When developing social media strategies, each department of the business has specific goals, and the advice that we would give is to focus in the beginning on 1 or 2 goals. Then as the program rolls out, expand your goal setting to other areas of the business. In this section, we will explain some of the goals you can focus on.
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Lower customer service costs
If your proposed strategy revolves around customer service, you can benefit greatly from social media’s impact on customer service costs. Comparing the cost of accessibility and quicker response rates through online content and social networking communication, you will come to rely on phone calls less, which are historically higher cost.
Increased Leads and Sales at Lower Cost per Lead/Sale
Over time, your content library will accumulate and produce ongoing leads and sales at a fraction of the cost of advertising. In addition, by sharing your content on social networks, you can strengthen the reach of your messages.
Lower market research costs
One of the most efficient ways of gathering feedback on what your prospects and customers want is by asking them before building out a product, service, marketing campaign, among other business initiatives. Focus groups and other types of market research can be quite expensive, so you can compliment this research with high value insights from your current audience. The only issue with gathering feedback from social networks is that the samples and feedback could tend to be biased and statistically insignificant. Therefore, complimenting your current market research with social media will garner the best results.
Lower recruiting costs
The cost of attending recruiting events in-person can also run up a potentially large tab if you account for travel, accommodations, registration fees, materials, etc. Digital recruiting is more cost efficient, and you will be able to pick out the best applicants through public information that they provide on the internet.
Increase brand awareness
Since many social networks have built in viral capabilities, your content and messages can potentially spread far and wide if you have something valuable to share. You can track brand awareness by issuing special link tracking and calculate the word of mouth multiplier. The formula is: (number of direct clicks + number of clicks from recommendations)/number of direct clicks. Of course there are other tools and formulas to help you gauge brand awareness within social media. Note: the true answer to brand awareness is by conducting survey research to find out if people are “more likely to buy from you after interacting or seeing your content”. But social networks make this question a little easier by looking at the data.
Increase Loyalty and Lower Churn
When providing exceptional content and social customer service, your customers will form a community of loyalists. If you can reward this community for being active members of your brand, your retention rate for these customers should theoretically be higher than customers who are not part of the community. The only way you would be able to measure this is through connecting social data into your customer relationship management software.
This is an excerpt from “6 Social Media Strategy Tips for Market Leadership”.
