Testing SoLoMo Marketing Campaigns

Modern marketers have their work cut out for them just in keeping up with the latest innovations in marketing technology. With so many new innovations and buzzwords flying about the place, it can be hard to know which ones are passing fads and which are here to stay.

In the case of SoLoMo, given the importance of each individual strand, it is hard to envisage it fading into the background anytime soon.

Unifying your social, local, and mobile marketing strategies offers a number of benefits. However, in order to reap the rewards, you need to understand the concept and how to test your implementation of it.

The Components of SoLoMo

For those who haven’t been introduced to SoLoMo yet, this is a new approach to marketing that draws together three individual strands into a unified marketing approach that is aware of how modern consumers interact with brands.

SoLoMo is shorthand for social local and mobile marketing. All of these components are individually important, but by considering the interplay between them, you can use each to its maximum potential.

Social

Consumers rarely turn to brands themselves as their primary source of information about their own products. Instead, most people turn to their social media accounts when they want to find out what other people think about a brand.

Whenever a consumer searches for your brand on a social media platform, you want them to come across both glowing reviews of your business, and an official profile that you use to interact with and update your customers.

It’s no longer enough to court the opinions of a few select reviewers or industry analysts. Instead, you need to focus on generating positive organic mentions of your brand and engaging positively with your customers through your official profile.

Local

While some people are extremely alarmed by the degree to which their smartphones are able to track their physical movements, most of us make use of location services on a daily basis.

In the past, these services have existed primarily to enhance the users’ convenience when using particular apps and services. However, location services also present marketers with a potentially very powerful tool.

By tailoring the content that is served up to users according to their location and the businesses around them, marketers can personalize the user experience in new and exciting ways.

Deploying marketing that is aware of a users’ physical location doesn’t just make marketing feel more personal, it also makes it far more likely to be relevant. After all, if you see an ad for a store that is just around the corner, you’re more likely to be swayed than you are if you see an ad for a business that you couldn’t visit now even if you wanted to.

Mobile

Both social and local marketing is increasingly being viewed as predominantly mobile-based marketing methods.

Most social media users will access the platforms through their smartphones. Similarly, marketing localization is difficult outside of smart mobile devices that have GPS or other location technology in them.

Consumers take their phones with them wherever they go. For many of us, our smartphones have begun to replace our laptops and we are increasingly dependent upon them to keep ourselves organized. Because of the array of sensors and features that modern smartphones contain, there is a huge amount of potential for creative marketers.

Identify Your Key Performance Indicators

In order to assess the effectiveness of any campaign, you need to go into it knowing what your key performance indicators are going to be. These are the variables that you are going to use to measure the success of your campaign and they will define your strategy and execution.

The most important KPIs will depend on what the ultimate goal of your marketing campaign is. Uniting your social, local, and mobile marketing efforts into a single cohesive approach enables you to utilize each individual strand to its full potential.

However, you still need to have a clear idea of what your goals are if you want to reap as many benefits as possible. If you are trying to use each strand to achieve something different, those individual successes won’t be as effective as combining all three towards a common goal.

Without locking down your KPIs before you begin, you will have a difficult time assessing how effective your campaign has been.

Of course, increases in sales and other metrics can indicate a successful campaign, but you should be aiming to develop a more granular understanding of what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Use Social Media to Test Your Taglines

Social media platforms are great for giving you instant feedback. If your social media profiles have enough followers, all you need to do is post a potential tagline or image to your social media accounts and then see how your audience responds to them.

You can make both your local and your mobile marketing more effective by building them upon a focus-tested tagline that you know is going to resonate with your audience.

Mobile marketing favors short and effective messages, it is not an effective arena for long and drawn-out sales pitches. Take advantage of social media, Twitter in particular, as a testing ground for your key messaging.

Monitor Local Channels

As with any other form of marketing, the hope with local marketing campaigns is that they will ultimately lead to increased footfall, and therefore increased sales. However, these are not the only important metrics for assessing the impact of your local marketing.

If your SoLoMo marketing approach is successful, interest in your business in the local area should rise. This will be reflected in increased mentions of your brand on local social media channels.

Make sure that your business is registered with Google and is visible to apps like FourSquare that enable users to check-in.

Every time a user checks in to your business, they are giving you some free promotion and improving local awareness of your business.

The key to testing the success of any marketing campaign lies in choosing the right KPIs to measure your success, to begin with.

Not only do KPIs help you to devise useful tests for measuring the effectiveness of your campaign, but they also focus your mind and enable you to develop a thoughtful and considered strategy.