To deliver a truly customer-centric CX experience, brands must build integrative social media marketing and social care strategies.
Once upon a time, a brand’s social media marketing and customer care strategies rarely overlapped. Social media marketers focused their efforts on creating paid and organic content aimed at driving conversion rates and lifting online sales revenue, while customer care teams spent their days resolving customer issues. But, as consumer behavior evolved, savvy brands realized that keeping their social media marketing initiatives separate from their customer care strategies resulted in a disjointed customer experience that worked against their primary customer engagement goals.
Last year, a Forrester report commissioned by Emplifi revealed that 56% of marketing leaders measured their team’s success based on the brand’s customer retention capabilities and another 51% used customer satisfaction scores to measure success. Meanwhile, both of these factors—customer retention and customer satisfaction scores—are also correlated with exceptional customer care tactics.
When you consider that more than 50% of consumers expect brands to respond to their questions posted on social media platforms within an hour, it’s evident that social care is a natural extension of a comprehensive social media marketing strategy. But how does a brand effectively remove the silos that keep their social media marketing and social care strategies isolated from the other? More importantly, how can each inform the other to build a more integrative and comprehensive customer experience?
Social Media Marketing and Social Care: Two sides of the same coin
Social media marketing teams have much different KPIs and goals than their customer care counterparts, but, ultimately, they are both striving for the same end result: To build a loyal audience of repeat buyers. While social media marketers are focused on campaigns that extend their brand’s reach, drive conversions, and lift ecommerce sales, customer care agents are ensuring questions are answered and issues are resolved as quickly as possible.
One of the primary “middle grounds” between these two departments is centered on the technology they use. In the new era of ecommerce, customer care teams are rapidly adopting the social media marketing platforms that previously were designed for social media marketing efforts—and not just to communicate with customers and consumers via social messaging platforms.
The customer care teams that are ahead of the curve are integrating multiple social media marketing tools and tactics into their own initiatives, using generative AI to scale their social care efforts and social listening tools and analytics to better understand their customer base. We’ve seen customer care teams make considerable leaps within their workflow processes after implementing social media tools that used to be restricted to a brand’s marketing stack—leveraging chatbot technology to correctly answer 97% of customer inquiries, which, in turn, helped reduce call volumes by as much as 40% and dropped wait times to speak with a customer care agent by nearly 30%.
Combining your social media marketing and social care efforts to build a seamless customer experience
Ultimately, to build a seamless customer experience filled with authentic moments, brands must bring together their social media marketing and social care teams so that they are aligned on key branding initiatives. For example, does the brand’s social care efforts reflect the same language and messaging points as the social media marketing team? Does the customer care team have an easy and effective way to collaborate with their social media marketing counterparts so that they can keep them abreast of common product questions or frequent customer inquiries?
Oftentimes, common customer inquiries can be extremely helpful when building strategic marketing campaigns meant to drive engagement. What better way to engage your audience than giving them content based on their most frequent product questions?
Another critical component of social media marketing that applies to social care: consumer sentiment around the brand’s reputation. Do both the social media marketing team and customer care team have access to social listening and sentiment analysis tools? These solutions can provide an in-depth understanding of how consumers feel about the brand and its products across social platforms. It also helps when personalizing messaging for an audience segment or gaining insight on which social platforms certain customer segments prefer.
Such insights can greatly improve over-arching brand strategies, giving social media marketers, customer agents—and anyone else involved in CX initiatives—valuable information that can inform and shape how brands engage with their customers and win over new audiences.
Center for Social Excellence: The key to unlocking the full potential of your social channels
The biggest obstacle we see to social success, either on the social media marketing side or the social care side, is a lack of knowledge. Social media platforms are constantly evolving, launching new ad products, refining their algorithms, and offering new user tools. It’s difficult enough for most brands to keep their social media marketing and customer care strategies moving forward, much less stay informed about the latest releases and updates happening within Meta’s ad manager or TikTok’s latest trend.
By establishing a Center for Social Excellence, brands can keep their ear to the ground on the latest updates happening across the social media landscape. This knowledge can then be leveraged across departments, ensuring social media marketers and customer care agents are in the know when it comes to the latest social media advancements, platform updates, consumer behavior trends, and more.
Even if your business is not big enough to justify a fully staffed Center for Social Excellence, it’s crucial that your brand has someone on staff who stays in the know on such details—especially if you are investing in social media marketing campaigns and social care tactics.
The reality is that the social landscape—and how consumers use social apps—grows more complex by the day. By building more integrative, customer-centric strategies that align your social media marketing efforts with your social care tactics, you’ll be better equipped to meet consumer demands and exceed customer expectations.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Tay, Director of Business Consulting, Emplifi
About Emplifi: Emplifi provides exceptional digital customer experiences via a platform trusted by more than 20,000 of the world’s leading brands. With comprehensive and integrated social media marketing, social commerce, and care, combined with unified analytics and AI, Emplifi fuels growth, resulting in happy customers, increased product sales, and improved brand loyalty.