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Using social media for online marketing in the Middle East – A quick guide

1)    Discuss – don’t sell, don’t over inflate and certainly don’t try to hoodwink people onto your site using dumb marketing stunts.  Generate relevant content and encourage points of discussion and feedback from your targeted audience.

2)    Relevant – Keep the content relevant to your subject matter; don’t use marketing jargon in conveying your message, keep it honest, open and to the point.

3)    Encourage feedback – getting user feedback will help you tailor your message to exactly what the consumer is interested in, its much more effective to provide consumers with the information they want as compared to the information you think they want.

Measurement is going to be critical if you want to prove your return on investment to your manager - knowing who is visiting your web site, where they go, how they look at content and what actions they take as a result of visiting your site needs to be analyzed and taken into account when adapting online marketing tactics.  Although these concepts have come from advanced markets such as the UK and USA, the Middle East, just beginning to experience huge growth in the online market, is certainly no exception – without the right measurement you are working blind.  There are a wide variety of online tools available to you or your web service provider should be able to provide them to you.  One of the striking benefits of social media over and above traditional media is your ability to measure your response and optimise your message. Companies are being held more accountable for their marketing spends.  Every penny that is spent needs to show its return in investment. For example, using meta data and intelligent page titles contributes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) drives a much higher return than contextual search based advertising.  However very effective SEO is very hard to achieve without the right experienced expert driving the requirement you may fall foul of get rich quick SEO schemes that actually end up damaging your search engine ranking rather than improving it.

The online customer experience with persuasive content and online applications at the right times to the market, will determine your online marketing success in the UAE. As well as saving money, your company will be able to get to market and in front of customers and potential customers much faster using social media. Ensure that your content strategy and the links to your online advertising and data acquisition or CRM system are well defined before you embark on the journey.

A good online marketing strategy using social media platforms should tick all of the following boxes.

1) Measurable coverage with clicks, impressions and unique users
2) Quantifiable ROI – for example 0.25 % of people purchased a car resulting in <This> ROI
3) Data acquisition from the campaign into your companies CRM system or other database
4) Closed loop viral effect of your marketing campaign should result in the campaign increasing its foot print even after the campaign has officially stopped

The net result – if you are not sure of what the campaign will deliver even after speaking to your marketing manager or online agency in to your office, then we would suggest you ask them to drawer the campaign architecture up on a white board, a campaign architecture should answer all of the questions above and the person presenting it and should show the process flow between advertising, data capture, viral looping and content creation.
Here is an example of quick marketing campaign architecture – of course all of the figures are generated simply for example, real figures should be defined using a test campaign to define what numbers and percentages are applicable to the campaign.

1.    Online advertising on facebook targeted at this demographic entices people to win a car, this costs <This much> and will result in <This many> brand views
2.    0.75 of people click on the advertisement and register for a track day resulting in <this many visitors>
3.    They are provided with another chance in the drawer for each person they refer resulting in a mean average of 4.2 people per person clicked through invited resulting in <this many secondary brand messages>
4.    Of these 4.2 people invited 1.8 on average also entered the competition resulting in an average of <this many emails collected> of these 1.8 competition entrants they will invite 4.2 people on average resulting in <this many emails collected> and so on
5.    All emails are kept in the CRM system for future marketing – upon sign up the CRM system is atomically populated with data from the competition sign up.
6.    Data acquisition costs through this campaign for each unique user = <this much> based on our sales conversion rate of <This %> our net profit would be <this much> providing a return of <this much over this long>
The process flow should be able to be mapped out on the board, in an ideal situation there will be an element of closed viral looping, if you are unsure of what this is then you should check our blog more often! But a good example would be if users had to upload video that was syndicated to multiple online video channels (example) of exactly why they wanted to win a track day for this particular car…the net effect is that you have a viral loop promoting the competition, as more internet users see the video they check the competition.  Be very careful how you implement closed viral loops – they often go very wrong if implemented without very careful consideration.

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