Case Study : Social Media and Customer Engagement

The success of social media marketing is often seen when big brands (and celebrities!) run campaigns that attract media attention when they get more Facebook fans or Twitter followers. 

There are a range of features besides the basic ‘likes’ that can be useful for achieving marketing goals, but proven tactics usually involve promotional giveaways. This is hardly surprising.  Decades before online social media even existed, businesses were already implementing successful contests, sweepstakes, challenges and promotional campaigns.

In early 2013, several social media campaigns launched from our network, again proved the value of giveaways.  For example, French skincare manufacturer, L’OCCITANE en Provence, ran a display campaign to encourage users to “Like” their Facebook page; in return, visitors stood a chance to win a trip to Paris.  Similarly, Sony ran a promotional campaign offering not just prizes to visitors but also coupons to encourage store visits and sales.

Giveaways are certainly not the only tactic for a social media campaign.  The maturing of social media brings the potential of more leads and conversions for your business as well.

The key lies in three distinct elements:

1. Planning: this probably takes up the biggest time commitment as you will need to know the fine details of the tools that providers like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter provide. This also means identifying your audience.  In many cases, advertisers choose our brandsafe channels to promote their social media campaigns.
2. Execution: the secret sauce here, of course, is the engagement you create with the audience. This is proportional to the amount of focus you place on addressing new developments that arise (like answering customer questions) and includes close, real-time monitoring of your display advertising (on top of your Facebook ads).
3. Measurement: this is about quantifying your efforts and determining the success of your campaign by comparing it to your original goals. The real advantage is the data you collect can be used to compare with future marketing projects.  But it’s also important to have a strategy in place to nurture and convert those people into sales over time.

Social media provides an easy-to-use, affordable, unified platform across the web and on mobiles.  We expect to see more social media campaigns in the months ahead, particularly by smaller companies.

Here are three recent case studies, one from L'OCCITANE and two from Sony, one in Indonesia and another in Malaysia.