As social marketing has grown, marketers have struggled to keep pace with the change in consumer behavior – and leverage those behaviors to reveal new marketing opportunities. We’ve taken a close look at how Marketers are engaging with social - here are a few of our observations:

1. Mass targeting in a silo. Marketers continue to hold onto an “all for one” mentality – delivering mass social messaging rather than targeted, relevant content integrated with other CRM channels and customer insights.
2. Listening isn’t working.  Everyone is listening, but few brands are integrating customers’ authentic voice to drive content and activate social audiences.
3. Measurement is stale. Social metrics are stale and unsophisticated. Marketers should be measuring engagement at the customer level and applying test-and-learn principles that are prevalent in other channels.

Social CRM: Connecting to Your Audience:

Merkle’s approach to social helps marketers leverage social insights to connect directly to their customers. To drive results, here’s where we focus with our clients:

• Targeted Social Contact Strategies: leverage social as a platform to develop targeted social contact strategies to reach customers and fans with relevant content based on their social behavior.
• Social Integration: Drive social engagement and value by identifying data-driven social insights to leverage across other CRM channels (site, email, mobile, search, display).
• Fan  Acquisition & Conversion: Develop targeted prospect acquisition strategies designed to capture and engage high-value fans and convert them to known, marketable customers.

Customer Centric Social Measurement: Create customer focused measurement strategies designed to identify the value of social programs and identify social optimization opportunities across channels.

Our Framework and Capabilities
Our digital team helps our clients across industries achieve their social CRM goals - from basic social listening integration to complex targeting and measurement strategies. To organize our social CRM activities, we utilize the following social marketing framework: