The Pontiflex Social Marketing Guide

The things people say on social media platforms can greatly affect the way your brand is perceived. Fortunately, it’s possible for you to play an active role in this exciting world by implementing some smart social marketing techniques. We developed this guide so you can do social marketing the right way and build a vibrant community for your brand.
Start learning below.

• What Is Branding?   

  Before we get into the social aspect, let’s talk a little about branding in general. Branding is the process that creates a feeling, attitude, or perception in a person toward a product or company.

  Branding can help a company differentiate itself from the competition. For example, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi make colas, but a person might see Coca-Cola as old-fashioned or established, and Pepsi as edgier or for a younger demographic. That’s because each company has its own unique brand.

  Branding also drives customer loyalty and influences purchase intent because people who identify with a brand are usually more likely to buy products from that brand. Ultimately, building a strong brand can help ensure that consumers choose you over the competition.

  

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• Can I Measure Branding?   

  Yes! You can measure the impact of branding before and after any marketing campaign.

  Before the Campaign

  When planning a branding campaign, you should have a clear idea about:

  

  • Reach: the number of people (in your target audience) that will see your message.
  • Frequency: How many times each person will see your message. (Typically, a person needs to see a message multiple times to notice, absorb, and comprehend the message.)

  After the Campaign

  You can determine if your branding campaign is successful by looking at the following criteria:

  • Brand Advocacy: How many more users are talking about your brand with family members, friends, and colleagues?
  • Aided awareness: Does a person recognize your brand when shown the name?
  • Unaided awareness: Does a person think of your brand even when they are not given any cues? (For example, the words “luxury car” may for some trigger the image of a BMW, which is a good thing for BMW.)
  • Brand preference: Do people prefer your brand to the competition?
  • Purchase intent: Has your campaign made people want to buy your product?
  • Brand loyalty: Do people keep coming back for more?

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• How Has Branding Changed With the Internet?   

  Before the Internet, you could run a branding campaign by purchasing a TV or radio spot, a newspaper or magazine ad, or an outdoor billboard. The problem with this: you’d never know specifically who saw your ad.

  But on the Internet, people can express interest in your ad by signing up. The shroud of mystery is lifted, and you know exactly who wants to hear from you.

  Simply put before, you purchased anonymized impressions. Now, you acquire the user data (first name, last name, email address) of people interested in your brand.

  Once you do that, you can start a conversation with these people – through email, Facebook and Twitter. You can talk to them in a way that is relevant to them.

  

  Here’s an example: let’s say Sarah Smith is a regular shopper at Tommy Hilfiger. However, she’s primarily interested in the Fashion Week Specials and summer dresses.

  Thanks to the Internet, Sarah Smith doesn’t have to have to sift through the whole Tommy website to find what interests her. Instead, she can sign up on the Tommy Hilfiger website or sign up for their ad — and tell them to email/Facebook message/Tweet her when they have new specials or summer dress arrivals . Voila, Tommy Hilfiger is now more relevant to Sarah Smith!

  Acquiring user data is the first step toward providing a more relevant experience to your users, and furthering deepening connections with your brand.

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• Where Does Social Media Fit in?   

  Social media plays a vital role in branding because it gives you an opportunity to communicate directly with the people who care about your brand. You’re not just speaking to the masses — you’re talking to specific individuals who can spread the word about your brand in an organic way to friends, family members, and colleagues.

  Where are these people?

  Your social media audience is spread across a wide variety of online platforms, from social networks like Facebook and Twitter to online discussion forums to the comment sections of blogs. If you can reach a significant number of these people and bring them together around your brand, you can create something very powerful: a brand community.

  

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• What is a Brand Community?   

  A community is a group of people who come together because they share a common goal or interest. You see communities all the time in the offline world — a book club, a political party, etc.

  Brand communities are formed when people come together because they are interested in a particular company and its products.

  Advertisers can connect to consumers through brand communities and have meaningful two-way conversations. On the Internet, the most common examples of brand communities are e-newsletters, discussion forums, Facebook Pages, Twitter groups, and loyalty programs.

  A good social marketing program talks to people in multiple places, so that even if a person leaves one (unsubscribes from an e-newsletter, for example), that person can be kept engaged through Facebook or Twitter.

  Here are some examples of brand communities:

  Threadless.com Newsletter

  

  JetBlue Twitter Group

  

  ASPCA Facebook Page

  

  Graco Nation Community Site

  

  Coca Cola Rewards Program

  

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• What Should I Do Before Launching a Social Marketing Campaign?   

  Any community, whether it’s online or offline, is made up of real people. Real people have names, email addresses, and zip codes, data that you will need to speak with them online. You can’t build a community of anonymous users.

  So before you launch your campaign, you need to acquire the user data of people interested in your brand. You should target two audiences:

  • People visiting your site or landing page.
  • People on the Internet who are not on your site or landing page.

  

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• How Can I Acquire User Data of People Visiting My Site?   

