Chaffey Digital Marketing Communication Mix
Chaffey’s Communication Mix for Traffic Building (Chaffey and Smith, 2017)
Social Listening and Online Reputation Management
It is important to listen to what customers are on social media are saying. This should not be just about your brand but social issues too. Great ideas for your brand’s success lies in getting suggestions and feedback from a brand’s customers. A perfect example of this is how customers helped international coffee chain, Starbucks create an online buzz, improve products and increase engagement on social media(Perepu, 2013).
Audience Analysis
This answers the question who are we reaching? To analyse who a brand is reaching it is important to look at its followers online. Most social media platforms give the names, age, gender, location and in some instances the interests of those people that follow each brand. This information is critical in the creation of a customer persona (aka Buyer Persona). This helps our brand’s content strategy.
Internal Audits
Create a social media metric that:
- Lists all Social Media platforms and properties
- Notes posting frequency
- Tracks follower counts
- Observes engagement rates and times
- and monitors all referral traffic rates
To stay on message it is important to delete or report off brand accounts that could harm the social value of a brand to the social media company. When Drinks brand Barcardi approached Instagram about the use of their copyrighted brand name by rapper Cardi B (formerly BaCardi B), the social media company deleted her account several times before she changed her stage name to Cardi B.
(The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, 2017)
Once the internal audit is done consider moving away from channels with low or poor traffic, for example, MySpace is a digital media cemetery where good brands go to die. Shift resources towards channels with greater engagement that better reach your target audience.
It is also important at this point to identify both top performing and poorly performing content. This is important for the creating a viable content strategy that.
All this collation of data allows for the comparison of historical social media performance and engagement to current levels. This helps gauge the efficacy of the social media strategy.
Competitor Audits
In 1624 English poet, John Donne, wrote: “No man is an island.” How does a brand know if it is doing well? If it can keep track of what its competitors are doing? using the same 5 metrics mentioned in Internal Audits above, a brand can learn from its competitors’ failures and success. It’s important to find out what content of theirs outperforms ours. This can be used to tailor our message. The competitors are not the only source of information. Aspirational brands are a treasure trove of brand engagement tactics.
Wrap-up Audit
There are mainly 2 methods of wrapping up a Social Media audit:
- SWOT Analysis – Gives a more formal understanding of the Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats
- Start-Stop or Continue – START, if a stratagem seems promising. STOP, if it is ineffective. CONTINUE if it is doing well.
To be effective a social media audit should be done monthly not just when there is a change in strategic focus. this helps track changes in customer tastes,
References
Chaffey, D. and Smith, P. (2017). Digital marketing excellence. 5th ed. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, pp.367, 232-47, 253-6.
Perepu, I. (2013). Starbucks: Brewing Customer Experience Through Social Media. IBS Centre for Management Research, [online] 513-001-1(1), pp.1-19. Available at: http://www.bu.edu/goglobal/a/goglobal_courses/tm648/spain/starbucks.pdf [Accessed 17 Dec. 2017].
Social Media Governance (2015). Social Media Governance. [online] Socialmediagovernance.com. Available at: http://socialmediagovernance.com/ [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2017). Jimmy Fallon Interviews Cardi B.
Available at: https://youtu.be/8LPVjHxXvJM?t=10s [Accessed 26 Nov. 2017].