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9 Reasons Social Media Marketing is Important For the Bottom Line

While bicycling at the gym this morning, I decided to do some brainstorming on the value of social media marketing programs from a revenue driving standpoint.  Many of the reasons I came up with would improve revenue by decreasing costs, increasing cost-per-consumer, and boosting lead-generation:

• Building relationships with your consumer will increase retention rates and ultimately increase revenue per person
• Harnessing feedback will improve the quality of your product at lower R&D cost and potentially reveal new market opportunities
• Identifying and addressing customer concerns will stop bleeding more quickly and with less casualties
• All of these things will improve brand reputation, which in itself will improve the share of time a potential consumer considers your brand
• Creating advocates will generate free earned media impressions and often in places you can’t buy
• Advocate voices to their own social graph are the strongest and most trusted advertising method and will often generate the highest conversion rate
• Advocates spread the message inside social networks, where effective advertising is hard to come by, where consumers are spending more of their time and increasingly starting their commercial inquiries
• Generating content through conversation will increase the natural search results and ultimately traffic that flows to your destination
• This is important not just for Google but to create content in real time search engines, which are only going to increase in search share

Dell and Starbucks may be possible case studies on how these ring true, and I may try and map them in the future.  The next steps would be to lay out tactics to accomplish these objectives and define ways to measure the impact.   What are your reasons for social marketing?  How is social marketing increasing revenue?  Am I looking at this the right way?