How Social Media Campaigning = ROI

When a company is seen as being active across a social media platform, it is established as having its proverbial “finger on the pulse”of modern society.  It projects that the company has something to say, that it is part of the community – far more effective than simply a static web page.

 The Tourism Authority of Thailand is campaigning across social media at the moment, offering chances to win a range of goodies.  This social media campaign is active across Facebook and its interlinked Twitter account and accompanies its event counterpart in the entire campaign plan, where awareness was also spread.  The campaign objective is to increase ‘likes’, spreading awareness of Hug Thailand which will in turn benefit the entrant by offering the latest travel tips, deals and news, relating to The Land Of Smiles.  Clever.  Also effective - results were immediate once the campaign was launched across the social media platform – doing away with many geographical and communicative borders.

We know social media can

1. increase your business’s trustworthiness and goodwill which will definitely translate to increased and better branding. When businesses are able to have conversations with their customers, the result is going to be a great amount of credibility.
2. help your campaigns reach out to achieve targeted lead generation.
3. make it easier and more flexible for your business to engage with customers. Crucial - this will help your business retain existing customers and of course increase your brand credibility.
4. increase SEO - generating traffic to your website. Including links to your website will redirect users to your website where they may choose to look around - cross promotion.  Setting your website up with the likes of Google Analytics will also serve measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
5. save money on market research – as social media evolves, more advanced, back-end, user-friendly measures are available to gauge the success of your campaigns.  Used effectively, this can translate to what works and what doesn’t.
6. improve your business through giving customers a voice.  Feedback helps to better your products based on what your customers require. Social media channels aid in making customer engagement possible and that customer feedback is available to use as basis for improvement.
7. Save you some cash.  There is no better way or an even cheaper way than a social media channel when it comes to announcing new products or services for your company. Social media makes it easier to spread the news regarding a new product or service. You can even include information such as arrival or release dates.
8. Enable intuition aligning with your customers’ requirements. Act based on what they want. By knowing their preferences, it will be much easier for you to enhance all of your products and plan your marketing campaigns more effectively.

So, in conclusion…  If roughly only one eighth of our technological iceberg is visible above the water and from this one eighth we can see all of these benefits, social media campaigning makes for an exciting time ahead!

Some points to remember when you’re planning your next social media campaign:

1. Profile your target audience – speak to them.  People are inundated with sales material all day every day across the internet.  Offering something beneficial in a language that resonates is immeasurable.
2. Put an expiration date on your campaign.  It’s important to create that sense of urgency for participation’s sake.  If something is for a ‘limited time’, entry is more emergent which translates to better results.
3. Spread the word in your own backyard.  We have to crawl before we can walk and we all have Facebook friends.  Some of us 50, some of us 5,000.  Spread your campaign with friends that could benefit to start with.  The beauty of social media is that exposure is huge – through getting word out the right way, the target market will come to you instead of the other way around.
4. Refresh.  Don’t expect to post up a great deal once and watch the response flood in.  Without spreading and increasing that awareness every day, your great deal becomes a great dream – a nice thought that’s otherwise unattainable (because people don’t know it exists!)

-    Sofia Margelis