MODERN MARKETING ESSENTIALS GUIDE

SOCIAL MARKETING
A Prescriptive Guide Fortified to Build Stronger Marketing

INTRODUCTION
The sheer volume of marketing information available today
is nearly impossible to sift through, and it can be hard to
decide how to allocate your valuable time. Aint nobody got
time for that. Weve got marketing magic to make!

The Modern Marketing Essentials Series gives marketing leaders and

practitioners the opportunity to supplement their existing marketing strategies with
helpful insights into the topics you hear marketers must know about, and more
importantly those that are affecting your bottom line.
Its more important than everessential evento ensure that youre keeping
up with smart marketing tips to maximize your success. Weve got you covered.
Modern Marketing Essentials Guides are a quick but detailed, compact but
thorough resource for topics and education Modern Marketers need the most.
Think of them as helpful vitamin supplements to your daily marketing diet.
Like any nutrition plan, this one will continue to evolve and help your marketing
stay healthy and thrive. We have several guides in the works, but we want to
know which topics are essential to your marketing! Tell us via Twitter
@OracleMktgCloud.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

MODERN MARKETING
ESSENTIALS: SOCIAL
MARKETING
THE PROMISE OF REAL-TIME COMMUNICATIONS
Its here. Its now. Its unfiltered. And it cant be turned off! Social media is a
unique force in that its a channel that provides distinct value for both the user and
the marketer. While its been compared to other evolved channelssuch as TV
and radiothe special appeal of providing a means of talking back allows for
a evocative, mutually beneficial dialogue rooted in the most precious (and scary)
marketing asset: Customer opinion.
Its the word of a million mouths. All speaking at once. All about your product or
service. Direct that in a positive way? Your message will resound forever. And with
the advent of better monitoring, marketers have a clearer view of who they are
speaking to, and can glean more granular insight into how to extend the value of
the conversation for the users benefit.
According to the 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Reportconducted by
Social Media Examinermarketers place very high value on social media, as a
vast majority (92%) indicate that social media is important for their business, up
from 86% in 2013.
Tactics and engagement are top areas marketers want to master, as at least 89%
of marketers want to know the most effective social tactics and the best ways to
engage their audience with social media.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

Touch the untouchable. Find the unfindable. The ubiquitous nature of online
social activities presents a tremendous way to extend the reach of any program
to engage with new audiences. For instance, social marketing helps jettison the
broadcast marketing mentality and allows marketers to refer traffic back to
their own properties: the very place where they can better execute on tactical
automated practices of tracking and deploying messages.

5 PILLARS OF SOCIAL SUCCESS

To help marketers better navigate the sea of social change, weve put together this
Essentials Guide based on 5 Pillars of Social Marketing:
1 Listening
2 Engagement
3 Marketing Communications
4 Social Advertising
5 Analytics

ANALYTICS

SOCIAL ADVERTISTING

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

ENGAGEMENT

LISTENING

SOCIAL MARKETING

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

PILLAR 1: LISTENING
Listen to many, speak to a few.
William Shakespeare
The Bard could have been a Modern Marketer. He recognized the necessity of
wide-open, yet discerning ears.
But make no mistake: The empowered consumer is calling the shots. Social media
usage, fueled by mobile growth, has forever transformed the way consumers and
businesses interact. And todays empowered and social consumer is driving and
forcing change across the enterprise.

The average user spends 1.72

hours per day on social platforms,
which represents about 28%
of all online activity (6 hours a
day on average), according to
GlobalWebIndex.

Social channels are native to the everyday lives of consumers. They are
hyperconnected and consult their social feeds for an increasingly blended mix of
tasks, both personal and professional.
The insight that can be gleaned from social media lends value to nearly every
department, both internally (for employees and stakeholders) and externally (for
customers and brand). Just by simply listening online, brand marketers can
then more effectively act on emerging trends and conversations with relevant
messaging and high value offerings that delight audiences rather than annoy.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

HOW SOCIAL BUSINESS CREATES VALUE ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION

Department/Area

How Social Business Creates Value

Marketing and Communications

Continually engage with customers

throughout the customer journey

Sales

Build connections with prospects,

create rich customer profiles, discover
unspoken motivations and needs,
and integrate commerce and social

Customer Care

Social support provided by customers

as well as by the company enables
rapid response time via customers
preferred platform

HR and Talent Management

Enhance recruitment efforts and track

employee achievements

Internal Collaboration

Provides context and drives internal

social engagement and teamwork
across the organization

Source: Delivering on the Promise of the Social Business/Altimeter

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL LISTENING

Listen for and learn from business insights. Audiences often take to social
media to voice their hopes, desires, and concerns with respect to the products
and services they use. Seize the opportunity! Formally document the key words,
phrases, and overall sentiment central to your social media strategy. Pay attention
to what people are saying about your brand. Then cross-reference their sentiment
with your documented terms and refine the list over time to reflect the wisdom of
the crowd.

