How to Integrate Social Media in your Marketing Mix

In the 4P square Marketing master class of February 15th, the Belgian social media expert Clo Willaerts shared her vision on social media and how to be successful in integrating it into the marketing mix.

It’s not easy to summarize her extensive presentation, but anyway, I gave it a try. Here are my personal  highlights that I would like to share with you.

Start with the basics

As a 4P square marketing expert, I was glad to hear from Clo that in order to be successful in social media, the basic marketing conditions need to be dealt with first.

Those are: (1) understand your target group, (2) know where to find your target group online, (3) develop your online touch points (online sales and communication channels) and finally deliver content which matches your target group and their needs.

This basically is where the 4P square methodology for Online marketing strategy development starts with too.

Another interesting basic marketing idea is that it’s maybe not a good idea to start with social media if you can’t deliver a proper product or service, because you’re offering a supplementary complaint platform.

In contradiction to classic media, who are able to make your product or service really shining, social media is taking off all shine. A few unsatisfied customers can easily reach all your network and fans with complaints.

However, my personal vision is that a complaint platform is not necessary a bad thing, as long as your organisation is able to cope with the complaints and as long as you’re able to improve your product or service.

If you’re not able to do this, consider not to invest in Social media yet and start with the basics first.

Playtime is over

If the basics are right, then you’re able to be successful in Social media. Social media is a huge online playground, but unfortunately the playtime is over.

Trial & error and experiments need to evolve to return on investment (ROI). Conversation is great, but return on investment is greater.

You need to go further than conversation. It’s time for leads, contracts and revenue. Determine your goals before you start!

A great example is the BMW Fan Day. BMW invited Facebook fans for a real – offline – fan day. Fans and their families where exclusively invited through the BMW Facebook fan page and needed to register via the BMW website, were their coordinates where locked into the CRM system.

Great idea, since there is no way you can export your fans from Facebook. The results: more concrete fan information in the CRM system, which enables marketers to develop well-targeted, relevant communication and campaigns.

A lot of fans did participate at the BMW fan day and took test drives, and once in the car … you’re sold. (Sorry, I’m a BMW fan too 😉 )

Maybe you’re thinking … Yes but BMW has a large budget. Well, one our consultants illustrated an interesting local SME case (with a small budget) and which is costing only a few hundreds of Euros a month and though is delivering a few thousands of return.

The secret: smart segmentation! In his case he simply targeted the people that have “engaged” in their status and offered them a real relevant deal for their upcoming marriage. Clo agreed that segmentation is part of the success in social media.

An interesting insight to be successful in Social media is that you shouldn’t consider it on a campaign base. You cannot expect valuable return in a few weeks.

Unless having 10.000 fans (which is a lot in Belgium) is valuable enough for you. You can buy 10.000 fans for 50 Euro if you want to. Real value however is building up relationships with your fans and customers through social media.

Once you’ve accomplishes this, than you can start with campaigns, research, conversation and lead generation through social media.

If you want the real value, think middle long term. It takes months and years to build a valuable fan page or social network. You need to earn you fan page to be successful, not to buy it.

Try to humanise your fan page too. Look at the difference in this B2B case: the Classic E&Y Twitter account versus the E&Y humanised Twitter account (every week another human face). Humanisation of brands is an important trend.

Clo Willaerts confirmed that fan pages and social networks are evolving in the same way, so in order to be successful in social media, try to humanise your pages.

Some interesting tips

Consider YouTube as advertising channel. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and is offering great advertising possibilities, which are going much further than an ordinary video.

Check out the YouTube advertising page for more information. Consider to replace micro sites with YouTube advertising.

If you’re on LinkedIn, complete your company page. Check out the LinkedIn Company page information for more information. It gives you an opportunity to brand your company on LinkedIn.

http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard gives you the YouTube trends for the country and demographic target of your choice.

You can compare trends too. Very interesting to get to know your target group a little bit better.

Those are for me personally the most relevant insights of Clo Willaert’s presentation.