Social Media & Digital Marketing

I am an older guy. I was on the forefront of the revived brand management movement in the mid-to-late 1990s. And I have ridden it out until the present. I was also an early user of the Internet - going as far back as 1976 when it was primarily a military communication vehicle (ARPANET). Further, I was on the ground floor of coding, learning Fortran, COBOL and basic assembler language in college. When I was at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in New York, I was an expert in reading binary code, hexadecimal code and core dumps to identify coding errors. I had an online newsletter before there were blogs and I started a few of the first marketing-oriented blogs. And, I have kept up with web design, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing (Google, Facebook, et al.), digital marketing, mobile marketing, CRM, data analytics, email marketing, marketing automation, CTV/OTT, geofencing, retargeting, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.

I share this background to indicate that I am grounded in both classical marketing and branding concepts and techniques and the most recent tools and advances in social media and digital marketing. I am not just speaking from one of these two perspectives. And I am not a luddite.

Here is my point. Social media and digital marketing are overrated. Brands and enterprises have become over reliant on them. Why? They are modern - the latest "shiny objects." They are relatively inexpensive. And, most importantly, you can track and measure their results (which cannot be said of many other marketing components).

However, while they have their place in the marketing mix, here is what they continue to lack - the human touch, relationship building, peer-to-peer marketing, real world publicity stunts, and the power of a good salesperson to close a sale.

Yes, over time, blog posts, podcasts and YouTube and Vimeo videos can create a certain level of trust, emotional connection and thought leadership. And, there are ways to make digital content go viral, especially to an extent that cannot be achieved otherwise. However, more "high touch" marketing tactics must be kept in the marketing mix to create a truly integrated and powerful marketing campaign. 

When a person only knows how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When marketers only know social media and digital marketing, the primary marketing vehicle becomes digital by default.

To have a fully rounded marketing campaign that is highly effective, generally you need the following marketing components: target market definition and segmentation, marketing research for customer insight, marketing strategy and plan development, graphic design, videography, copywriting, media planning and placement, media relations and publicity and social media and digital marketing expertise. 

I have witnessed more and more companies with limited resources relying solely on social media and digital marketing to achieve their marketing goals - often with lackluster results. This is not always the case, but it is often the case. 

If I were to start a marketing campaign with very limited resources, I would start with media relations and publicity including proactive publicity and carefully crafted publicity stunts. In today's world, this would include social media and digital marketing. But social media and digital marketing wouldn't be the only components of such a campaign.

So, my core message in this blog post is that while social media and digital marketing are likely to be components of your integrated marketing campaign, they should not be the sole or dominant components of that campaign. 

Brands and the Digital World

 

Here are some of the effects of the digital world on brands:

 

• A brand’s online presence can improve brand awareness.
• A brand’s website is critical to the perception of that brand because most people investigate a brand by going to its website.
• Blogs can create thought leadership and emotional connection for a brand. But consistent new content over time is required to activate these effects.
• If a picture is worth a thousand words, then videos are worth ten thousand words. Consider creating a YouTube channel for your brand.
• For thought leadership, consider podcasts too.
• SEO is still important.
• A third (older) to a half (younger) of people investigate brands through social media before they purchase. 
• Advertising in social media makes it easier for people to become aware of and try new brands, including brands that could not break though in the analog world because of lack of marketing funds. This, to some degree, levels the playing field for smaller brands.
• More and more product offerings are delivered through social media feeds.
• Low follows, likes, views and shares can reflect negatively on a brand.
• If you are just starting with your brand’s online presence, use Facebook and Instagram first. 
• Consumer targeting is significantly improved through Facebook and Google ads. Data analytics can result in highly targeted or even tailored product offerings to individuals.
• Brands would do well to set up pages on Facebook and Instagram as a way to interact with customers.
• The Internet provides many forums for people to provide feedback on brands, including negative feedback. It would behoove brand advocates to monitor as many of those forums as possible and respond as appropriate. It is important to respond as quickly as possible.
• Online forums can increase consumer engagement with brands.
• The Internet leads to greater brand transparency, but skilled marketing can also make a brand seem bigger or more popular than it actually is.
• Marketing automation can generate quality leads.
• Marketing automation makes it easier for people to respond to offers without prior awareness of the brands behind the offers.
• One needs to be extremely careful about how the marketing automation is set up or it can backfire on the brand. This is very similar to how automated telephonic customer service can backfire on the brand. 
• Geofencing can encourage immediate purchase when a consumer is near a retail outlet. 
• Geofence in the places that your target customers are at the times when they are there. Think this through carefully 
• Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, PayPal and Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering make it easier for people to purchase things online with fewer clicks.
• The online presence of brands makes price comparison much easier, which can drive down prices or at least direct the consumer to the cheapest source of the brand.
• Online clothing brand sales are still tricky. Several approaches have been implemented to help with sizing and visualizing the clothes when worn but there still are issues with tactile qualities of the fabric, quality of the construction and fit. This may lead to more returns for online purchased clothing brands than store purchased clothing brands.
• The younger the consumer, the more everything is transacted on the smart phone. All brand interactions must be optimized for mobile. 
• To some degree, the digital world has made people more savvy and cynical about brands, mostly due to increased transparency.

Big Data and Customer Targeting

Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media and networking websites coupled with smartphone GPS, AI and big data analytics allows the marketer to target customers in a way that was never possible before. 

Not only can the marketer target based on demographics, psychographics and physical location but also on intangibles such as highly correlated behaviors, purchases, web searches, affiliations, etc. 

So first, through factor analysis, cluster analysis and other big data analytics, you need to discover what correlates most closely with the purchase of your brand. Once you have discovered this, then you need to find ways to target people with those attributes. This allows for hyper-efficient targeting that makes old fashioned media planning seem quaint. 

Sometimes it is as easy as using the Facebook platform to run a highly targeted ad. At other times, you have to be creative about how to reach people with certain attributes.  

The beauty of this approach is that you can send very specific messages to each target group or segment. Each message will focus on the angle that will most appeal to people in that group or segment. 

Microtargeting is a related concept. it is the use by political parties and election campaigns of direct marketing datamining techniques that involve predictive market segmentation (aka cluster analysis). It is used by United States Republican and Democratic political parties and candidates to track individual voters and identify potential supporters. The term "microtargeting" was coined in 2002 by political consultant Alexander P. Gage.

When you combine prospect location with targeted messages on mobile phones you are entering the realm of geo-fencing and geo-targeting. Because I know A and B about you and because I know that correlates with an interest in my product and brand and because I know you are in a physical location proximate to where my brand is available for purchase, I will send you a highly personalized alert using the most compelling message for you indicating that I will give you an incentive to purchase my brand now. For an example of this, click here.

While brands need to be managed at a global level, increasingly they need to be marketed at an individual level. With today's tools, that is becoming more and more possible.