CH APT ER 6

ON YOUR SOCIAL PAYOFF STRATEGY

"The beginning is the most important part of the work." Plato

n the previous chapters, I shared about how social media has changed

the business landscape as a tool for promoting your company, and a place for you to create a community of users, influencers, and other industry drivers that can help your brand grow. We have identified the duties, roles, and responsibilities that are essential in making the social media marketing process work effectively. We have also talked about The C3 System, a framework that we use for every client so that they are able to plan a ROI-centric social media strategy. Setting your strategic objectives and the timeline to achieve them is the first of the steps under The C3 System's Conversations stage. Doing this right will set the stage for the rest of your campaign. Many companies make the mistake of neglecting this stage, or setting
83

Social Payoff

ambiguous objectives that cannot be properly measured. As illustrated by this quote from John Wanamaker, "Half the money I spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Similarly, marketing should not just be about spending money, buying ads, and simply just getting "awareness" for your brand. It should also have a specific measured outcome.

Before jumping on the social media bandwagon, ask yourself this critical question in your role as a business owner or marketer: What do you want to achieve from social media? Copyright Marcus Ho

For example, when I ask top executive management what their social media campaign's key business objectives are, the answer I get is usually "more fans on my Facebook Page". Unfortunately, this isn't a key business objective. My friend Jay Baer has a popular quote, "The goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business because of
84

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

social media." "More fans" is a social media metric, but it must relate to key business objectives. Without tangible objectives to guide your campaign, your social strategy will cause confusion, as your actions and decisions will not be guided by definitive targets.

All social media campaigns start with your business strategy. Everything else will have to fit into the overall strategy of your organisation. Source: Convince and Convert

Setting strategic objectives and timelines help you to keep track of your progress, maintain your direction in the complex social media environment, and allow you to remedy situations should errors or missteps occur in the midst of the campaign. Based on my experience, there are usually three different key objectives that organisations want to achieve: Increase brand awareness, increase sales, and consumer retention.
85

Social Payoff

Once objectives are set, the next stage of The C 3 System is to identify metrics to measure the success of your objectives. Copyright Marcus Ho

Once objectives are set, the second stage of the Conversations process is setting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the campaign. This means getting into conversation with your management and team on what KPIs to use to measure the success of your earlier set objectives. These KPIs will, in turn, allow you to determine your Return On Investment (ROI) or social payoff at the end of the campaign. Many companies have difficulty quantifying their social media ROI due to the complex and often intangible nature of social media marketing. My team and I at SocialMetric have a social media ROI framework with 24 unique metrics to help you, based on the three key objectives of increasing brand awareness, increasing action or sales, and consumer loyalty.

86

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

The Framework to Measuring Social Media ROI. Download the full version at SocialPayoffBook.com Copyright Marcus Ho

Brand Awareness ROI

Back in 1961, Russel H. Colley came up with the DAGMAR approach, which stands for Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results. Ever since then, the DAGMAR model has been internationally recognised and used in many marketing departments all over the world. According to the DAGMAR model, each purchase prospect goes through four steps: Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, and Action.

87

Social Payoff

To explain this in a little more detail, all advertisements begin at the "Awareness" stage, where consumers first know about the brand. They do not necessarily know about your products and why they're different yet, but at least your brand name will ring a bell in their minds. The next stage is where they start to comprehend your products, start to recognise and understand how you're different from the rest of your industry. Once they are past that stage, then comes the Conviction phase where consumers will rave about you and prefer your brand over your competitors. And the last stage is the time they put their money where their mouths are, and eventually purchase your products. The Social Media ROI model is built on this existing DAGMAR model with brand awareness on top, broken down into three phases: Awareness, Comprehension, and Conviction.

Awareness
Awareness refers to consumers' ability to recall and recognise the brand under appropriate conditions, and link this memory to situations and conditions associated with the brand. For example, when most people
88

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

think about fast food, they think of McDonald's, KFC, Subway, etc. The very first step to achieving brand awareness is exposure. Most brands traditionally buy advertising spaces on traditional media to get exposure. Just walking along a popular shopping area will expose you to many advertising messages such as bus ads, posters, and banners. The downside to these traditional ads is that even though people may be exposed to the existence of the brand, they do not know the product benefits. These ads are hampered by space constraints, and detailed product benefits are usually omitted as a result. This is fine, as the main goal of these ads is to gain mindshare and awareness. The social media equivalent of awareness can be measured by the number of Likes on the Facebook Page. A Facebook Like is equivalent to consumers giving you their email address, as you will gain access to the consumer's News Feed. Do not underestimate the value of a Facebook News Feed. Half the battle is already won, since you can publish content relevant to your consumers and start building a relationship with them directly. Another metric to determine awareness is the total reach. Reach refers to the total number of people who have viewed a particular piece of content posted on the Facebook Page. When a consumer engages with the content you post, it is likely that friends of that engaged consumer, who share strong affinity scores, will also see the post and get exposed to your brand. The third and fourth metrics to measure awareness are viewers and web traffic, which are not related to Facebook. Most companies today have YouTube channels, where corporate, event, and advertising videos are housed. The number of visitors to your website from your different social equities also impacts your exposure levels. You can find out the number of visitors through a free and amazing tool called Google Analytics. And to close the loop, the final awareness metric is cost-per-impression, arguably the metric that best explains the difference between traditional and social media. Cost-per-impression means the total cost required getting 1,000 eyeballs to your advertising message. If you measure your cost-per-impression across all marketing channels, traditional and social, you will be able to come to a conclusion to determine whether social media is a more
89

