Ikroh’s Summary of the Vocus Online Conference – “Retweet: Engagement Means Business” – Part 3
Public Relations Management software providers Vocus held a fantastic webinar on Wednesday 28th July 2010, including talks from five influential speakers from the PR, marketing and social media world: Deidre Breakenridge, David Meerman Scott , Beth Harte, Lee Odden and Brian Solis.
We thoroughly enjoyed the whole day of marketing and 2.0 insights and we thought for those of you who didn’t get a chance to watch the speakers and get involved in the live chat, we’d summarise each speaker’s presentation (and their scheduled chat afterwards) and try to answer any unanswered questions from the chatrooms. Every weekday this week, we will post a summary, following up next week with the chat questions. Enjoy!
Beth Harte – Client Services Director, Serengeti Communications
Beth Harte was the third speaker of the day, with a talk on “Integrated Marketing Communications: Engaging Your Audience”.
Overview
Harte’s speech concerned integrating marketing and communication, using public relations as a mutual relationship and formatting a successful social media strategy. She began by emphasising the importance of listening to what your customers are saying about your company. They have a large portion of control in how your brand is perceived, regardless of your own brand management – they will tell the real facts about how you do business: if your customer service is slack, your delivery is slow, your products are shoddy. No amount of shiny publicity will make up for poor customer relationships.
Public relations is a mutual relationship. Marketing and communications integrated (Marcom) can help you connect and respond to your customers. Ensuring you have happy clients will create advocates who will talk positively about you and your brand across the internet for free.
How to Integrate
Integrated Marcom is not just about your site/blog/print campaign/press releases/etc looking exactly the same. It should be data driven, incorporating careful planning and monitoring to effectively target your audience.
Use Data to Identify Customers/Prospects… and Their Buying Behaviour
You need to show an awareness of a customer’s specific need or problem and provide the answer. All along the journey of purchase, people are using social media to talk about it. First they make a search (or ask others where they should look for a product); next they’ll do some evaluation, prompting more suggestions and opinions from their friends/connections; after they’ve made a decision and a purchase, there will be a post-purchase evaluation, letting others know their final summary and satisfaction.
Estimate the Value of Customers
Demographic targeting is no longer enough. We need to look deeper into psychographics, sociographics and ethnographics, into customers’ values, personal choices and unique preferences, into the online communities and the language they use to interact. Tap into these individualities and connect with them in a way they will be receptive to.
Plan Communication Messages & Incentives
Previously, customers might ally themselves with a certain brand because they enjoy what it provides, or agree with its methods and ethics. With the rise of social media, customers are able to connect and make relationships with communicators within the brand, from the CEO to a representative from a specific department. This allows for multiple audiences, micro targeting and segmentation to broaden your personal touch. Think carefully about putting feelers out to the right channels – where will your audience pay attention? What’s the easiest way to get to them and at what time?
Estimating Return on Customer Investment
Plan, measure and prove. Find ways to monitor your interactions and present these findings to your boss/executives to show how your social media networking is making a difference. For a short term option, perhaps offer a coupon via Twitter or Facebook, something tangible that you can track to see how much traffic or how many conversions it provides. For long term results you need to look at the benefits of your brand identity, customer relationships and general visibility.
Evaluation and Future Planning
Take your data and use it to plan and project into the future. But remember to be flexible, agile and adaptable. If something isn’t working then stop, rethink and find a solution. Experiment and try different methods, different avenues until you get the results you are looking for.
Five ‘R’s for Successful Engagement
#1- Relevancy: Are you delivering what your customers want? Is your communication relevant, compelling and meaningful? Are people finding you where they want to?
#2 – Receptivity: Are you reaching your customers or prospects where they are most receptive? Do you understand how they want to communicate or be communicated with? Don’t be annoying and pushy, get into a conversation, don’t pitch.
