Review of The Social Marketing Funnel

I recently looked at a useful new book, The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing. It is sponsored by Awareness and available as a free download. The book begins with some interesting stats. Inc. reported in a 2009 study that 91% of Inc. 500 companies use social media as part of their marketing mix1. A second study found that 72% of marketers reported closing more business as a result of social media efforts and 52% reported lead generation benefits with social media.

At the same time, they note that, “measuring and tying social media efforts to true benefits and ROI continues to elude many marketers…Most marketers struggle to identify, capture, and leverage the myriad social conversations related to their brands.” The sets up the purpose of the book: to “help CMOs and social media strategists think about organizing and optimizing social marketing in the context of building a Social Funnel” and provide the steps and best practices to get the most value from social media investments. They define a Social Funnel as “a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel.” To provide context to this effort, Awareness looked at close of 100 businesses of all sizes from multiple industries (some managed by the brands themselves and some by agencies). They also talked with some industry experts.

To create your Social Funnel you need to first identify and capture consumer conversation across a variety of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Then you need a CRM tool that handles social media (aka SCRM) to aggregate the data and mine it for insights. This effort needs to be integrates with your traditional marketing and sales efforts and your CRM tool. This makes a lot of sense but the book notes that only 6% of companies report doing this integration.  The report predicts a growth in this integration and I would agree.

They offer five steps to building and managing your social funnel. You first manage and grow your social reach. This is defined as “the total number of social profiles a brand has collected across all social media platforms with brand presence.”  Then you monitor the relevant social conversations and manage your social content as a result of this monitoring.  You also practice good SEO as part of this management and measure and analyze the relevant social activity around your brand.  There are useful tips for each step.

In a related 2010 study Awareness asked over 300 companies about what they did with their social media monitoring. The results: 78% - Identify and respond to customer service issues, 64% - Identify individuals looking for my product or service, 38% - Identify individuals who influence sales of my product/service, and 17% - Identify behaviors associated with people who are likely to buy our product or service. However, this was mostly informal as only 18% had a formal tracking process.  Cleary there is a need for more effort here.

There is much more in the book as I have just skimmed over the headlines and I recommend it to anyone interesting in making their social media marketing more effective.  They conclude: “Remember, your Social Funnel is a strategic business investment – treat it with the same rigor, dedication, and governance you treat your other strategic investments.” This is good advice for any initiative and one that is most often ignored when the effort is around a hot new topic such as social media. 

 

Comments

[Sales Letters]

Most perfect review! Thanks and let me share with facebook!!

[Patty]

Social media program can be quite expensive too run, this is my 2 cents.

[blog commenting services]

This makes a lot of sense but the book notes that only 6% of companies report doing this integration. The report predicts a growth in this integration and I would agree.