Asia Pacific marketers have moved from experimenting with social media in the recent past to integrating it into their marketing mix. However, a large number are guilty of setting and measuring metrics, such as vanity metrics, that do not inform the next course of action.

To increase your chances of social marketing success, you must:

  • Build an understanding of your audience. Brands all too often mistake social media platforms as a broadcast channel and rave about their own products and services without first understanding the conversations going around them. Astute marketers will first deploy listening platforms by studying the social behaviors of their target audiences and the context of their conversations. Forrester’s Social Technographics® will tell you both how social your audience is and the types of social behaviors in which they engage.
  • Invest in social marketing based on clear business outcomes. Many Asia Pacific marketers are still allocating media budgets based on user consumption of media — or worse, on how budgets were allocated in previous years. But this model is obsolete, thanks to new methods of accessing data and harnessing technology. Marketers must be able to answer which specific social activities drive specific business outcomes and boldly reallocate marketing investments based on these. For instance, marketers must show how their Facebook strategy has driven fans to their eCommerce site and helped stimulate them to complete a sale.
  • Secure input from functional leads when building your strategy. Seeking input from functional leaders across the organization helps clarify core ROI assumptions and ensure that you’re accounting for all dimensions of attribution investment. Attribution significantly affects the whole organization, from staffing to marketing mix to media investments. Measuring the success of attribution will ultimately reveal which areas of the business are effective and which aren’t.

Social marketing must attain a level of maturity in the overall marketing strategy, and this requires a higher contribution from its practitioners. Marketers must migrate away from meaningless metrics to bring about business outcomes. My latest report highlights where Asia Pacific marketers have misaligned objectives and metrics and how they can realign them to drive marketing success for their organization.