Strategic DirectionSteps to social marketing success: Creating emerging marketing strategies in the digital era

Article information:To cite this document:, (2013),"Steps to social marketing success", Strategic Direction, Vol. 29 Iss 7 pp. 17 - 20Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/SD-04-2013-0006

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Steps to social marketing success

Creating emerging marketing strategies in the digital era

To paraphrase Monty Python’s Flying Circus no one expected the social marketing

revolution. Like the British satirical comedians in their famous Spanish Inquisition

sketch there seems to be some debate about how many secret weapons there are to

the social marketing phenomenon that businesses need understand and in truth perhaps

about its effectiveness as well.

Inevitably when technology enables and changes consumer behavior quickly, many firms

will struggle to understand the new market dynamics at play. This may not necessarily be the

observation of what is happening, nor indeed the import of the changes. Often the scale and

speed and impact can be slow and in turn expose knee-jerk reactions, or too quick for an

adequate response to be made.

Agile response

An example of this could be observed in the Spring of 2013 when the online retail behemoth

Amazon snapped up San Francisco-based book recommendation hub Goodreads. The

strategy is seemingly straightforward – Goodreads has been very successful in connecting

people and their book habits and reviews, doubling registered users in the previous year;

Amazon understands that recommendations drive sales for books and other media;

combine the two and a vertical strategy is apparent as Amazon both facilitates reviews and

then offers sales of everyone’s recommendations.

But if it was so simple, why did none of the major publishers, who feel under threat from

Amazon’s dominance, move for Goodreads?

Commentators at the time suggested they were simply too slow, or too risk averse or both to

make a deal happen. This may have been true, but it could also point to too little

understanding of the power of social marketing, and how it can be enhanced most

effectively. There is still a great deal businesses have to learn about how to use social media

to propel sales; there is still a great deal academics have to learn about this as well. However

the three articles reviewed here build on some established practices and show how

multi-step approaches can be combined to offer great clarity and certainty in implementing

strategies in an area that continues to twist, turn and develop at an extraordinary speed.

Two into four

In their article ‘‘Social marketing at the right place and time with new media’’, Bernhardt et al.

(2012) start from one of the early marketing marvels in the shape of McDonald’s, go through

one of the seminal marketing theories of the 4Ps and end up in the whirl of social marketing

DOI 10.1108/SD-04-2013-0006 VOL. 29 NO. 7 2013, pp. 17-20, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0258-0543 j STRATEGIC DIRECTION j PAGE 17

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campaigns to suggest that there is indeed a huge opportunity for mobile marketing

campaigns as long as the nature of mobile technology and use is understood properly.

Firstly, they use the example of McDonald’s and its founder Ray Kroc, who is quoted as

saying success is down to be in the right place at the right time, and then acting on that

situation. This highlights the importance of location in business success, and this is of course

one of the four ‘‘Ps’’ of the traditional marketing mix, alongside price, product and promotion.

What the authors want to debate here is that the notion of place is now more nuanced than

previously, as consumer interaction with products and services may not be at the store or on

a PC, but on the small screen of a mobile device.

An example that illustrates the change is the kind of marketing activity that accompanies the

pending of a new shopping mall. No longer are people expected to browse round and

physically check out the shops and any deals they have - mobile apps can help plan s

shopping trip beforehand with voucher offers; location technology can alert shoppers to

deals on their devices at any stage, and social marketing techniques can help flag up

promotions beforehand, and then track engagement through social networks afterwards.

this requires a customer-driven strategy from retailers, and is not without its complexities.

After firstly understanding that decisions are made on the mobile screen, not necessarily in

store, they then have to understand the multiple channels, interactivity and cadence of

marketing activity required to maximize impact. These activities can appear dizzying and

present a kaleidoscope of consumer behavior. The way forward, the authors argue, is

developing competences around what they refer to as ‘‘web 3.0’’, which includes

harnessing Big Data, cloud computing and location services on mobile devices to map out

interaction with brand propositions.

Measure and manage

Leveraging the new age of web tools should indeed lead to the ability to leverage the new

realities of place in a marketing context, but in order to do this, first these new toys need to be

managed effectively. This management imperative is discussed by David Benady in his

article ‘‘The architecture of social success’’ (2013), where he goes one better than the 4Ps

buy offering five rules to ensure effective social media management:

1. Create policy guidelines - these can include what NOT to do as well as what works, which

includes channel-specific responses or developing a blog to deal with larger issues

2. Social media as a customer complaints tool - complaints cane be shared and damage

reputation capital, but solutions can play at that game as well and create the opposite

effect

3. Organization-wide participation - often the conundrum here is between total control

(which can stunt interaction) and liberal interaction (which can lead to mixed messages).

