According to a study by Luxury-Insiders.com, a majority of luxury consumers are mainly influenced by the internet.
Although newspapers and magazine ads still have influence, it is clear that many continue to turn to the internet. The use of social media is very economical, allowing you to gain effective traffic and to build your brand.
In another study from Marketing Sherpa, you can see that marketers in many different markets are reducing their budgets in the more traditional channels such as Radio and Print and moving more of their focus to social media.
While the good news is that social media requires minimal capital investment, it is important to note that it can be extremely time intensive. However, if setup properly, you can reduce much of the daily time required.
Marketing Sherpa goes on to say that Lack of Knowledgeable Staff and Inability to Measure the Results are the two biggest barriers to social media. Lack of Funding and Management Resistance are both a direct result of this inability.
The ability to accurately measure ROI has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the tactic. In fact, “Advertising on blogs or social networks” is the tactic rated as the most easy to measure and the least effective (32%, was also rated least effective (16%).
If you remain obsessed with only tracking social media results you are missing the point and may find yourself employing much less effective social media tactics for the sake of the ability to measure.
Social Media tactics are difficult to measure. What we can do is measure the value of the resulting conversations and relationships, and not focus on transactions like traffic, hits, clicks, eyeballs, etc.
IOR or Impact of Relationships is another way to measure the success of social media. Measuring the amount of interaction with our communities, the number of comments they leave on our blogs and the number of times they reference us on their tweets and social networks gives us an additional measurement to show the success of social media.
Over a year ago, when I first worked with Donati Family Vineyard, I realized that what they needed was to build a community and life time relationships with their customers.
At that time I was focused on using platforms like Ning to provide that capability.
And Ning does a great job, it is a fabulous platform that provides blogging, forums, groups, videos, photos and event management and much more. It’s a great communication tool. Both Donati and Eagles Nest have their own social networks even though they are using them in slightly different ways.
What I have learned over the last year is that there are many ways to build a community, using other tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Recently, while working with Eagles Nest Winery, we have seen lots of success by using Twitter to drive followers to our blog posts, videos, and special offers.
I have a much longer list of best practices that would take a whole class (or two) to get through, but here is the short version.
People are looking for authentic experiences. Put the personal touch into all your social interactions, act human, be present, listen and actively respond.
Create a presence, build a fan base and generate BUZZ by posting and commenting on social networks such as Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, etc. .
Share videos like “how-to” clips or tours of your winery. Join Google Groups, Yahoo Groups or industry-specific sites that are related to the products or services you offer. Be sure to blog and comment on their sites. Make sure you make worthwhile contributions.
The most important aspect of any marketing program is to measure it. Even if you can’t measure ROI on your social media tactics, be sure to at least make an effort to measure IOR.
Without measurement you’ll never know how effective your efforts are and where you should put future efforts and investments going forward.
These are my slides from my presentation at the Wine Blogger’s Conference last week. You can download the slides here and view a video of my presentation here.
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