  You can use a variety of techniques to capture user data on your site:

  • Site registration form

    

  • Facebook Plug-ins

    You can use the Facebook Registration + Login plug-in to access data that a person has chosen to make public on Facebook. This can include a person's real name, email address, profile picture, and friends.

    

    Facebook recommends that you replace or supplement your user account system with their plug-in. However, we do not recommend that you make Facebook the sole user account system on your landing page.

    Please note: Many people have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings to ensure that their data is not available to third-party sites. If a person visits a third party site, they will see a pop-up menu from Facebook asking for more information, and this can be a highly disruptive experience.

    

    We recommend you always give people the choice to sync up with Facebook as one of many available options.

  • OpenID

    OpenID is an open standard that enables people to log in to secure websites without having to create different usernames and passwords for each one. People who have an account with any of the following services already have an OpenID:

    • Google
    • Yahoo!
    • LiveJournal
    • Flickr
    • Orange
    • Mixi
    • MySpace

    When people log in to your site with their OpenID credentials, you can access user information directly from their Open ID account.

    The Importance of Choice

    While collecting user data of people visiting your site or landing page, make sure to give people choice in how they can sign up, as well as choice in whether and how they want to share their information. A landing page that offers people choice presents all available options together, and might look like this:

    

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• How Can I Acquire User Data of People Not On My Site?   

  Most of the people on the Internet are not on your website. The majority of prospective consumers or advocates for your brand are on other websites — including those of your competition.

  To capture the user data of people who are not on your site, you can run a mix of search and sign-up campaigns.

  • Search ads

    Search ads are triggered when someone types a keyword belonging to your product category. You can run search ads on a number of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask.com to reach across the whole market. When people click on your search ad, they go to a landing page. As described in the previous section, you can use a variety of landing page techniques to capture user data.

  • Sign-up ads

    You can run sign-up ads that acquire user data right inside the ad unit on the publisher website. User information is sent from the publisher to the advertiser securely via back end transmission, so there’s no need to for a landing page. With sign-up ads, you only pay when a user signs up, so you get results for every dollar you spend.

    

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• What Do I Do Once I Have User Data?   

  As soon as you receive a person’s user data, you should send them an email thanking them for their interest in your brand.

  In the last few years, email marketing has become much easier, and you no longer need to be an email expert to send emails to large groups of people. Our product, Pontiflex AdLeads, enables you to follow up on user interest in real-time, for example. ExactTarget, Cheetahmail, and Responsys are good email partners for large companies, while Vertical Response and Constant Contact are ideal for sending emails to smaller groups of people.

  Now that you have a person’s email address, you can start communicating with them about your brand in order to drive awareness, preference, and loyalty. You should look to spread the conversation across multiple touchpoints such as email, community sites, Facebook Pages, or Twitter groups.

  Below we’ve provided instructions on how to conduct a simple social marketing campaign. None of the steps are set in stone, but they are a good foundation for giving people a meaningful brand experience and growing your social presence.

  • As we mentioned earlier, send you first email as soon as the person signs up. You may want to do the following:

    • Thank the person for signing up for your offer.
    • Re-state the offer that the user signed up for. It never hurts to remind people why they are receiving an email from you. Include a link to a relevant landing page or section of your website, when possible.
    • Include prominent links to your Facebook Page, Twitter groups, and/or community site.
    

  • After a week, send a follow-up email. In this email you might:

    • Provide something of value that the recipient wouldn’t get if they hadn’t signed up for your email. For example, Tommy Hilfiger sends subscribers emails featuring new arrivals.
    • Include one strong call to action.
    • Place share-on-social-network icons (e.g., the Facebook logo) in the email footer.
    • Select the part of your email you want highlighted on social network. This area will show up on a person’s profile when they share your email.
    • Embed prominent links to your Facebook Page, Twitter groups, and/or community site.
    

  • After two weeks, send a third email. In this email you can:

    • Highlight another promotion the person would not have received if they hadn’t signed up for your email. You might connect the promotion to the offer you mentioned in your last email.
    • Include one strong call to action.
    • Place share-on-social-network icons (e.g., the Facebook logo) in the email footer.
    • Select the part of your email you want highlighted on social network. This area will show up on a person’s profile when they share your email.
    • Embed prominent links to your Facebook Page, Twitter groups, and/or community site.

  • Now it’s time to kick your social networking message up a notch.

    • In your prior emails, you included call-outs to your Facebook page, Twitter group, and/or community site. Now you should explicitly spell out the benefits of clicking on these call-outs. For example:

      

    • Build a brand widget and enable people to embed it in their social networking profile. Widgets allow you to give people different messages (content, coupons, videos) every day, and they allow you to stay in control of your branding.

      For example, Kimberly-Clark developed a pregnancy countdown widget for the HUGGIES brand. During the download process, HUGGIES asked expecting mothers to provide their due dates. HUGGIES could then provide each mother with provide customized baby and pregnancy information based on her individual due date. That widget was downloaded more than 10,000 times in less than a month.

