I’ve found some interesting statistics published by NTT Data Lab on 15th of November. It shows why more than 60% of the businesses in Japan failed to see the result they expected from running Social Media Marketing. This study targeted businesses in Japan with more than 300 employees and also ones that operate smaller offices.<\/p>\n
The first set of stats in the report tell us that the percentage of businesses that succeeded in implementing Social Media and getting an expected result was 35%. On the other hand, 65% of them said that they failed to get the result they wanted.<\/p>\n
For successful companies the top 4 reasons why they thought they had succeeded with their social media campaigns were something like this.<\/p>\n
1. The timing was right.
\n2. Staff had a good knowledge of the brand.
\n3. The company improved its internal processes to suit this new type of strategy.
\n4. There was an understanding of what Social Media and this allowed for implementation of good strategy.<\/p>\n
All of the above are understandable, and many of the businesses who failed might say, “Well we did all that, but I\u2019m not sure why our strategy isn’t working so well\u201d. So what I really want you to see are the differences in what they focus on.<\/p>\n
Social Media’s KPI and successful businesses focus on the right measurements.<\/p>\n
The top 3 things successful companies focus on are:<\/p>\n
1. Sales increase, Profit margin \u2014 Business management (18.2%)
\n2. Favourability, search ranking, press \u2014 Brand management (15.5%)
\n3. Number of visitors, number of sales \u2013 Sales management (14.4%)<\/p>\n
Whereas the businesses who failed list important focus points as follows:<\/p>\n
1. Number of access, click, interactions \u2014 Website traffic management (25.6%)
\n2. Number of fans, followers \u2014 Social Media traffic management (21.5%)<\/p>\n
As you can see, the main focus points of the unsuccessful companies was not improving the business by selling more, but rather just driving traffic. Driving traffic to a website is important, but doesn’t help you if you don’t have a good long term strategy on how to improve your sales.<\/p>\n
We are often asked “Can you get us XXXX followers?” or “We need to have monthly page view of XXX at least, can you do this?”. But it’s time for us to realise the value of the long term strategy and measuring your business success with Social Media with the right kind of measurements. We always recommend you to have long term and short term strategy to achieve this \u2014 rather than just evaluating the number of access or followers.<\/p>\n
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Thanks,
\nKana & The JAPAN BUZZ Team<\/p>\n