This week Clay McDaniel posted "5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest" on Mashable. It's a brilliantly simple summary of the best way to manage any kind of social media program -- not just contests!
Here are his tips:
1. Define Your Marketing Goal
2. Get Creative
3. Leverage Social Channels
4. Finish the Contest
5. Measure the Contest
Sorry, “Doing” Social Media is Not a Marketing Goal
Social media activities are fun -- chatting with passionate people about interesting events, entering contests (prizes!) and all those entertaining personal anecdotes.
Having fun is a plenty good reason for you or me to spend three hours tweeting about American Idol. But businesses don’t do things because they’re fun. And they certainly don’t pay marketing agencies to have a good time on their behalf!
When you manage a social media program for a business, every activity must have a function that supports business objectives. Otherwise it’s a (fun) potential waste of time and money.In a business context, social media activities are (cool, new, often effective) tactics that help you achieve the goal, not the goal itself.
Goal = Job
People tend to struggle with setting goals, but it’s actually pretty simple if you just ask: “What is the job of this program?”
Your answer is the job description of the program, and should include this information:- Required: What you want the program to do, e.g. raise awareness, drive traffic to a site, convert followers to sales
- Recommended: Who you want it to do it to, i.e. your target audience
- Helpful: When you want the job completed, or at least target milestone dates
- Bonus points: a measurable number, e.g. 4,000 followers, 750 downloads, $25k in sales
Pick A Tactic, But Not Just Any Tactic
There are a gabrillion social media channels out there, with a new one launching every day. The hard part is narrowing down all of your choices.Here's the first place your goal comes in handy: knowing what you’re trying to do helps you decide how (Step #2) and where (Step #3) to do it.
Example Goal A: Reinforce the loyalty of a small, passionate and growing audience for a struggling TV show during the three month long season
Tactics to achieve this goal could include:
- building a destination that facilitates repeat visits, like a Facebook fan page or blog
- creating exclusive content for that location that encourages comments and interaction, like Q&A chats with the cast, or polls for your favorite character with relevant prizes
- updating often, so there's something new every time visitors return
This matches your goal because it creates an environment for loyalty and steady (and hopefully big!) growth, gives fans opportunities to give their input, and it takes advantage of the length of the program timeframe to build relationships.
Example Goal B: Get new customers to make a purchase during a one day sale
To generate quick awareness and concentrated sales activity about a new product, your tactics could include:
- tweeting a promo code and link to the ecommerce site
- outreach to get power influencers to retweet
This matches your goal because it's short, sweet and specific. It leverages Twitter's low entry barrier to quickly get your information in front of new people, and has an immediate call to action that drives to the one-time transaction. The ephemeral nature of Twitter is perfectly acceptable because the goal is to make a sale, not to build a relationship.
(Note: I'm not saying B is the smartest goal or best use of social media -- in the long run relationship building is probably more profitable than 1x quickie sales -- but it certainly is a common request!)
Time’s Up!
Step 4 is “Finish the contest” and for our purposes, that means you should drive to a deadline, like quarter end sales targets, or pick a relevant check-in date to do review and measurement.
Learn to Love the (Other) Metric System
That brings us to Step #5, Measure, the one that everyone resists.
People shy away from metrics partly because they’re afraid it will be hard work, and partly out of fear that the numbers will show everyone that a program didn’t work.
That’s the wrong attitude for professional marketers, because measurement is one of the most valuable tools for any marketing program – social media, advertising, direct mail, billboards, sponsorship, you name it.
Great marketers should love the measurement stage, because it's
when you get the prize: did you succeed or not? Even more importantly,
did you do what your client paid you to do?
As the well-know adage goes "You get what you measure" -- accountability is a potent incentive! Plus, measuring tells you what's working, and where you need to adjust. No one gets all the answers right the first time. If you're tracking your efforts and success, it's easy to make fixes because you know exactly what and where to change.
For personal satisfaction and professional accountability, you've got to get good at this step.The “Math is Hard” Excuse
Let’s address the “hard” issue once and for all. If you define a clear goal up front, basic measurement is idiot-proof simple, requiring little more than 4th grade addition and subtraction skills!
Yes or no, did you get the 4,000 followers, 750 downloads, or $25k in sales?
- If the answer is yes, you have a clear mandate to continue, repeat and increase the activity
- If the answer is no, you have something equally useful, the knowledge that you need to change what you’re doing, and data about what not to do again
There’s no value judgment, just the truth. It worked, or it didn’t.
Next Stop: ROI
It's a rich topic.
But before you can analyze magnitude, parse sub-segment sentiment, tweak the offer and get into all kinds of fun marketing wonk debates about the details, you have to know whether or not you achieved your goal.
Make it your mission to set a goal. It's the end that starts everything else!
posted by Cat Lincoln
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