Benady recommends a hub-and-spoke approach around a specific social media team

that supports individual departments

4. Free advertising - Facebook used to be free, but increasingly free use may not reach as

many people as before, so it may be worth using emergent networks such as Tumblr or

Pinterest who are still in the ‘‘free’’ part of their freemium strategy, especially if a specific

market such as youth or females are the targets

‘‘ Leveraging the new age of web tools should indeed lead to theability to leverage the new realities of place in a marketingcontext. ’’

PAGE 18 jSTRATEGIC DIRECTIONj VOL. 29 NO. 7 2013

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5. Move media management inside - outsourcing social media marketing may not be the

right choice if there is the right expertise in-house, and this has the benefit of bringing

brands even closer to their markets

Secrets of success

So, you have your social marketing strategy, and you understand the dynamics of place in

the customer-driven market towards mobile devices, and you have understood the

importance of managing data and implementing a tight social media policy. So do you then

just sit back and watch the sales shoot upwards? Not necessarily. This could happen, but

many social marketing campaigns will merely improve brand exposure and positioning, and

have to form part of a wider marketing campaign. Nevertheless, a value has to be placed on

this activity as it will incur some cost to the business, and the return on investment (RoI) is just

as crucial a metric in the social marketing world than in any other.

In their article ‘‘Increasing the RoI of social media marketing’’ (2012), V. Kumar and Rohan

Mirchandani underline the importance of establishing RoI by placing an emphasis on the

speed of action and visibility of the activities undertaken. They do this by provide a seven

step approach for executives based on previous research that shows the advantage of

identifying the consumers with the highest influence over word of mouth (WOM) activity and

engaging them individually.

Their framework is as follows:

1. Monitor conversations around the brand.

2. Identify influential individuals by using the assembled data.

3. Identify shared traits of those consumers that have been identified and create profiles in

terms of their messages, influence and social impact.

4. Locate influencers who could be important to a new campaign.

5. Engage those influencers with a view to ‘‘recruiting’’ them as advocates of the new

product or service to provide positive WOM.

6. Create incentives for positive WOM by offering freebies or online recognition.

7. Identify rewards of activity by linking WOM to product and brand growth.

Social marketing in action

So this is the theory –how can it be done in practice? The authors include in their article a

case study of the Hokey Pokey ice cream parlours in India, where they identify the steps laid

out above in the successful approach the company had to increase its brand value and

sales positioning. In doing this, the authors also created three scales by which success can

be identified:

1. Customer Influence Effect (which measures the influence individuals can have on others

through social media).

2. Stickiness Index (which measures the propensity for influencers to talk about the product

sector in question).

3. Customer Influence Value (which uses the Customer Influence Effect to identify the value

created in a given campaign by an individual).

For Hokey Pokey, they saw effects for customers but also within the company itself. The

ability to calculate customer influence and value proved critical in determining the success

of the marketing campaign, and shed much greater light on this process. However it also

benefited the company as a whole as it gave it a crucial competitive edge while offering a

sense of accountability for the social marketing campaign team. In pure numbers, their

campaign where they introduced the new metrics showed an 83 percent increase in social

VOL. 29 NO. 7 2013 jSTRATEGIC DIRECTIONj PAGE 19

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media RoI and sales growth of 40 percent with attendant increases in brand awareness. With

those numbers, it is very hard to argue with the notion that social marketing is here to stay.

Comment

The three articles covered here should give businesses in the first throes of social marketing

campaigns a reliable guide to using these activities in a way that has been tried and tested.

The articles by Bernhardt et al. (2012) and Benady (2013) do a great job of helping set up the

processes needed, but the Kumar and Mirchandani (2012) piece is a superb exposition of

how to implement social marketing strategies effectively, how to harvest the right data to

show impact and also offers some insight into such strategies with an excellent case study.

Keywords:

Social marketing,

New media,

Media management,

Advertising,

Marketing

References

Benady, D. (2013), ‘‘The architecture of social success’’, Marketing, 6 March, pp. 30-32.

Bernhardt, J.M., Mays, D. and Hall, A.K. (2012), ‘‘Social marketing at the right place and time with new

media’’, Journal of Social Marketing, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 130-137.

Kumar, V. and Mirchandani, R. (2012), ‘‘Increasing the role of social media marketing’’, MIT Sloan

Management Review, Fall, pp. 55-61.

‘‘ With those numbers, it is very hard to argue with the notionthat social marketing is here to stay. ’’

PAGE 20 jSTRATEGIC DIRECTIONj VOL. 29 NO. 7 2013

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