Social Payoff

effective and cheaper channel in reaching out and gaining awareness as compared to traditional media.

One of our client's Cost-per-Impression ROI calculations. Copyright SocialMetric

Comprehension
Awareness is the first step to achieving brand awareness, but note that it only means letting your target audience know of your existence. Once they become aware, it is time to engage them and to get them to understand more about what you are offering to the market. Comprehension means reaching out to your consumers and letting them know more about your brand, products, and services. Traditional counterparts in this advertising phase are roadshows and exhibits where you can directly interact with your consumers. In the social media space, the People Talking About This (PTAT) score of your Facebook Page is one metric to measure that level of
90

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

engagement. PTAT basically means the number of people who engaged with your content by Liking, Commenting, and/or Sharing it. This can be likened to a passer-by who asks an employee at a roadshow about product benefits. The next possible metric to measure comprehension is Retweets on Twitter. A Retweets is basically like forwarding an email. If an airline company, for example, tweets about a promotional offer, you can Retweet it, and it will be seen by all your followers on Twitter. Content conversations is the next metric - people commenting on the content on your social channels. Social brand mentions is measured by the number of times your brand is mentioned on your consumers' social profile. It is useful to measure your content conversations and social brand mentions on a monthly basis, as this will allow you to find out if consumers are interested in your brand. The cost-per-engagement metric will tie all your engagement initiatives together. By taking the total amount of cost, including manpower and logistics, divided by the amount of engaged consumers, you will get your cost-per-engagement score. Once again, measure this across all your marketing efforts, and you will realise that social media offers you the lowest cost-perengagement.

One of our client's cost-per-engagement calculations. Copyright SocialMetric

91

Social Payoff

Conviction
The final stage in measuring brand awareness is conviction, which refers to how much a consumer feels positively about your brand. Let's say a friend asks you which smartphone brand he should purchase. You carry a Samsung phone and you are pleased with the experiences you've had with it, so you would definitely recommend the Samsung phone to your friend. You have just influenced your friend to find out more about the benefits of Samsung phones, which may lead to a purchase. To measure such convictions traditionally would be extremely costly, starting at around $100,000 through mass surveys. And even then, the results may not be quite accurate because everyone has different agendas when filling up survey forms. To measure conviction on social media, the first metric is positive social brand mentions, meaning how many connected consumers are talking positively about your brand online. This can be done using social monitoring tools like ThoughBuzz, Meltwater, or Brandtology. The next metric, Category Share of Voice, can also be determined by social monitoring tools. Category Share of Voice means finding out which brand is the most talked about within the same category or industry on social media. This is important as the more people talking about your brand, the more influence your brand will enjoy.

92

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

Category Share of Voice research as shown in the screenshot above. As you can see, Chanel is the current market leader at the point of the conducted research. Another metric you can use is Category Share of Search, which means which brand is the most searched for within the same category or industry on the social web. Research from GroupM has shown that a person is 2.8 times more likely to Google a brand if he/she has already been exposed to the brand's social campaigns. For example, if they are already fans of your Facebook Page, they are 2.8 times more likely to Google your brand name. Many conclusions can be drawn from this, but what is certain is that brands who are Googled more often are more influential.

In the screenshot example above, it shows that the search volume for L'Oral's nail polishes is competing closely with OPI. You can find out the same for your industry at Google Think Insights

Action/Sales ROI
Conversions The next key objective for a social media campaign is to increase sales. First of all, all the brand awareness has to be converted to sales. The first metric to measure conversion is sales-intended traffic from social equities. If you haven't done so already, install Google Analytics for your website. It is free and extremely useful in giving you valuable insights on your site's traffic flow. If you are in the retail industry, you will want to find out which pages your consumers are accessing through social
93

Social Payoff

media, and whether those pages are sales-related ones, like your online order or outlet location page. When consumers visit sales-related pages, it means that they have the intention to buy. From those insights, you can calculate your cost-per-visitor score. Take the total amount spent on growing your Social Community (Facebook ad spend, promoted posts) plus the total amount spent on engagement (creating content, running word-of-mouth campaigns), and divide the number by total visitors on your sales-related webpages. If your company is not sales-based, actions taken by consumers is a good metric to gauge conversion. These actions include providing email addresses, phone numbers, subscriptions, donations, and RSVPs. All these actions can also be measured using the cost per-visitor-formula, by replacing the visitor number with the relevant action number.