THE BENEFIT
This will help you learn about customer preferenceswhat they like and dont
like about your productso you can harness the insights to create products and
marketing programs that move the needle.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

PILLAR 2: ENGAGEMENT
Theyve raised their hands. Theyve spoken out. Theyve expressed curiosity. Do
you just blunder in and start a conversation about product A or offer B. No!
Keep em coming back for more. Take a look at your own favorite pages to follow
as a consumer: What do they offer you that keeps you coming back for more?
Content, of course. And that content is valuable to you because it offers focused
information pertinent to your interests, and/or helpful to your everyday life. Perhaps
your favorite pages to follow simply offer you feel-good images, or articles that
help your knowledge building on subjects significant to your lifestyle. You engage,
respond, and share when these basic, fundamental needs and wants are met.
Know their likes. Like what they know. To effectively engage with your
communities, its important that you have a solid understanding of your audiences
behavior and give them the tools they need to help grow the relationship and
connection.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

?
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Here are some integral tips for enhancing your social engagement strategy:

Q
SHARE
Q

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A

SHARE
SHARE

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SHARE

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Be an inquisitor: Most of the time, readers are content to ingest content and
move on. By asking a question, either outright or in the form of a poll or survey,
Q opinion matters. They will usually respond to a
you send the message that their
A
questionQ
where they might otherwise keep scrolling.

Take the time to mine the right topics for your audience. Also known as
newsjacking, the practice of posting content around trending topics on social
sites is an easy way to get meaningfully involved in the conversation and engage
both current and potentialQ
customers. Facebook recently made it easy by posting
trending topics alongside the newsfeed.
Caution: Dont overdo it. You can quickly
A
lose credibility.

?
@

@@

Remember that sharing is caring. Make it easy to spread the good word.
Streamline social sharing so that your followers only need to take one or two
clickable actions to share your content. Enable the action by embedding social
sharing buttons, but not too many.

@@

Make em say your name. In the spirit of keeping your brand name top of
mind, #Hashtag @YourCompany. Using @mentions helps create a sense of
community by sharing content with the right audiences and groups, and by getting
the attention of specific people you want to nurture a relationship withlike
influencers. Social media is about relationships and connections, so use those
#hashtags and @mentions to help you build them.

@@

THE BENEFIT

Make the social connections to grow your business with engagement and insight.
Get the listening, engagement, and analysis capabilities across social channels so
you can better understand your customers and maintain a social dialogue.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

PILLAR 3: MARKETING
COMMUNICATIONS
Time to align the business application of your social efforts. Word of mouth has
become word of millions. Social influences (those trusted peers and experts)
have more sway than old school press and analysts. Theyre the voice of the
common man, after all.
All successful companies respect and utilize these independent advocates
to spread messages to customers and prospects, amplifying brand, thought
leadership, and awareness of products and services.
This strategy is essential to a brands earned media, or todays version of word of
mouth marketing strongly rooted in the positive extension of your brands appeal
with a wider net of audiences.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL MARCOMMs

Ask your next marketing candidate about his or her established influencer
relationships. The responsibilities of smart social media marketing call for much
more than the mere posting of Tweets or Facebook updates. Make sure that your
social marketing superstar has a solid understanding of how to identify target
audiences across networks, improve the amplification of your messaging as a
result, andmost importantlyhow to establish meaningful relationships across
your industrys key influencers.

THE BENEFIT
Having the inside scoop on the influencers and stakeholders most noted in your
industry will give your social media activities a leg up on your competitors.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

10

PILLAR 4: SOCIAL ADVERTISING

Advertising is paid. Isnt paid a dirty word in the free-for-all world of social
channels? Nope. Its become expected. Like ads in the subway or on the radio.
Thats great for us. The natural tendency of people to form groups with similar
tastes and views has made it easier for us marketers to reach out to the most
receptive minds.
The social stakeholdera social marketing or community managerworks closely
with content, demand generation, and PR teamsas well as potentially a third
party agencyto extend the value of marketing activities onto social channels
specifically.
Social networks continue to evolve their advertising offerings and policies to
capitalize on the opportunities that enable brands to extend their reach across
audiences.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

11

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ADVERTISE ACROSS THE PLETHORA OF SOCIAL NETWORKS.

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HERES HOW:
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Facebook: The social giant boasts more than 700 million daily active worldwide
users, presenting a significant opportunity to drive eyeballs and engagement in a
consumer-native environment. Facebook Ads are optimized to enable brands to
garner additional website traffic and increase conversions. Marketers can create
ads that are shown in the right column of user pages, or shown in the main News
Feed to be viewed by people on both mobile and desktop. More organizations
are trying to leverage their databases to drive granular marketing based on
demographic and geographic insight, including running ad modeling based on
known contacts.

