What matters most for social media marketing success? That’s a question which Marquette Group and Ascend2 tried to answer with some research based on a survey of more than 500 marketing professionals and ‘business leaders’ around the world.
Only 15 per cent of the respondents rated their companies as ‘very successful’ at achieving marketing objectives using social media – and 17 per cent said their companies were ‘not successful’.
So, what are the successful ones doing that the unsuccessful ones are not?
One of the differences lies in the question itself – what actually constitutes ‘success’?
Successful users of social media are more likely than unsuccessful ones to be aiming for improved brand/product awareness and ‘customer engagement’ than for increasing lead generation and website traffic. The unsuccessful users, by contrast, are more focused on these latter two objectives. And, since they rate themselves as ‘unsuccessful’, they are presumably failing. So, if there is a lesson to be learned from this statistic, it appears to be that it is still difficult to drive sales directly through social media.
Successful social marketers are six times as likely to integrate social media with other types of marketing communication as are their unsuccessful peers. The lesson to be learned from that seems to be the obvious one that we have written about here many times before – social media should be just one part of the marketing mix.
What should you integrate with your social media? Well, the survey suggests that something we have also advocated here more than once is a winning tactic – content marketing. Successful social marketers are twice as likely as unsuccessful ones to integrate their social media activities with content marketing.
Overall, then, the survey provides no surprises. Successful social marketers are doing the things that we (and, to be fair, others) have been urging since social media marketing became a ‘hot topic’.
In summary, integration and plenty of good, high quality, content are the keys to success.
