Social media marketing is in the spotlight for 2012, but the latest research from Forrester shows that surprisingly marketing budgets have been slow to shift to social. Simon Morris, marketing director, Digital Marketing business unit, Adobe Systems, explains how to remove the guesswork and connect social media to real business results.
Social media marketing has certainly been the buzzword of 2011 – from Facebook advertising to Twitter engagement everyone wants a piece of the online action. This trend is set to continue with Forrester research highlighting that 25% of European marketers not currently using this method of marketing plan to adopt it in 2012.
Although brands may have their heart set on social, in order to justify and even accelerate this shift to digital, marketers must clearly understand and prove the business impact of their digital initiatives to those in charge of budgets. This is where many have struggled in 2011.
The problem for many businesses is that they are using metrics to measure the success of social media activity such as Facebook ‘Likes’ or Twitter followers, but failing to make the next step by understanding how this drives or correlates with improved business performance. Without this framework, and without establishing the right key performance indicators, it is difficult to make the case for more investment in social media-related business activity and associated analysis. Worryingly a recent report by Econsultancy highlighted that whilst 84% of companies are using or striving to use social data to understand marketing ROI, only 12% believe they are harnessing it in the right way – a huge waste of time and money!
This is all set to change in 2012 however, as tools are available that allow marketers to measure their social media activity and tie this back to business impact. When used properly they are able to pinpoint how conversations and social media engagement such as ‘likes’, comments and page visits, drive important actions such as orders and revenue. They are also able to drill down into the actual conversation in terms of tweets, comments and blogs so marketers are able to see the type of people driving discussion and influencing others. Through this insight marketers can then evolve or tweak their campaigns accordingly so they get the best possible return.
The result? More brands and businesses committing budget to social media marketing in 2012 and marketers producing more effective social media campaigns.
By Simon Morris
Marketing Director
Digital Marketing business unit
Adobe Systems
http://www.adobe.com/uk/
For more information on how Adobe is helping brands to measure their social media success, visit Adobe’s SocialAnalytics website or follow us @AdobeUK, @smorris75.