@
@

Google+ (Google AdWords): According to Social Media Examiner, 65% of

marketers say they want to learn how to utilize Google+ better. While Google+
doesnt offer any advertising within the platform, you are able to promote specific
posts on the Google Display Network, thus turning your post into an interactive
display ad.
Instagram: Instagram is new to the advertising game, but many companies were
quick to start utilizing the new feature. With 70% of their 200 million active users
checking the platform at least once a day, many brands are starting to create
advertising strategies for this platform.
LinkedIn: Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers a few different ways to advertise
your content as well as your company page. The network also feature very granular
targeting to ensure youre reaching the right audience, including choosing those
with a specific job title.
Twitter: Similar to Facebook and LinkedIn, you can promote your Twitter handle
(or page) as well as specific posts/Tweets. When trying to promote your Twitter
page, its important to have copy that tells people WHY they should follow you.
What value are you going to add to their already busy tweet stream? What kind of
content will you be sharing?
Promoted Tweets are a relatively easy way to advertise content or events. Because
of the sheer volume of Tweets (Twitter boasts about 500 million Tweets are sent
every day) you want to make sure that youre sharing something that is going to be
relevant to a targeted audience. Because Twitter Ads works on an auction model,
its easy to adjust your bids and budgets accordingly.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

12

THE BENEFIT: A CASE STUDY OF SOCIAL ADVERTISING

IN ACTION
How Oracle Marketing Cloud Cooked
Up Social Demand
To extend the promotional value and
support demand gen efforts for our
Demand Gen Pros Cookbook, the content
THE DEMAND GEN PROS
and social team developed a strategic
COOKBOOK
program featuring marketing influencers
Tasty Tips From Marketings
profiled in the asset. The eBook profiled
Master Chefs
seven case studies in a recipe format, and
paid homage to the brands respective
marketing leaders by profiling their
marketing teams, as well as their roles
and responsibilities with respect to the
campaign. We had illustrators create
caricatures with chef hats for each of
the Master Marketing Chefs and used these images in social advertising
over the course of approximately two months to drive interest.
Results
With a $20,000 budget, we were able to generate a significant social stir:
1,332,764 social impressions
305 social shares
900 new Likes on our Facebook page
364,828 impressions and 189 shares on LinkedIn for just one ad

These metrics do not include other organic, non-paid posts we did on both
channels over the course of two months.

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL ADVERTISING

Know your audience and their locale. Test, test, and test again. Just like
with email, you can A/B test your ads with different text and images to identify
which is getting the most engagement. Make sure the content youre sharing
is going to resonate on the channel you choose to advertise on. Get granular
with your targeting. The more targeted your message the better your money is
going to be spent.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

13

PILLAR 5: ANALYTICS
Yes, its difficult to quantify the value of social vanity metrics such as Likes,
Follows, or even Comments, but marketing technology is evolving to support the
mining of more meaningful performance insight far deeper than engagement.
Here are a few tips to follow when developing a strategy to calculate the ROI of
your social media efforts:
Align with the goals of your business. Are you a new startup and trying to

build brand awareness and/or establish yourselves as thought leaders? Do

you need to field a lot of customer service questions and complaints? Are you
trying to establish a community through a social network? Do you want to
use social to capture new leads? Make sure that youre aligning with specific
business goals and choose to establish a presence on the channels that have
the best chance of achieving those goals. Simply put, dont create a Facebook
page just to say youre on Facebook. Gravitate toward the channels where your
audiences are playing.
Define relevant metrics. For thought leadership, maybe its reach and

impressions across the web. For customer service, maybe its response
time, and sentiment. Tie metrics like these together to tell the complete
story of your campaign efforts. Investing in tools that offer listening,
publishing, reporting, and customer support will enable the collection of
these important metrics.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

14

 Reconfigure and repeat activities. Now that you have your goals and

metrics, its time to align with the other teams in your marketing department to
establish a publishing schedule based on your content calendar. Align with your
demand generation team for a more definitive view of which campaigns are
coming down the pipeline. Sync with your PR team on which announcements
are happening and when, and find out which publications the organization is
working with. Talk with your events teams so you know what webinars and
conferences you have coming up that you can drive people to.
Nurture and build. Once youve captured data on the people youve brought

in from social in your cross-channel marketing system, you can then put them
into a nurture campaign and track what other interactions youre having with
them. From there you can score that lead and potentially pass it on to your
sales team.