      

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• How Do I Engage Users on Facebook?   

  Create a Page for Your Brand

  A Facebook Page is different from a personal profile in that it is made for a business and not for a particular person.

  A Facebook Page is also different from a Facebook group. A Page is made for people who are fans of a particular business or brand, whereas a Facebook Group is built around a common activity or interest.

  Facebook Pages offer businesses important advantages over Groups:

  • Every tab of a Page is publicly indexed and shows up on search engines. On the other hand, only the home page of a Group is publically indexed.
  • All Group administrators are listed on the Group’s home page. However, administrators on a Page can remain invisible. This way, you can keep your Page all about your brand.
  • When you send an update from a Group, it comes from the Group manager’s personal profile. When you send an update from a Page, it comes from the brand.

  You can create a Page for your brand at www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

  Generating and Maintaining Buzz for your Facebook Page

  • Make Your Page Useful:

    Don’t merely provide information about your brand and company on your Facebook Page. Instead, give people content that is useful to them. The ASPCA, for example, calls attention to pets that are up for adoption each week. Fans can donate their status updates to these pets and find pet adoption clinics in their neighborhoods.

    

  • Encourage users to interact

    Facebook Pages are set up to be viral. When a person interacts with the content on your Facebook Page, that activity is published in their news feed. This means your message can be seen by all of this person’s friends.

    There are different ways to entice people to interact with your Page:

    • Upload brand videos to generate conversation.

      Red Bull has a collection of videos on its Facebook page. Red Bull TV is a montage of different sporting events sponsored by Red Bull, and the Red Bull audience is passionate about sports.

      

    • Allow people to post content to your Page.

      Coca-Cola’s Facebook Page is largely filled by user-generated content. For example, comments appear in real-time with no moderation. There is a downside to this approach — undesirable content may appear — but it’s a great way to convey the feeling of authenticity.

      

      Tommy Hilfiger asks users to post photos of themselves wearing Tommy gear on its Facebook Page. Remember that every time a user posts a photo the message is broadcast to friends.

      

    • Run contests to generate buzz among your brand community

      Nothing gets fans excited like a contest. Southwest Airlines gives fans the chance to win a trip to California by playing a themed game.

      

    • Create social apps that enable fans to spread your message in a meaningful way.

      ASPCA’s Orange app lets pet owners share stories about their cats and dogs. Pringles “Help the Oversharers” app is a clever take on people who share too much personal info on Facebook. This app fits perfectly with the fun, irreverent image Pringles has come to personify.

      

  • Refresh your Facebook community

    As you may have noticed, people get distracted on the Internet. People will leave or ignore your Facebook Page, so it’s important that you continually reach out to new potential fans. Visit the “How Can I Acquire User Data” sections above to find out how you can grow your Facebook community.

    In all cases, it is extremely important to respect user privacy on Facebook. People should know exactly what they are signing up for and what their privacy options are. All communication should be on an opt-in basis.

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• How Do I Grow My Twitter Group?   

  With its real-time messages and features that make it easy to pass on your campaign, Twitter is especially suited for providing information, updates, tips, and special deals to consumers.

  Here’s how you can build a robust Twitter presence:

  • Have a dedicated person to monitor your Twitter account.

    Whatever happens on Twitter happens in real-time. So make sure you have a dedicated person who can manage your account and:

    • Answer questions.
    • Respond to complaints.
    • Participate in conversations related to your brand.

  • Decide whether you want a brand or personal profile for your company Twitter account.

    If you are using Twitter to engage people with your brand, it is advisable to create a profile and voice that reflect your company as a whole (@skittles, @Nike).

    However, if you have a person within the company whose personality exemplifies the values of the brand (such as Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com), you can have that person tweet on behalf of your brand.

  • Decide on the goals of your Twitter campaign.

    Be clear on why you want a Twitter page for your brand. Are you providing content? Asking people for feedback? Offering deals? Here are some examples of how big brands use Twitter:

    JetBlue provides real-time travel updates.

    

    The ASPCA shares tips on caring for animals.

    

    DELL offers exclusive deals. (Dell has generated more than 1 million dollars in sales through its Twitter account alone.)

    

    Best Buy provides customer service.

    

  • Divide your Twitter followers into lists

    Twitter lets you segment followers just as you would an email list. You can create different lists of people and message each list differently. You can also follow what each list is saying about your brand and gain valuable market feedback in real-time. If you can speak to people in a way that is relevant to them, you can boost branding metrics.

    To create a new Twitter list, sign in to your account and click “Create New List” in the top right corner of the page.

  • Refresh your followers continuously

    As with your Facebook community, it’s very important to refresh your Twitter followers. Research released in June 2009 showed that 85.3% of all Twitter users tweet less than once per day and 21% of users have never tweeted at all. Given that Twitter users may be easily distracted, you need more new followers all the time for your Twitter program to be meaningful.

    Please visit the “How Can I Acquire User Data” sections above to find out how you can grow your Twitter community.

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