Kia Motors doubled the impact of its social media marketing at less than half the cost by targeting paid posts to social media users who were most likely to engage with the content. 

The Accenture-supported strategy raised the engagement of followers and influencers with the South Korean automaker?s brand and optimized its social marketing spend, with results showing more than twice the level of positive interactions with followers at 47 percent the cost. The initiative points to auto marketers? growing sophistication with leveraging social to deliver insights to influence brand preference and purchase, although industry critics have called for more use of social to drive business leads into sales pipelines.

?Targeting the correct audience is particularly important in a social media ad buy because a non-committed fan base can negatively impact the distribution of the brand?s message,? said Shuli Lowy, marketing director for mobile for Ping Mobile. 

?Social media sites often give priority placement to messages that receive traction from viewers ? making it important that you grow your base with the right crowd.? 

With Accenture?s help, Seoul-based Kia is steering its social media effort toward providing more personally relevant messages for customers.

South Korea?s oldest automaker has successfully grown its base of fans and followers on social channels to about 21 million, contributing significantly to its rapidly expanding brand value for the past several years.

Kia is prudent to work with partners to take a step back, think about how it can target its audience, and place ads accordingly. 

For example, a user coming to the Facebook news feed is greeted with a lot of information from friends and companies. Facebook needs to make sure that the content the user sees is interesting to get him or her to come back. The site therefore has algorithms set up to test posts and see how they perform. 

If a brand?s posts receives likes, shares, and comments then the algorithm will deem it as engaging content and place it in more news feeds. If, on the other hand, the site tests out a brand?s post on a sample audience and everyone ignores it, then Facebook will deem it as less interesting content and be less likely to distribute it elsewhere. 

 

In the Kia campaign, Accenture first used its proprietary Social Media Diagnostic solution provided by Accenture Interactive Research & Development to identify Kia?s social media strengths and areas of improvement. 

Then, the global management consulting company clustered Kia?s social media followers based on an analysis of Kia?s data on user engagement in social channels, using different car models and different post types as the criteria. 

Kia then precisely targeted paid posts to social media users who were most likely to engage with the content.  

 

Marketers? challenge is to establish and sustain a seamless, integrated customer experience, combining the physical touch points of auto retailing with those of the evolving digital marketplace, maintaining the integrity of a meaningful car-buying experience.

 

A report last year from the Chief Marketing Officer Council urged marketers to do more to leverage social media as a platform for driving business leads into sales pipelines.

The report argued that the use of social in combination with natural language processing and big data analytics, along with social's ability to deliver meaningful content and commentary in context, has the potential to make it a highly effective medium for identifying, segmenting and engaging consumers based on preferences and where they are in the purchase cycle.

?Having one million fans that are committed to a brand is better than having 10 million fans that aren?t,? Ms. Lowy said. ?In the first scenario, it is more likely that a brand?s Facebook posts will be distributed to the entire committed audience. 

?That?s why it?s imperative that brands don?t blindly throw money at social media ad spends,? she said. ?Getting the wrong group of followers is not just ineffective ? it?s detrimental.?