ESSENTIALS TIP FOR SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

Align tools and teams to conquer! To make the most of your social media
intelligence across all organizational efforts, map out a plan to integrate the
appropriate systems, as well as the insights being gleaned from them. This will
help not only your team foster a more seamless execution focus, but also create
more meaningful customer interactions across touch points. For instance, you can
better connect the communication messaging to your social audiences in a way
that rewards their loyalty and interest.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

15

GETTING DOWN TO
SOCIAL BUSINESS
The Six Stages of Social Business Maturity
as outlined by Altimeter Group1
SOCIAL BUSINESS MATURITY STEPS
The evolutionary trajectory of how companies
organize and strategize around social

CONVERGED

STRATEGIC

FORMALIZED
ENGAGEMENT
PRESENCE
PLANNING
LISTEN &
LEARN

STAKE OUR
CLAIM

DIALOG
DEEPENS
RELATIONSHIPS

ORGANIZE
FOR SCALE

BECOME A
SOCIAL
BUSINESS

BUSINESS
IS SOCIAL

STAGE 1:
Planning: Listen to LearnThe goal of the Planning stage is to ensure there is
a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource
development, and execution.

STAGE 2:
Presence: Stake Our ClaimStaking a claim represents a natural evolution
from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience
establishes a formal and informed presence in social media.

STAGE 3:
Engagement: Dialog Deepens RelationshipsWhen organizations move
into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer nice
to have but is instead a critical element in relationship building. This requires
a commitment to two-way dialogs, which can be difficult for organizations
unaccustomed to sharing.

STAGE 4:
Formalized: Organize for ScaleThe risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is
the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4. As social media spreads quickly
throughout the organization, groups in departments and business units often act
within their own silo, with minimal coordination across teams.
1 This text is an excerpt from the framework that originally appears in the Oracle eBook
Delivering on the Promise of the Social Business.

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

16

STAGE 5:
Strategic: Becoming a Social BusinessAs organizations migrate along
the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they
increasingly generate real business impacts.
This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see
the potential and benefits of social. Key tenets of this stage include integrating
social into all areas of the business, garnering executive engagement, forming a
steering committee, and pushing social operations out to business units.

STAGE 6:
Converged: Business is Social As a result of the cross-functional and
executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of
an evolving organization. Organizations moving into this stage are driven by a
vision that articulates how social media and digital overall improve customer and
employee relationships and experiences. The key tenets to convergence are the
imperative to make a commitment to a single business strategy process, merging
social with digital, creating holistic customer experiences with converged media,
and developing a holistic social culture.
MARRIOTT REWARDS CASE STUDY:
Marriott Rewards joined Facebook in December 2011 and quickly grew to be
the largest and most engaged hotel loyalty brand on Facebook. The continuing
mission of Marriott Rewards is to engage target audiences around the world
through social media channels in a consistent, authentic and meaningful way.
The Marriott Rewards social media philosophy is to keep life at the center of the
story, not hotels, programs, or deals.
The 30 Beds In 30 Days sweepstakes was the second Facebook promotion in
which Marriott Rewards gave away 30 Marriott Beds to 30 Facebook fans in 30
days. The sweepstakes was hosted on a Facebook enabled microsite, which was
responsively designed for desktop, mobile, and tablet users. It also lived on the
Marriott Rewards Facebook page as a tab. As with the 2012 sweepstakes, it was
co-sponsored by partners ShopMarriott.com and the Marriott Rewards Credit
Card by Chase.
The primary goal was to increase fan acquisition and engagement on Facebook
and also to drive traffic to partner sites like Chase Marriott Rewards Credit
Card and ShopMarriott.com. Marriott also hoped to drive enrollments into the
Marriott Rewards program.
The 30 Beds In 30 Days sweepstakes increased share of voice during the
campaign. It also generated more positive sentiment around the program in
general outside of the contest. According to Oracle Social Clouds sentiment
analysis, mentions of the Marriott Rewards program and the campaign outside
of Marriott channels with a clearly defined sentiment ran 90% positive during
the campaign.
Additional metrics include:
196,909 new Facebook Fans for Marriott Rewards Page
102% ShopMarriott.com sales increase
18,244 visits to Marriott Rewards Credit Card application page
602,334 entries into 30 Beds In 30 Days

Modern Marketing Essentials Guide: Social Marketing

17

ABOUT ORACLE MARKETING CLOUD

Modern Marketers choose Oracle Marketing Cloud to build
customer obsessed cultures, create and manage ideal
customers, and power revenue performance. They transform
marketing by truly knowing the customer, engaging
with cross-channel marketing, and achieving data driven
accountability. Integrated information from cross-channel,
content, and social marketing with data management and
activation along with hundreds of app and data partners
enables them to target, engage, convert, analyze, and use
award-winning marketing technology and expertise to deliver
personalized customer experiences at every interaction.
Visit oracle.com/marketingcloud

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