Marketers are really looking for the same old things from social media and digital marketing as they did from traditional marketing methods, so why should it be treated any different.
They are looking for:
- Product lift – be on top of the consumers mind
- Revenue – increase share of the consumer wallet
- Brand building – the subtle science of knowing your customer and providing them what they need, when they need it and every once in a while creating that non-existent need – which takes-off and becomes a rage, a success. It is in the domain of building brands that the concepts of loyalty and trust reside – those un-measurable factors which makes marketing the art form it is and keeps it interesting at all times.
At its most basic, from a marketing standpoint, Social Media offers us the insight we always wanted into our consumers’ minds, behaviors and thoughts – the challenge is harnessing it, understanding it and making it work for us. As a recent piece of research about Facebook ‘Likes’ suggests that algorithms can automatically help identify, thus target, users’ personal attributes such as: ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. This is highly powerful in this day and age, where micro-targeting aka personalization and localization, has come to be expected rather than being treated with suspicion by consumers.
A separate research Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report identifies some key factors about consumer behavior and trends that should be applied effectively to make marketing spend work more efficiently. To make the spend work harder, pull marketing – blogs and brand websites – continue to be significantly more relevant in buying influence than any other digital spend. It also identifies that while communities are effective tools, their size is inversely proportional to their effectiveness. This just bolsters the old known fact that deeper relationships are more efficient than having more relationships, that an active community participant is going to be a better brand ambassador than the multitude that signed up just cause they saw an interesting promo.
