Social marketing is ultimately about creating word of mouth—otherwise I say you’re just advertising. Smart marketers go beyond broadcasting, utilising social listening tools to better understand their audiences and maximise the social influence of their brands.
Social marketing is ultimately about creating word of mouth—otherwise I say you’re just advertising. Smart marketers go beyond broadcasting, utilising social listening tools to better understand their audiences and maximise the social influence of their brands.
In other words, applying a good social listening strategy is the marketing equivalent of stalking someone on Facebook before meeting, so you know exactly what they like and what to talk about when you do.
The fact that content-hosting platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Sina Weibo are (mostly) free makes these avenues the perfect testing grounds for assessing consumer reaction to your ideas
Aside from monitoring your brand (and your competitors) for positive and negative sentiment, following trends or identifying your audience’s key influencers, there’s one aspect of social listening of which I feel too many marketers aren’t taking advantage: market testing.
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The fact that content-hosting platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Sina Weibo are (mostly) free makes these avenues the perfect testing grounds for assessing consumer reaction to your ideas, especially before spending on a fully-fledged campaign.
For example, U.S. retailer K-Mart has received a lot of positive buzz since their latest tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign, using taglines like “Ship My Pants” and “Big Gas Savings”. (Say them out loud, and you’ll get it. Or just watch them here.) A pretty bold move if you consider the relatively conservative target audience—or is it?
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Of course, K-Mart wasn’t going live with that content without first testing against potential negative reactions. However, instead of leaving the fate of their brand to a few small sample groups, they sent bite-sized versions of their content out to the Internet and just watched.
By “watched”, I mean K-Mart actively utilised a dedicated, in-house social media team to monitor customer sentiment toward the test content. They saw that the great majority of their customers were responding positively to the idea and decided to go all-out with the campaign.
If it weren’t for social listening, K-Mart very well might not be enjoying the success they’re currently seeing. In fact, it’s quite likely they wouldn’t have run the campaign at all, as the under-informed risk would conceivably outweigh the potential for success.
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Furthermore, marketers who aren’t taking advantage of what could be considered the broadest, fastest, and most cost-effective market testing tool out there run those same risks.
So, if you’re looking to up your marketing strategy game, start by testing email subject headlines on Twitter, creative concepts on Facebook and video concepts on YouTube. The key to a better media strategy is better information—unless you’re willing to risk the backlash.
