Marketers say ‘not enough time and too many priorities is their greatest challenge’

1. Prioritize segments and groups for social investment
The vision for social CRM is predicated on leveraging social behavior against specific groups. Measuring engagement, leads and behavior of segments allows marketers to strategically invest against different groups. Measurement should include all touch points across the social lifecycle, including content read, click-through behavior, social sharing, comments, reviews, leads and even conversions. Depending on the prioritization of objectives, marketers can use this information to help shape social investment and align with overall marketing goals.

2. Deliver relevancy in bite-sized pieces
At first glance, relevancy sounds like it would entail more time and resources. But as you gain understanding of how to motivate engagement and action among groups, relevancy becomes easier. It allows you to focus social activities and messaging against smaller groups. And it enables you to focus messaging into more bite-sized pieces rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Focused efforts tend to help manage execution and enable complex execution in stages.

3. Measure social media’s ability to inform all marketing activities
Analyze the results of your social media programs to understand user behavior and engagement. Social engagement information enables you to quickly understand what content users find most relevant and ultimately what drives a lead to a convert. Using a continuous improvement process for social media marketing helps evolve your activities to social CRM. Leveraging social information can ensure ultimate alignment to marketing goals and deliver more effective and efficient marketing activities.

4. Utilize social media insights to shape performance of marketing efforts
Along the same lines, used correctly, social data can also provide a platform of real-time learnings and feedback that will shape other communications tactics messaging. These insights can also help supplement and reduce formal research spend and efforts. For example, if users are engaging with content on a specific topic, consider how that information might inform paid search efforts. Once these findings are applied, the measurement improves the effectiveness of the entire marketing mix, ultimately increasing overall marketing spend effectiveness and total marketing ROI, not just social ROI.

5. Set clear goals and metrics for social activities
Social media has a number of different measurements. Engagement, leads and conversions are all viable approaches. Social media measurements should directly align to marketing goals. One of the critical paths to ensuring focus is to tightly define goals. This can include measuring engagement and behavior, such as content read, click-through behavior, social sharing, comments and reviews, or measuring leads and downstream conversions.

In a recent study we conducted among marketers, managing time and resources was the greatest challenge. In that same study, social media rose as the top channel for increased marketing spend in 2013 and it became clear that marketers are uncertain about the best ways to measure social media. While the correlation between these activities isn’t proven, it seems like a viable hypothesis.

Prioritization and setting a deliberate social media marketing strategy can deliver more focus. And focus can help ensure marketers are leveraging their time and resources in the optimal manner.