Inter Studio

The expected growth in social media marketing spending next year is a positive thing—a sign that it has earned a place at the marketing dinner table. While there are still many challenges to using it effectively, increasing budgets without a solid strategy is a sure way to fail.

– Debra Aho Williamson (Lead Analyst, eMarketers)

The use of WWW as a carrier for advertising and marketing has been increasing dramatically since the early 90’s. Unlike any media, including television, radio and print, internet advertising and marketing solutions using its low cost is now widely applied.

Due to the considerable progress in information of web and a result of inexpensive web advertising remedies, it provides more potential for multimedia subject material. It could capture text messages, images, video and acoustic. The publishers could make logos, going banners, animated and 3d model imagery. With these in hand, advertisers combination these forms to create successful and low price internet marketing and advertising solutions.

Internet marketing has the better part of a decade behind it now, and it’s been an interesting journey. After SEO, banner ads, blogs and landing pages, the latest wave in the world of online marketing, with the advent of Web 2.0, is social media marketing.

While it is a known fact that online marketing is all the rage these days, it has hardly sidetracked the other media, such as TV and print advertising. Actually, it isn’t supposed to do that either. No single medium can be effectively utilized as the ONLY medium for any marketing strategy. There might of course be exceptions, but media planners know the importance of an Integrated Marketing Communications strategy to fulfill their objectives. Media planners often see their role from a brand contact perspective. Instead of focusing solely on what medium is used for message dissemination, media planners also pay attention to how to create and manage brand contact. Brand contact is any planned and unplanned form of exposure to and interaction with a product or service. The brand contact perspective shows how the role of media planners has expanded. First, media planners have moved from focusing only on traditional media to integrating traditional media and new media. New media — cable and satellite television, satellite radio, business-to-business e-media, consumer Internet, movie screen advertising and videogame advertising — is playing an increasingly significant role.

With such a wide choice of media, which kind of media is to be concentrated on more is a matter of strategic tweaking in accordance with the following factors:

1.       What kind of product is being marketed?

2.       What is the target segment?

3.       Which medium would enjoy the maximum penetration among the target segment?

These would not only dictate how much of the marketing budget should be diverted towards internet marketing, but the internet marketing strategy itself.

Why Social Media?

Social networking  websites are a great platform for marketers to reach a desired target segment. One of the preliminary objectives of marketing is to attract a prospective consumer and engage their attention. In this age of shortening attention spans, passive communication tools or simple links hardly merit more than a glance. Here, social networking tools provide an interactive approach to marketing. More importantly, while social media breaks new frontiers in terms of engagement tactics, it also connects with the basics by building itself around the word of mouth approach. Social media marketing is typically built around users recommending viral games, videos or simply online communities relating to a product.

The figures speak for themselves:

• When asked what sources “influence your decision to use or not use a particular company, brand or product” 71% claim reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence. (Harris Interactive, June 2010)
• 53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets, with 48% of them delivering on their intention to buy the product. (ROI Research for Performance, June 2010)
• The average consumer mentions specific brands over 90 times per week in conversations with friends, family, and co-workers. (Keller Fay, WOMMA, 2010)
• In a study conducted by social networking site myYearbook, 81 percent of respondents said they’d received advice from friends and followers relating to a product purchase through a social site; 74 percent of those who received such advice found it to be influential in their decision. (Click Z, January 2010)
• One-half of Beresford respondents said they considered information shared on their networks when making a decision—and the proportion was higher among users ages 18 to 24, at 65%.(eMarketer, October 2009)
• 67% of shoppers spend more online after recommendations from online community of friends. (Internet Retailer, September 2009)
• A March 2009 study by Knowledge Networks found that between 10% and 24% of US social media users turned to social networks when making purchase decisions about various categories of products and services.

The tribal or cult influence on individual decision is a fundamental human tendency which has, over thousands of years of civilization, manifested itself into friend and family circles. It is often called term it the herd tendency, but a tribe tendency would be more accurate, as individuals usually tend to be influenced by those who they recognize as ‘friends’ and thus having similar interests, tastes and aspirations. Social networking sites such as facebook, twitter and orkut are built around this theory, and thus marketers find it easy to identify target groups as the users are already organized into communities and groups that signify their interests.

The reason why this approach is more effective than just having an online presence in the form of a web page or blog, or having seemingly random people mention your link in their blogs or forum posts becomes clear by taking a look at some more statistics. While customer reviews are trusted more than manufacturer descriptions, 90% of users would trust product recommendations from people they know, while only 70% would trust strangers in the same matter. Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases.

All marketing communication aims at attracting prospective buyers who in turn would propagate just how good the product is to those known to them, thus generating a sense of goodwill and brand recognition. Such communication cannot be achieved through conventional online advertising techniques unless supported by strong Web 2.0 presence. This scene is still relatively nascent and much remains to be seen, but what is clear is that brand-building through facebook, twitter (and who knows which site in the future) is here to stay.