As
one of the most popular marketing modes these years, social marketing
specializes in utilizing the key characters of the products to stimulate the
emotion of people, to evoke self-initiated sharing on a large scale and to
finally generate unprecedented influence. Social media may produce some
negative influence on offline communication and people’s real life, but what is
undoubted is that as for marketing, social media is the most worth-concerning
platform, for that it presents the advantages such as low-cost, strong
evolvement, and incomparable ability of diffusion.
However,
each marketer or promoter needs to look at the customer journey as well as set
the ultimate goals. No matter the goal is to motivate people to join in your
activities, register on your website or even buy your products, one thing you
have to think about is how to utilize social media to achieve these goals and
how to measure the effects of social media. Therefore, here comes the question:
do the metrics of social media such as number of followers, likes and sharing really
signify success or are they just some magnificent but meaningless numbers?
As
early as in 2013, one report about fashion brand and social media released by
L2 suggested that despite of the prosperity of social media, they actually
contributed little to the sales of fashion brands. Among the 247 fashion brands
that they had research on, more than 95% of them have social media accounts,
and even more than 18.6% of them have as many as 7 accounts on social media
platforms. Nevertheless, the report points out that as for the traffic driven
from twitter to the official websites, the conversion rate is only between
0.09% and 0.19%. As for sales, the conversion rate is even lower, with 0.01% on
Twitter and 0.25% on Facebook. The same situation happens in our project which
helps to promote the pet website called Wecarepets.
As the data from Google Analytics shows, the traffic we drive form Wechat
has reached 130000, but the daily new registers in this period never runs
beyond 40, which suggest that the conversion rate is quite low.
According
to these examples, it can be clearly seen that social media are indeed
effective in raising the awareness of brands and building the brand image. However,
are they really comparatively useless in increasing the conversion rate? If
not, what can we do to improve the conversion rate of social media?
The first thing I would like to mention
is KOL(Key opinion leader). According to my observation, many official accounts
like to invite some key opinion leaders to join in their activities on Weibo,
so that more people would be attracted. However, many companies have put too
much emphasis on these KOL and the form itself, but neglect their genuine
target users as well as these people’s needs. One of the negative examples is
LuoYonghao and his mobile phone brand Smartisan.
LuoYonghao used to be a famous English teacher and speaker and then
transformed to the industry of smart phone. When he promotes his phone on
Weibo, he spares no effort to utilize his own personality to attract people’s
eyes and to create some heated or even debatable topics. However, the sales of
the phone are not good and he has to cut the price. I think the problems lie in
two aspects: firstly, the key performance driver should be the special quality
and selling point of the phone rather than the spokesman himself. Secondly, the
characters of LuoYonghao do not really match with the phone, so that his image
is mot as helpful as Jobs or Xiaomi’s LeiJun in converting the influence to the
sales. Therefore, promoting your brand story, brand spirit，core quality and attributes in the social
marketing may be more crucial, while KOLs are merely one of the key links in
spreading the information.
Secondly, the most obvious advantage of
social media marketing is that it targets accurately at your potential
customers. Once people follow the account, it suggests that they are
interested. However, we should avoid being cheated by the number of users
because it is more crucial to check how many active users the account has. In
order to cultivate the continuously active followers, I think three points should
be given priority.
Above all, the official accounts one
brand uses in the social marketing needs to present its own personality, that
is to say it has to come up with a kind of style and tone, which match with the
brand and products and are also attractive enough. Moreover, to improve the
transaction rate, the brand has to provide motivation for the followers, which
could be prize, qualified content or products that are creative, innovative and
useful. One of the most outstanding social accountson Wechat is that of the
museum of Forbidden City. They use interesting expressions and funny comics to
introduce historic knowledge, so that people are willing to share their posts,
and thus the awareness has been improve. Meanwhile, they utilize the social platform
and same tone to promote their products, which are usually common stuff with innovative
and creative design. At the last, no matter the goal is to convert traffic to
registration or sales, the process has to be simplified, and the potential
users have to be reminded what they would miss if not taking a further action.
Compared to awareness, the goal of
raising transaction rate may not be effectively achieved in social marketing.
However, if the marketers focus on the
above points in the operation process, I believe that the customers
would take a further step in the customer funnel.
Reference:
1.Socialbeta( 2013) 从转化率、活跃度和忠诚度看社会化媒体营销效果. Retrieved April, 28th, 2014 from: http://www.socialbeta.com/articles/social-media-marketing-performance-2013.html
2.钛媒体（2013）社会化营销，关注度和转化率缺一不可. Retrieved
April, 28th
2014
from: http://www.tmtpost.com/74661.html
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