Confluence Media, Inc. (“Confluence”) was founded in January 2007 as a search marketing agency providing social media marketing programs to businesses. Confluence’s original social media programs included Word of Mouth Marketing, Social Influencing, Reputation Management, and Research and Measurement. Since its founding, Confluence has developed core capabilities in social media research (social, cultural, and economic) and in marketing techniques; we have also codified our methods and developed internet tools and task automation, increasing efficiency while maintaining quality across resources.
Through our experience serving our clients, Confluence gained the following insights into commercial businesses’ social media marketing requirements:
Social Media Marketing methods require measurable return on investment:
Commercial businesses spend marketing dollars to increase revenues and/or enterprise value. That’s why Confluence’s commercial clients require an understanding of their return on social media marketing investment dollars. Standard evaluation techniques use subjective keyword counts or frequency measures that are not explicitly related to results; Confluence recognizes that social media marketing measurements must go further and demonstrate the impact of connections to points of interests through sales.
Social Media can help accelerate consumers’ development of brand loyalty:
A customer engages with your brand in stages, moving from realizing a need for a product, to making regular purchases, and sometimes onward to becoming a brand advocate—spreading good word about your product to others. Moving customers along this spectrum takes a great deal of effort from marketers and brand managers; however, leveraging your customers’ social networks as part of your promotional efforts engages them more deeply with your brand and can help move them toward being advocates more quickly and with less effort from marketers.
Social Media Marketing methods require integration with traditional marketing:
Social media campaigns are not meant to stand alone—we would never suggest that you abandon your traditional marketing in favor of social media. Instead, Confluence focuses on social media and traditional marketing integration; linking social media campaigns to traditional marketing techniques makes measuring social media ROI feasible, while increasing the efficacy and lowering the overall costs of your traditional programs.