How to calculate your Cost-per-Visitor score. Copyright SocialMetric

94

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

Sales Figures

These methods of quantifying sales may not be relevant to all companies it really depends on the industry and type of business you are in. To track sales, put up offers and promotions exclusively on your brand's social media channels. It doesn't matter which platform you choose, just remember to make it exclusive to social media. Facebook Offers is a new tool launched by Facebook and it has proven to be very useful for every retail company that we have worked with. And if you're in the retail business, you can also use a Whisper Code, which is a secret word that is only announced on specific social platforms with a specific offer. In order to claim that offer, your customers must softly whisper the secret word to the cashier at your retail outlets. Another possible way is through the social connectivity of customers. This means connecting all your customers on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform so that you can see an accurate amount
95

Social Payoff

of increase in sales from customers socially connected to your business. To make this happen, there are many CRM companies and tools that would be able to integrate your Point-of-Sale systems with your social presence. The outcome for you is to be able to tell if customers who are socially connected with you are spending more versus customers who are not socially connected.

Consumer Loyalty ROI

Some companies are happy with the amount of brand awareness and sales revenue they enjoy. Their main objective is to retain consumer loyalty so that sales revenue will remain constant. Consumer retention can be measured by actions taken from your top engaged users. Social CRM platforms like AgoraPulse allow you to find out who are your most engaged fans based on the interaction they have with your Facebook Page. The more times they Like, comment, and Share your post, the more engaged and loyal they are considered to be. This group of loyal consumers are your brand champions, and are likely to speak positively and promote your brand to their own friends.

This is one of AgoraPulse's main features: the Facebook CRM tool. From this, you can tell who are your topmost engaged fans and further cultivate brand advocacy from them. Source: Agora Pulse 96

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

Such Facebook CRM tools can be extremely helpful in cultivating more consumer loyalty. We showed the top 20 most engaged fans to a particular client in the business of distributing a very well-known haircare product across Asia. There was a lot of potential from this, and the first action step they took was to bring their top 20 most engaged fans (not surprisingly, all of them were ladies) out for a Sunday brunch. During the brunch, they distributed a couple of their sample haircare products to these ladies and asked them to test them out. In the following months, some of them sent in their positive feedback about using the sample products and the brand manager made an effort to stay in touch with all 20 of them. Being in the distribution and retail business, the company also had to do mystery shopping once every quarter, and they relied on this same group of 20 ladies to mystery shop (which some ladies would be happy to do for free). Likewise for certain focus group sessions, the company relied on this same group of top most engaged fans. Just by leveraging on these relationships, the company was able to save more than $50,000 in expenses. When there were questions or negative feedback on their Facebook Page, one of these 20 top most engaged fans actually answered on the company's behalf! Imagine the same scenario for your business: You having your own group of brand advocates. How much cash do you think you can save? The next metric is Net Promoter Score (NPS) of socially connected consumers. You can find out your brand's NPS by asking one simple question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you will recommend [your company name] to a friend or colleague? A score of 0-6 means that these respondents are detractors, 7-8 means they are passive, 9-10 means they are promoters. NPS can be calculated by the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. This model can also be used to improve customer service, as it gives you opportunities to engage with your detractors and find out how to improve their experiences with your brand, turning them into promoters. Companies like Agoda (the hotel booking site) are known to use this very frequently, especially after you book your hotel. This can possibly decrease your company expenses

97

Social Payoff

as well, as less complaints means less manpower and budget allocated to customer service.

How to calculate your NPS. Copyright SocialMetric

The Action Plan

All these metrics may be a little overwhelming. You may be wondering why it is so tedious to measure social media ROI. It is actually not that difficult and you can avoid the analysis paralysis. For a start, you need to understand and follow The C3 System, especially the Conversations stage, where you set your objectives and KPIs. Once you decide on your objectives, whether to increase brand awareness, increase action or sales, or whether it is consumer loyalty, determine which stage of the social media ROI framework your brand is currently at. From there, pick three metrics and measure it for at least three months. Progress through the different stages, and select different metrics to measure your ROI. The results you get will certainly be worth the effort.

98

On Your Social Payoff Strategy

REFLECTIONS

Does your company's social media metrics support the overall

business objectives? Pick three metrics from the Social Media ROI model and measure it for at least three months. ROI is key to every social media campaign. Always be mindful of achieving the best possible ROI in whatever strategy you implement. Brand awareness is a largely vague term used loosely by many social media agencies. Familiarise yourself with the three phases of brand awareness (Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction) so that you will have a clear idea of what actually constitutes the term. If your company's objective does not include monetising through social media, other metrics, such as email addresses acquired, can be used to measure the campaign's ROI.

99