Everyone seems to be jumping on the social media bandwagon, although not everyone understands the time investment needed to run a successful social media campaign. Social media is not a once-off activity and interaction needs to be consistent and happen almost instantly.

As part of a business’ integrated marketing strategy, social media plays a valuable role. To make sure you get it right, you need to create a social media strategy. Determine where your target audience are spending their time on social networks, then create a social media strategy and action plan for these platforms.  Merely determining which platforms to use does not constitute a social media strategy!

Decide what type of content you are going to publish on these social networks and how you are going to respond to comments and replies, both the good and bad ones. The initial social media strategy should cover at least the first three months of your campaign, but you will learn a lot during this initial period and can tweak the strategy as you go along. Determine how you are going to measure your social media efforts and what goals you want to achieve with your social media strategy.

Always aim to provide content that will encourage and create interaction. Don’t only talk about your own brand, think about your target audience’s interests and create content based on those. By adding value you will encourage people to talk to and about your business; and when other people talk about you, it adds credibility.

Social media thrives on conversations and unfortunately these conversations don’t only take place during office hours. For a successful social media campaign you need to be there and respond to questions and comments as soon as possible. In order to manage your conversations, decide which social media applications you’re going to use. Below are some of my favourites:

• TweetDeck
• Seesmic
• Hootsuite

With all the above applications you can manage multiple Twitter accounts from one place and have columns for your friends’ updates, lists you have created, your direct messages and @replies. In Hootsuite and Tweetdeck you can create additional columns where you can run a permanent search for keywords or key-phrases. I really like Hootsuite as it is browser-based and allows you to schedule tweets

With social media, there is no right or wrong way to do it. There are some basic unspoken rules to keep in mind, but as your campaign progresses you will learn from your mistakes.

Google Analytics is a fantastic, enterprise grade analytics programme that features great advanced functionality. We’ve already explored the importance of using analytics to understand how your visitors are interacting with your website and how you can use this information to improve your site’s usability and maximise conversion. Today, we’d like to look at this in a little more detail.

Among Google Analytics’ great features for even better analysis of your data is Advanced Segments. Essentially, segments allow you to easily isolate and analyse specific, defined sections of your traffic side by side.

At the top of the dashboard you can easily activate pre-defined Advanced Segments by using the drop-down on the top right hand side of the screen (in the grey bar). By selecting any number of the default segments, you’re able to compare these metrics next to each other on your reports. And, as you move around in your reports, these segments will remain in place allowing you to extract more meaningful analysis from your analytics data.

The pre-defined segments include a number of useful everyday metrics such traffic sources, paid and non-paid traffic, visits with conversions and non-bounce visits.

But, as they say on the home shopping channels, “that’s not all!” Can’t find the segment you’re looking for? Or want to define a segment even further? No problem!

Click on “create a new advanced segment”, or click on “Advanced Segments” in the My Customizations menu. Here you will be able to create a new segment by simply dragging and dropping dimensions and metrics into the fields around the “and”/”or” statements. You then specify conditions and values for each and test the segment to see the number of visitors to which these specified rules apply.

Once you’re happy with your segment you can name it and save it. Now you’re able to easily select it from the list and apply it to any one of your reports.

How can you apply this on a practical level? Let’s say you run an African travel website and you’re interested in seeing which destinations are most popular on your website. The first step would be to check if there are any unique identifiers in your URLs for these pages. If the URLs use variables as unique identifiers, say “country=botswana”, “country=southafrica” and “country=namibia” – then you’re in business! Note what these are.

In your advanced segments tab, click “create new advanced segment”. Drag the “Page” dimension (from the Content section of the menu) into the field. Select the condition “contains” and select the appropriate value for the identifier. Test the segment to see that it’s working. Name the segment appropriately and save it. Do the same for each of the destinations you want to segment.

Now, you are able to apply these custom advanced segments to your reports to compare data such as visits to each section, bounces, pageviews and new visits for each segment side by side.

Advanced segments are also particularly useful if you’re looking to analyse purchasing behaviour. It’s possible, for example, to segment visitors from specific cities or regions who made a purchase on your site. You can then more easily see what products and pages these people looked at, this may give you a better understanding of where to focus your marketing efforts.

Intrawest controls a number of resorts in North America. With its large portfolio, Intrawest has become the leader in experiential destination resorts in this region. The company started in 1976 as a residential and urban real estate firm and has evolved over the years include holiday resorts “where amazing experiences happen.”

Intrawest use Email Marketing tactics to stay in touch with clients during the off-season. According to Randy Cuff, Intrawest’s director of CRM and Email Marketing, their email marketing strategies “focus on promoting the resorts as four-season resorts.”

Intrawest is a good example of a brand that successfully integrates their Email Marketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Below are a few of the things they focus on in order to create more value for clients through their email newsletters.

• Targeted newsletters are sent out to clients that are visiting any of the resorts within 14 days. The email focuses on reminding clients that they are almost on holiday and offers them links to activities in the resort that they can pre-book to make their stay more memorable.




• Email newsletters are personalised based on 750 different criteria. For instance, if a visitors lives in the area, they won’t need directions to the resort. In newsletters to local clients a link to the weather forecast is included to encourage them to plan a break-away weekend.




• Intrawest makes use of subtle cross-selling, for instance if a first-time visitor hasn’t booked a ski lesson yet they are encouraged to do so in their welcoming email and they have the option to rent their ski gear in advance.

Intrawest also found that when visitors only take one ski lesson they’re less likely to come back. Yet, if they participate in two lessons they’re more likely to become a skier for life. To encourage first-time skiers to come back for a second lesson, the ski instructor will take a photo of the skier during the first session and send it to the skier after the lesson with tips on how to improve as well as an invitation to book his / her next lesson.

Read the full Intrawest case study on ChiefMarketer.com.