because of the surplus of “me me, buy now!” content. He talked about the “utopia” that social media had the potential to be—a place for brands and consumers to connect and share real information.

It’s no surprise that with aggressive revenue goals as our leading objective, innocent marketers have cluttered the utopia with our conversion-pushing content agenda. Don’t get me wrong, calls to action are important, and businesses have to make money, but I propose there are goals we can set that will improve your social media effectiveness and bring you more revenue.

Customer Success + Social Media = One Heavenly Match

Customer success is most often defined as the moment when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their use of your product or service. Purists will tell you that this is not the same as happiness because happiness is an outset of success. But for simplicity’s sake, I will be referring to your customer’s happiness throughout this post as well.

Customer success is a critical component for your business because if your customers are not successful with your product or service, your business by default cannot be successful!

It also happens to be the perfect pairing for social media because social media is at its core a space for communication. And the best form of communication provides value to both parties. It’s not a one-way street.

Great, So How Do We Measure It?

Customer success already has a built-in key performance indicator that we can tap into for social media measurement: net promoter score. Net promoter score is the degree of happiness have with your brand. It makes a strong overall KPI and can easily be broken out into digestible SMART goals for social media such as:

  • Increasing the response time on social media
  • Increasing the number of reviews on social media
  • Publishing a certain amount of customer success content per month

Be Sure You Know Your Customer

Once you have an idea of some goals, it’s time to create some content. But you can’t do that effectively without a clear definition of your ideal customer and the path they follow to purchase. Don’t make the mistake of building a social media strategy without mapping out your personas and buyer’s journeys. It’s hard to identify the customer success factors if you don’t understand the customer!

How Should Your Social Content Strategy Look?

Alright, now it’s time to put your research to work. Build out an editorial calendar and start sharing some inspiring, useful, supportive content. To give you some inspiration, here are a couple of brands who do a great job with customer success content:

  • AdEspresso: This is a platform that helps brands optimize their Facebook ads. But they go far beyond just promotional posts about their brand. They also talk about the components of a successful campaign or how to target effectively. This content will help their customers be more successful with the full process of creating Facebook ads, and in the end, they will have better outcomes.
  • Lowes: Have you ever seen the Lowe’s Fix in Six videos? These short videos are interesting to watch and help their customers be more successful with the products they purchase in the store. Lowes is not in the business of hardware education, but by sharing this information, their customers have better outcomes.

Be Useful and You Will Retain More Customers

At the end of the day, just with any other marketing initiative, the most important thing is to craft a plan, test it, measure the results, and continue to learn and grow. The more you support your customers toward their goal of achieving their desired outcome, the more favorable of a view they will have of your brand. Let’s take a look at our social accounts and review? Are we trying to help our customers or has this just become another place for us to push an agenda? If your answer is the latter, maybe you should consider some changes to your strategy.

If you would like to view the slides from my presentation, click here.

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