Posts tagged apps

Kristin Hersant, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, StrongMail, introduces the company’s new Social Direct tools and tells us why it’s all about respect for your customers.

Let’s face it, on the whole, people don’t like advertising. They try and avoid it at all costs. They change channels during commercials and use pop-up blockers in their web browsers. The reason ads on social networks such as Facebook aren’t living up to their potential is because people haven’t opted-in to receive those messages. They don’t want to see them.

Conversely, by approaching social media as an opt-in channel, you are respecting the individuals that you’re trying to target and are only communicating with those who are interested in hearing from you. This conforms to the spirit of social media and aligns with email marketing best practices.

As any email marketer will tell you, opt-in marketing is significantly more effective than blasting a mass message to a rented list of names that someone claims has similar interests to what you’re trying to market.

It is opt-in marketing that StrongMail is leveraging with our new Social Direct product. Introduced in beta in early 2010 and formally launched last month, Social Direct is a social media campaign solution that enables marketers to monitor, target, and measure their investment in social channels using proven principles from direct marketing.

Marketers can now use Social Direct to monitor all the social conversations that affect their brand and respond as they occur from within the campaign management tool. Those who engage with your social media promotions can be easily identified and distinguished from those who don’t, meaning future offerings can be precisely targeted to customers who opt in to receive correspondence from your brand.

Using StrongMail’s unique search and conversation technology, users can also create individual workspaces to take control of the broad stream of data and conversations regarding customers, products, competitors and projects. By leveraging threading within conversation columns, they can easily see the flow of engagement with consumers on the social web.

Automatically adding re-tweets and replies to a campaign also allows businesses to track the total impact of engagement within a conversation.

Using the social media campaign management tools in Social Direct, marketers can manage campaigns simultaneously via a collaborative platform that integrates multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Key features were designed to improve campaign workflow, including the ability to schedule messages and posts, organise profiles into groups, shorten and track URLs separately, and view a comprehensive calendar that drills down to summary metrics.

Social Direct addresses the lack of effective measurement tools in the social media marketing space by incorporating advanced reporting and analytics. Using real-time reporting, marketers can track all campaign activity and break it down into key performance metrics to help them identify trends, track conversions and conduct comparative analysis. Not only does this help streamline your own campaigns, it gives your customers the satisfaction of knowing they are being listened to, and only approached according to their own wishes.

This effort will be fuelled by personal referrals and genuine recommendations that ring true because the people recommending your product or service genuinely care about it. The future of social media marketing has more to learn from email than advertising.