Most marketing executives are aware by now of the potential power of social media in creating buzz and branding opportunities. But that’s only scratching the surface of social’s true value to the organization as a whole.
CMOs are well on their way to being even bigger tech spenders and users than even their CIO counterparts. Empowered by budget, new technology, and staggering amounts of data, there’s even a growing trend of CMOs taking the helm of the company and moving to the CEO position.
Any marketer (digital or otherwise) worth his or her job knows by now that social has become an integral pillar of nearly any marketing mix: an important channel for buzz and awareness, content marketing, lead generation, and for some, commerce.
Beyond simply mastering tweeting, social intelligence offers a path to marketing success and career growth for any ambitious CMO. Executive recruiters are on the hunt for “social CMOs” that understand how social data equips their team with the insights to strategically, proactively, and even predictably influence the performance of other core business operations like product development, customer service, HR, and even finance.
Armed with social intelligence and a strategic action plan, a creative CMO can improve processes around the boardroom and guide the company as a whole to growth.
We Have Liftoff: Socially Securing a New Product Launch
More than 250,000 new consumer tech products launch every year, and 95% of them result in failure. The social-savvy CMO can help ensure success from the early days of development, through its release, and well into securing the product’s establishment of a place in the market.
Using data gleaned from social listening platforms, you can pinpoint the precise online platforms and narrowly-focused communities and engage with target audiences to learn what they really want. It’s also incredibly valuable to tune into “white space conversations:” the chatter around a specific product or industry that doesn’t directly mention your brand or competitors.
By analyzing this data and finding patterns, you can provide your company’s R&D and product management teams with strategic insights into user needs and illuminate a clearer picture of the customer journey– even identifying the most ripe time for a product launch.
Of course, the job’s not done once the product is in the market. Using social listening, marketing executives can measure and evaluate–both at a macro and micro level–the effectiveness of your messaging, tune into your audience response, assess buying patterns, and listen to and strategically address customer complaints.
Converting Dissatisfaction into Loyalty
Like it or not, your company’s social presence is also your default customer service channel.
More than half of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter expect a response within one hour—72% if it’s a complaint.
Unfortunately, most companies fail to meet those expectations. Only 11% percent of retail brands respond to questions within one hour; in fact, most take a day or more. The outcome? At best you’re left with one annoyed customer and one missed sales opportunity; at worst it can snowball into a negative trending social media PR disaster that does more damage to your reputation than you can imagine.
But just as social media gives dissatisfied customers a bigger voice, it also bestows the opportunity for brands to turn a disgruntled customer into an even more loyal one– and here’s where the social CMO can add value. If you’ve ever had a customer service representative pick up on the first ring, or gotten a customized response to your online product inquiry, or gotten exceptional treatment above and beyond your expectations from a store manager after voicing a complaint, you know how gratifying a swift, personal and thorough brand response can be.
How Marketing and Customer Service Can Collaborate to Handle Customer Complaints on Social
video from Social Media Today
By collaborating closely with your customer service team, not only can you flag complaints in real time– and even anticipate them– but you should also have the processes and campaigns in place to turn complaints into future revenue. Customers who receive great service via social media spend about 21% more money–and that’s not counting the additional brand goodwill you can build by publicly addressing concerns. Consider also that customer care via social substantially reduces call center costs, and that’s money you can take to the bank (and show off to CMO executive recruiters).
Getting More from Your Staff
Regardless of when, where, and why, and how people love to talk about their jobs on social media–love or hate.
How Americans Tweet About Their Jobs
Though the wisdom of publicly complaining about your job or your employer on social media can certainly be called into question, this data reveals insights and patterns that can be invaluable to HR and marketing recruiters. Working together, the CMO and HR can analyze potential triggers that prompt workers to take to Twitter to complain, as well as create campaigns and programs to re-engage those employees (or anticipate imminent hiring needs).
Forecast and Prepare for Stock Price Shifts
Twitter and other social networks are valuable tools for feeling the pulse of public opinion. And there’s evidence that suggests that social sentiment can even precede or reflect share prices and other financial market trends.
Twitter can show how impactful emerging news, announcements and events are, offering analytically-minded CMOs rough insights into how they might reflect upon company value and share prices. Armed with social intelligence, the CMO and his/her team can deftly work with counterparts in finance and investor relations to understand and even anticipate the impact of real-time social conversations on the investor community and, if necessary, take preemptive action to protect shareholder value.
With access to the right technology and social media staffing, social data can tell a CMO what’s happened and what’s happening (and we’re on the verge of being able to use social to tell us what’s going to happen next; keep a close eye on the predictive social analytics space over the next few years). Turning social data into insights that drive strategic decision-making and action will be what separates the career-savvy social CMO from the average marketer.
Article source: VentureBeat
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