In Asia Pacific, there is growing recognition that the old way of marketing — driving awareness through push advertising — has sputtered and slowed in the wake of media fragmentation and the disruptive power of digital. Marketers need a new framework to align their marketing decisions to the customer’s experiences with the brand to define customer engagement, budget allocation, and organizational skills.

However, many companies are still in the adolescent phase of social marketing; they have crested the initial wave of social likes and followers, but are now stuck on the next steps. Few have managed to crack the social marketing conundrum — that of showing meaningful return on their social marketing investments. Marketers need to understand and map the customer journey — from enabling discovery to supporting exploration, purchase, and engagement. Astute ones will map each stage of the customer life cycle to an objective from Forrester’s marketing RaDaR model. To create discovery, the objective should be reach. To support exploration, depth is the objective. To nurture engagement, focus on relationships.

Singapore Post (SingPost) is a traditional postal service provider that is transforming into an eCommerce logistics and trusted communications provider in the region. Part of this transformation involves digitizing the customer experience and embracing new communication channels to interact with customers and stakeholders, such as using social media to understand and serve local and regional customers. I’ve detailed part of SingPost’s social marketing journey and used this to illustrate how you too can apply the RaDaR to your own strategy. For instance, SingPost is using its Facebook page as a way to build brand advocates to increase its digital marketing reach through word of mouth. For more detail, as well as our advice on how marketing leaders can learn from SingPost, read our latest case study and let me know what you think in the comments below.