Importance of Context in Social Marketing
Context is the environment which a message is spread. If you don’t have this figured out then your social marketing efforts for awareness will be more than likely in vain. If you haven’t defined the context of your social marketing efforts you’ll fall back to old habits of forceful ways blasting messages to tons of people hoping that something sticks and intern hurting your brand causing people to put up an information barrier against you. Social marketing and especially in the awareness stage you want to be extremely targeted to small but powerful groups of people. Social marketing core competence is the “Law of the Few”.
Understanding the context of the social web, that is relative to your business, allows you to see the overall landscape of the ecosystem that you want to influence. To define the environment in which your message will spread you need to look at 4 key elements your customers, competitors, company and culture. Defining these four elements you’ll be able to target your efforts to create a contextual story for the people/communities that will have a lasting impact on your business.
Step 1: Define Your Customer
Market/Conversation Size
Understanding the total conversation size that you’re going to play in is the first step to becoming target in your social marketing efforts. Total Market gives you a base allowing you to build fundamental KPI’s such as Share of Voice and market share. Conversation size will vary for different products some might be in the millions and others can be in the thousands. Do your homework! The conversation size is usually different than what your first analysis will show.
Note:
A common error in measuring your market size solely using a social monitoring tool that is based in boolean logic. The problem with these tools is when you search keywords you’ll either get a large amount of noise (unwanted search results) because your search terms are too broad or you eliminate possible results because your parameters are too specific. Even Natural Language Processing (NLP) faces the same inaccuracies since it’s based off of the bluntness of keyword search.
If you’re looking to automate the process Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a better rout. LSA is a method for exposing latent contextual-meaning within a large body of text. This allows more relevant terms to carry more weight to construct more accurate vectors of how consumers are talking about a category, brand or product. This technique deciphers the relationships and correlations between words and plots where they dimensionally reside in proximity to a specific topic of interest. The resulting data is more relevant and pertinent to a research query. LSA learns in much the way the human brain does, by recognizing the context of language from all of previous times it has seen a term within that context. This produces a technology that can accurately disambiguate a term that is used in multiple contexts. This is vital as you narrow down the total conversation into addressable market and realistic market that I’ll dive into more detail in conversation segments.
Now NLP and LSA both have their flaws and there’s nothing better than human analysis to determine the total conversation on the web that is relevant to your organization.
One More thing!
When researching your total market make sure to use the research that has been done in your search engine optimization efforts. You can read more about this in my previous posts How Social Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Work Together. Beside giving you a head start in your analysis the keywords that have been identified in your search engine optimization efforts can help alleviate the problem with boolean logic social monitoring tools.
Market/Conversation Segments (Total Addressable Marketing “TAM”)
Segmentation of your market is one of the first steps to narrow your focus and identify your target audience for finding the “few” that you want to influence. Market size gives you an understanding of the overall landscape but segmentation starts to give you an understanding on how to target the market.
- Geographic segmentation
- Demographic segmentation
- Psychographic segmentation
- Behavioral segmentation
Geographic and demographic segmentation is pretty self explanatory but for psychographic and behavior segmentation it’s important to understand what this research is because it relates to why people will share your story on the social web. For more details on this scroll down to cultural context
Step 2 Understand Your Competitors
Understanding your competitors is critical to understand how you differentiate or changes that you need to make to separate yourself from the rest of the pack. This analysis is critical for the creation of KPI’s.
Not doing enough research on the potential competitors in your market is one of the most overlooked parts of this process. So instead of explaining all of the bullet points in the above diagram I’m just going to focus on research for potential competitors.
- Market expansion. Perhaps the most obvious source of potential competitors is firms operating in other geographic regions or in other countries. A cookie company may want to keep a close eye on a competing firm in an adjacent state, for example.
- Product expansion. The leading ski firm, Rossignol, has expanded into ski clothing, thus exploiting a common market, and has moved to tennis equipment, which takes advantage of technological and distribution overlap.
- Backward integration. Customers are another potential source of competition. General Motors bought dozens of manufacturers of components during its formative years. Major can users, such as Campbell Soup, have integrated backward, making their own containers.
- Forward integration. Suppliers attracted by margins are also potential competitors. Apple Computer, for example, opened a chain of retail stores. Suppliers, believing they have the critical ingredients to succeed in a market, may be attracted by the margins, the control, and the visibility that come with integrating forward.
- The export of assets or competencies. A current small competitor with critical strategic weaknesses can turn into a major entrant if it is purchased by a firm that can reduce or eliminate those weaknesses. Predicting such moves can be difficult, but sometimes an analysis of competitor strengths
Step 3 Be Honest About How Consumers View Your Company and Products
How do people currently view your organization. Example – Microsoft has brand recognition at the same time has people who dislike it. Critical for understanding (sentiment) KPI’s. To keep this simple focus on your product line, image in the marketing and your overall company culture.We all want to think that our company and products are the best thing since sliced bread but you need to be data grounded when building a contextual story for social marketing. If you don’t you’re going to instantly turn off your customers and most of all provide content and a story to answer their questions and concerns about your company and product.
Step 4 Cultural Context
As stated before market segmentation is one of the first steps for identifying your target audience and identifying the “few” that you want to influence. Understanding the culture of these segmentations allows you to narrow down your list even more and become more targeted on the content and engagement strategies that you need to build out.
Psychographic and Behavior Segmentation (motivation for sharing):
Consumer motivation is an internal state that drives people to identify and buy products or services that fulfill conscious and unconscious needs or desires. The fulfillment of those needs can then motivate them share messages online, make a repeat purchase or to find different goods and services to better fulfill those needs.
Hierarchy of Needs
Consumer motivation is linked to Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” According to this model, motivational drivers have different levels of importance. The most common needs are physiological and concern basic survival–the need for food, shelter and safety. Higher-level needs include social ones (for relationships and love), esteem needs (recognition and status) and self-actualization needs (fulfillment of self). According to Maslow, an individual must meet lower-level needs before being motivated to fulfill higher-level needs.
Motivation Levels
Depending on how important a purchase is to an individual, his motivational levels may vary from low to high. Influences include familiarity with the purchase, status factors and overall expense and value. Where fulfillment rewards are low, as with groceries, motivation levels are also relatively low and involve little decision-making behavior. Conversely, with a complex, risky and emotionally-charged process such as buying a new house, the drive to achieve the “right” result is high.
Motivation Behavior
The behavioral aspect of consumer motivation concerns the actions someone takes before purchasing and consuming goods or services. A person might do a lot of research–evaluating alternatives, testing and sampling–before making a selection. She might decide to buy something based on which goods or services most closely meet and satisfy motivational wants and needs. Marketers aim to gain the most impact and eventual sales by linking their products and services to clearly defined consumer needs and by understanding what motivates people to buy.
Motivational Influences
Motivational levels differ greatly between individuals and are influenced by many external variables. These include the social value of making the “right” decision, beliefs about brands and alignment of brand values and personal values. If other people are involved in the decision, their motivation also affects the behavior of the primary consumer.
Market and conversation segmentation is one of the best things to start persona work of your audience. Persona – “The aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others” can be a big help in becoming very specific in your contextual storytelling on “WHO” you’re talking to.
