How to deliver tangible results on social media

DTAC's Nuttaputch Wongreanthong told delegates at ClickZ Live Bangkok that delivering 'tangible' results on social media means nothing if brands don't know why they are using it.

There was one word Nuttaputch Wongreanthong, the vice president and head of online marketing at DTAC, kept coming back to when delivering his keynote address at this year’s ClickZ Live Bangkok digital marketing conference – ‘why?’

By asking ‘why’ when developing a social media strategy, marketers can better form objectives, in turn making it easier to measure tangible results.

“If you have the right ‘why’, you will have the right ‘how’ to have the right ‘what’,” said Wongreanthong.

“What is the purpose of using social media? The ugly truth is that many [marketers] commonly don’t know why they have social media. The only reason is often because their competitor has it,” he said.

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*Nuttaputch Wongreanthong, vice president and head of online marketing, DTAC, delivering his keynote address at ClickZ Live Bangkok. (ClickZ Live)

What is social media?

Social media is real, it’s not a fad and it’s a part of our lives, Wongreanthong said. It means social media has changed everything, including the way marketers understand change and assess opportunities.

For those not doing that, they risk going the way of companies like Blockbuster that used to be really big, and today are gone.

What are tangible results?

In the old days of marketing, being able to measure how many people viewed a television commercial (TVC) or saw a billboard were considered tangible marketing results. Today, when measuring tangible results for social media, marketers might cling to data and numbers but the industry is letting itself be fooled by these metrics, Wongreanthong said.

He used the example of Facebook, where not so long ago, brands sought millions of ‘likes’ to show they were a ‘loved’ brand. Since Facebook released engagement scores, social media metrics are no longer about fan numbers, but how many people are ‘talking’ about the brand.

“Next year it will be new numbers, again and again, and our bosses will be asking us, what are the next numbers you are going to present to me?” he said.

Therefore, to develop meaningful KPIs and metrics, marketers need to go back to the basics. A common marketing practice – or mistake – is to focus directly on the results, when the first thing marketers should be assessing is the objective, said Wongreanthong.

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Objectives

Marketers should be asking themselves, what is the objective of using social media? Is it likes, is it views, is it the number of downloads? By assessing the real ‘need’ that the brand wants to achieve from social media marketing, it can better tailor its strategy, he said.

“From that need, we come back to the very simple question – what is the objective of using social media in your company? If you have no objective, then how can we know what it is we want to do?”

Marketers commonly answer this question by citing brand awareness, for example. For many brands however, like DTAC – a well-known telecommunications provider in Thailand – that brand awareness already exists. “So the question needs to be asked, with a brand like DTAC, we are already there in the public mind, everyone already knows DTAC, so I am asking, what is the real need, the real objective of using social media?”

Strategy

Brands often site social media as a channel for publishing content, however Wongreanthong said this in turn raised another question – why does a brand need content? Content goes back to the very basics of communication, because it creates changes of mindsets and perceptions, and for marketers, ultimately it is to create sales, he said.

What is content? Content can be:

  • Text
  • Video
  • Voice
  • Touch
  • And even smell

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Wongreanthong broke content down into three parts – reach, communication and engagement.

Reach

There are three core channels for social media communication, according to Wongreanthong. They are:

  1. Acquisition channels: people who don’t know you so you have to go out and bring them to your product.
  2. Direct channels: your audience knows you are there, and come to you directly.
  3. Social channels: consumers are talking in a social way, and you want to be a part of that conversation.

While in the past it was all about using social media for maximum reach, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter today give marketers the ability to customize to a very narrow target, said Wongreanthong.

“I say to SMEs in Thailand – you don’t need 1 million fans, you only need 10,000 fans of your real customers, and that’s it.”

Focusing on the ‘right’ reach however is only the first step, communication then needs to lead to influence.

Communication

“If we reach the right people but we can’t communicate with them, or communicate with the wrong message, or they don’t want to listen, that really hurts social media strategy,” he said.

This is an ongoing issue for marketers – social media has empowered all users today to become publishers. Which means brands are no longer competing with each other to reach consumers, but are competing with the millions of people in Thailand who are on social media.

Engagement

Engagement is another hit metric with marketers, but Wongreanthong again asked: “Why do we need engagement? What makes one brand more ‘engaging’ on digital than another?”

He used examples of brands that might have very high engagement on a platform like Facebook, but a closer look might show comments to be negative, such as complaints.

Then there are the videos that have had 10 million views but no one can remember the brand after watching it.

“Social media is an interpersonal media – they can like, comment, chat, leave you a message and we have to assess that. With this experience in social media, how can brands deliver a service and experience to make people more engaged?”

He said the key to engaging audiences was recognizing they are human. The marketing team might say that the target customer is 18-35 years old, in the segment A or B, with a salary of about 30,000 baht a month, living in Bangkok.

“This is not a customer. A human is more than a number – humans think, they have feelings, they have demographics, they have interests,” said Wongreanthong. “We say we want more effective targeting to users but have we ever used the right interests and social graphs to make the target right?”

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Summary

How do we measure ‘tangible’ results in social media strategy? Here is Wongreanthong’s summary:

  1. Objective: be very clear on your purpose – why are you doing it? Why invest in social media or content?
  2. Strategy: Go back to your client, to your boss and ask: why are we using social media, and what is the purpose? Once you are clear on that, setting the right strategy and executing it will be easier.
  3. Results: Have the right metric. There is a lot of data and lot of numbers out there – don’t get distracted by them. High numbers don’t always mean positive engagement.

Media cannot perform if it does not have the right content, so how do you make sure content is valuable to the consumer?

“Social media today is about me, me, me and me. The user can control everything and if we can’t understand the customer, something is wrong with us,” said Wongreanthong. “If the content is valued, they will hunger for it, they will want to read your blog, they will want to see every post, and every TVC,” he said.

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