• by Gretchen Hoffman , November 6, 2013

Some of the most successful brands and agencies are using social media analytics to manage their marketing campaigns on paid, owned and earned media. Here's a nine-step plan to emulate them and get better results from your campaigns.

1.   What's your plan?

Lack of structure is the main reason that integrated marketing campaigns fail. Ask yourself: Why are we doing this? Then create a plan with clear business objectives and a set of tactics that can help you achieve your goals.

2.   What does success look like to you?

What are the outcomes you are hoping to achieve? Are you looking for qualified leads? More Web site traffic? A twenty-point lift in brand awareness? Defining the metrics that define success will help you hit your mark.

3.   Who is your target audience?

Use social instead of surveys or focus groups to analyze your audience. Pull online owned, earned and paid media conversations into dashboards where you can accurately analyze customers’ emotional and behavioral patterns across millions of data sources, languages and cultures.

4.   Where do they hang out?

If your business is marketing maternity clothes, you might want to target pregnancy Web sites and forums. If you’re releasing an aftershave that is targeting athletic men between the ages of 18 and 26, you might want to go to online dating sites.

5.   Who are your influencers?

Your company’s influencers may be bloggers with hundreds of thousands of followers. Your marketing team should have a list of influencers they can contact before the campaign about advocating and building brand exposure, or about mitigating risk.

6.   How important is accuracy to your analysis?

Social media content you will use for analysis can come with junk -- advertising, spam, porn, duplicates and other misleading data. Find a social media analytics vendor whose technology filters that out to give you a smaller but cleaner data set.

7.   How well do you position?

For better messaging, get a clear understanding of your customer and yourself. Know who your buyers and influencers are, know who you are as a brand and what you stand for, and analyze your competitors so you will know how to differentiate yourself.

8.   Can you monitor and react in real-time?

Once you kick off your campaign, monitor its performance using a social analytics solution so you can determine what sort of sentiment lift your brand is or isn’t getting, and what the emerging themes and conversations are. Set up notifications to detect any unusual changes, allowing the executive team to make educated decisions in real-time.

9.   Measure overall campaign impact

What you measure depends on your initial strategy (see step #2). Using a social analytics solution enables you to measure the overall impact of the campaign against category or historical benchmarks. Triangulate paid and owned drivers of earned media, and examine conversations to reveal deep insights into consumer emotions and behaviors.

Case Study: Dr. Pepper Ten

Here’s how a consumer brand like Dr. Pepper Ten could use social analytics to manage and track its advertising campaigns on paid, owned and earned media. Doing this would enable the company to apply insights from social media during campaign development, execution and measurement.

In the campaign development phase, the brand could use sentiment and passion analysis to understand why its previous “It’s Not for Women” campaign was perceived as sexist and generated such negative sentiment.

In the campaign execution phase, the brand could use real-time analysis to understand how its new “No Man’s Land” campaign boosted brand passion and net sentiment. Social analysis could also identify which themes were or were not resonating with the target audience.

In the campaign management phase, the brand could use analytics to assess paid and owned drivers of earned media. They would be able to analyze how the campaign performed, who was doing the talking online, and how successful the campaign was in influencing consumer perceptions and behaviors.