Social media mar­ket­ing is an increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of con­sumer pur­chase fun­nels, and can be a pow­er­ful way to raise aware­ness dur­ing cru­cial sea­sons of the mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar. A new Engagor study has exam­ined the per­for­mance of a num­ber of brands on social media dur­ing the ‘back to school’ sea­son. How are the best brands con­duct­ing cam­paigns to raise aware­ness about their prod­ucts on social media?

An increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of the sum­mer mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar is August’s ‘Back to School’ con­tent and social media ini­tia­tives. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Retail Fed­er­a­tion, fam­i­lies are expect­ed to spend $74.9 bil­lion on back to school sup­plies and equip­ment in 2014, a fig­ure that rep­re­sents a 5 per­cent rise from 2013 spend­ing. This year, the aver­age fam­i­ly with chil­dren in grades K‑12 is expect­ed to spend $669.28, on appar­el, shoes, sup­plies, and elec­tron­ics.

Social media mar­ket­ing has proved to be a valu­able part of sea­son­al brand cam­paigns and a new study from social media ana­lyt­ics plat­form Engagor has revealed that Wal­mart was the best per­form­ing brand on social media for the lat­est back to school peri­od. With 232,210 men­tions, the U.S. retail giant led the social chat­ter fol­lowed close­ly by Kohl’s, with 200,899 men­tions. Tar­get, JCPen­ney, Sta­ples, Old Navy, and Office Depot also co-ordi­nat­ed suc­cess­ful cam­paigns.

As well as this, Wal­mart was also the most engaged retail­er of the brands includ­ed in Engagor’s study, respond­ing to com­ments 2,625 times, and the quick­est to respond, tak­ing an aver­age of 33 min­utes to answer con­sumer ques­tions.

You can see a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the key find­ings of Engagor’s study in the info­graph­ic below:

The Merits of Social Media Marketing

An impor­tant aspect of social media mar­ket­ing, par­tic­u­lar in rela­tion to back to school cam­paigns, is the sus­tained lev­el of engage­ment that con­sumers expe­ri­ence as they view brand­ed posts and browse updates and offers in their feeds.

Con­sumers today are extreme­ly savvy in the way of dis­cov­er­ing avail­able offers, and are pre­pared to stag­ger their spend­ing await­ing the best pos­si­ble deals. As report­ed on Retail Touch­Points, Pam Good­fel­low, Prin­ci­pal Ana­lyst and Con­sumer Insights Direc­tor at Pros­per Insights & Ana­lyt­ics spoke of how “there’s not a mind­set now where con­sumers feel the need to make one giant pur­chase… It’s eas­i­er for them to buy a few things dur­ing back-to-school and then pur­chase more items through­out the year. Con­sumers also know dis­counts are com­ing and there’s no incen­tive to spend more [now].”

Saman­tha Polak, writ­ing in the the same arti­cle, went on to explain that “retail­ers can get in front of back-to-school shop­pers through­out the extend­ed sea­son by break­ing it down into seg­ments and tai­lor­ing mes­sages based on what par­ents and stu­dents are think­ing about at each stage”.

In many ways, social media mar­ket­ing offers a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to main­tain a con­sis­tent, per­son­al­ized lev­el of mes­sag­ing which goes some way to explain the suc­cess of back to school cam­paigns on the chan­nel.

This arti­cle first appeared on the Linkdex blog.

Have you seen any great exam­ples of brands doing social media mar­ket­ing?