#3 – Response: How easy is it for a customer to respond to your offerings? Are you easy to do business with? Is every point of contact knowledgeable? Can you respond quickly and effectively?
#4 – Recognition: Do you recognise who your customers are; their histories, opinions, preferences? Do they recognise you in a sea of brands?
#5 – Relationship: PR and marketing cannot create relationships. Customers determine relationships, in response to how well you treat them. Provide great customer service and you will keep your relationships strong. Do customers pull you to them – are you aware of their needs and answering them?
Strategy and Planning
As Harte explained, to be measurable, objectives must include:
- A specific desire, communication or behavioural effect
- A designated target audience among whom the effect is to be achieved
- The expected level of attainment
- The timeframe in which those attainments are to occur
Some signifiers of success that you can monitor are: a change in sentiment; mentions, followers and fans; page views and clicks, bookmarking, comments and subscriptions; customer satisfaction impact; and actual increased revenue/conversions. A simple process example Harte gave was:
- Output – the content you have posted, distributed, communicated.
- Outtake – did your audience understand and act/respond/acknowledge?
- Outcome – the result – a change in sentiment, more links, views, traffic etc?
Be aware of “Shiny Object Syndrome” – don’t rush in and spread yourself too thinly because you think you need to have fingers in all the pies. Gather your tools and your research before you go charging in and setting up multiple accounts on lots of different networks. Monitor, listen, THEN respond.
Make the most of the media available to you, and use it according to how your audience will best respond – if your targets are mainly conversing on Twitter, that’s where you should be. If they’re most interested in video then put some content on YouTube. Make your media kits searchable, optimised and shareable. Use tools and monitoring programs to measure your progress and adapt it accordingly. Finally, process the data and analyse with human logic as well as digital metrics – work out the value of everything you do, plan accordingly and move forward.
Tips and Hints (from the live chat):
Business to business (B2B) marketers can struggle, or find it hard to implement B2C techniques appropriately to their market. The benefits of B2B marketing is that data is easy to come by – people may already be talking about a business before they’re even a presence online. Businesses who operate on the internet normally already have some data understanding and data gathering in place, so you can start from there to build a deeper relationship with their customers by sharing and interacting socially.
Social media is ideal for small businesses. They can use the same tools and tactics as a large corporation, but their extra benefit is their small budget. Small businesses tend to be less wasteful with their marketing budget (and remember social media only costs time, otherwise it is generally free). For small businesses, they must first have a goal in place, then start small, make use of the personal side of local business and gather information where their customers are social.
Well, that’s all from us today – thanks again to Vocus and Beth Harte for a great presentation. Come back every weekday this week for the rest of the webinar summaries, and check the blog next week for our Q&A session comprised of all the questions that couldn’t get answered on the day.
You can read the other parts of our Vocus Online Conference Summaries with Deidre Breakenridge, David Meerman Scott, Lee Odden and Brian Solis at the Ikroh blog.
Resources:
Books:
Integrated Marketing Commmunications, The Next Generation by Don Schultz
Measuring Public Relationships by Katie Paine
Websites:
www.endlessplain.com
www.serengeticom.com
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Thanks so much for attending and recapping my session, it’s much appreciated!
I want to clearly state that most of what I spoke about came from the book that Don Schultz & Heidi Schultz wrote: “IMC: The Next Generation. Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communications.”
If you are interested in the integration and ROI of your marketing communications efforts — whether you are a small business or a large corporation — I highly suggest you get a copy sooner than later!
As well, Katie Payne’s book will also be helpful for measurement and metrics. Another great book for metrics is Jim Sterne’s new book “Social Media Metrics.”
It’s time for marketing/PR and business professionals to take the bull by the horns… Stop spending wastefully, start targeting smartly, give customers what they need and really think about how your are moving the needle with your efforts.
Beth Harte
Thanks again for the great conference and thanks for the comment! There was a huge amount of fantastic information for anyone wanting to boost their SEO and social media engagement. Cheers.