Digital provides us with a medium for extremely measureable objectives, which we use to the benefit of Clients. In social media, digital also gives the market a vast platform to voice their opinions.

But the majority of marketers are still not using the consumer comments and opinions as a measured justification component for digital media plans, online strategies and campaigns.

The reality is you need to know this to provide a comprehensive strategy:

• knowing where the target market is actually hanging out,
• what they are saying about the specific Brand/Product/Service,
• what consumer opinions are about previous campaigns / campaigns of similar competitor Brands.

Research and monitoring online is key before any plan can be justified today;

1. Solid research provides improved campaign results

When you establish and benchmark in advance where your target market is making the most noise, by tracking what they are saying in relation to tracking of keywords relative to your objectives you are able to quickly narrow down your plan to gain effective results and provide the basis to measure the results from;

Acknowledging the discussions around previous campaigns is key to an even better result for your next campaign. You may have had great results and achieved the campaign objective but with actual consumer insights the results can supersede the objectives, providing momentum in gaining Client confidence in this still highly intangible medium.

On the flip side, when a campaign doesn’t work by listening to the conversations you can easily pick up where you went wrong, what the consumer didn’t like and why they didn’t buy into it.

• benchmark the “health-rating” of your Brand before any implementation/intervention

2. Launch and Listen

Digital is an ever moving target… what works today is already redundant tomorrow, this medium allows the consumer to be fickle, to turn you off, opt out and quickly kill your reputation with their negative opinions instantly to all their “meta-friends”, if they don’t like what you have to say and this obviously applies in the positive where a well-like message will spread virally in no time.

On launch you need to track; what are they saying; do they like what they see/hear, are they responding as planned, what tweak need to be made to the message to better fit what the target audience wants.

Bear in mind, in the same way that you send out a press release to journalist’s offline at launch; you need to simultaneously plan your webPR strategy. Seeding content to bloggers and placing your releases on consumer, press portals etc.

3. Track, track, track…. and Measure

You need to be on to it. If you don’t know what is being talked about you cannot react and this can make the difference to the level of success of a campaign and the overall Brand reputation.

So your campaign message has been communicated where your target market hang outs…

What difference has this intervention made? Has it influenced the consumers’ perception positively/negatively? Where has the conversation now shifted to, where do you need to focus next?

Knowing all of this is not a luxury but a necessary qualitative part of the plan and, results, that marketers need to include to their campaign and, strategy, justification.

Tools out there such as saidWot can be used for this: benchmarking target market networks, tracking campaigns and, the monitoring and influencing of overall Brand perception.