The Learning Curve of Social Media Marketing
Marketing has changed since our parents saw it last. From airwaves to cyberspace, most are optimistic about this continually evolving market. Social media marketing has affected most of us so drastically that it’s now hard to imagine daily life without it. After all, products are literally everywhere now. Link sharing is happening thousands of times a minute. Company owners now have the ability to easily talk with an anonymous customer thousands of miles away and still be able to satisfy his or her concerns. However, to appreciate the advantages of social media marketing, we must remember the advantages that traditional marketing had as well. In combination, traditional marketing and social media marketing can create a big boom in a business.
Traditional marketing was primarily known for its visibility to the eye. If an audience saw it, they’d remember it. Of course, if you’re like me, visual overload can happen quickly. Then you find yourself staring blankly at a television screen while some woman is talking about some brand, reading off of an unconvincing script. It’s a dismal scene, and one of the travesties that traditional marketing has fallen into from time to time. Traditional marketing has taken the form of public ads, such as brochures, pamphlets, and billboards. Other venues include television, word of mouth, business cards, postal mail, newspapers, magazines, and telemarketing.
Three advantages of traditional marketing include:
- A higher percentage of visibility
- Easier to know where to invest campaigns
- More accurate ROI (Return on Investment) Calculations
It’s harder for social media marketing to gain the same percentage of visibility. For example, an ad on a billboard is going to capture the attention of most drivers down a main highway because of its large size. Ads or links on the internet have to be more subtle or they end up looking like spam. To avoid the downfall of the visibility percentage, those using social media marketing must increase their subtle ads and links and continue to gain visible and genuine customer satisfaction. It’s also harder in social media marketing to know where to invest campaigns because it’s hard to predict where likely consumers are going to come from. Often in social media marketing, campaigns must be split up into many different projects on different social media websites. Also, ROI is harder to calculate. Now, companies must be willing to listen to the voice of their consumers rather than the statistics. The voice of the consumers, if monitored diligently, can hint at a success boom or adversely plummeting dissatisfaction. Customer satisfaction is paramount in the success of any website or company. Read the rest of this entry »
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Overall, AT&T knows exactly how to run social media marketing. Their blog posts relay updates about their products, and they respond to their customers’ ideas and concerns (positive or negative) promptly. They also have a Spanish blog for their non-English speaking customers. They have some videos of new products on Youtube and a video contest. On one website, they have pictures and short mentions of big celebrity events linking back to an entertainment portion of the AT&T website called U-verse. This is a company that models an excellent social media marketing strategy.
The CMO, Barry Judge, seems to manage most of their social media marketing. Most recent was a holiday charity. These always offer valuable improvements in business ethics and reputation. One thing I was really impressed with was his quick response to a controversial issue that was in the blog, which mentioned an alternative faith’s seasonal holiday. He updates his consumers and answers their questions quickly. With 15,800 followers on Twitter, this massive giant isn’t doing too badly. Read the rest of this entry »
