Influence of Social Media on Marketing Strategies
Influence of Social Media on Marketing Strategies
There is no denying the fact that social media has a huge and valuable impact on people lives nowadays. Moreover, person’s ordinary lifestyle, habits, and desires often depend on content or discussions there. For instance, some posts in Pinterest may become a good reason to buy a new dress or a necessary gadget. Different tweets help users to express their opinions, expand their knowledge about situation in the world and follow some of the famous people. In addition, humans start to build their view on products and services by reading others testimonials about them. Therefore, such changes made marketers to rethink their old programs in order to survive in a new business world.
Trust be told, a question of social media role in modern marketing programs has already generated a lot of interesting discussions in recent years. As a result, many companies implement it into their strategies in order to be more competitive ones. But to be frank, there are still a lot of doubtful questions and open debates about this topic. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to find out the true power of social media in marketing programs as well as how to use it in the most effective way and what kind of consequences will bring its further growth to companies and ordinary users.
Naturally, we can observe easily that in the modern society social networks shape human’s daily lifestyle. According to Pew Research Center report, in 2005 only 7% of adults used these applications. However, this number have grown till 65% in 2015 (Perrin, 2015). Obviously, this situation demands a lot of radical changing in many fields. Marketing business strategy is one of them.
Besides, for the past years social business worked mostly in B-to-C sector. However, today it is a great helper and adviser for companies in B-to-B business as well due to the fact that most of the socially mature organizations and companies use social media in order to succeed or expand their value in particular region of the planet or in potential buyers’ group (Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron, & Buckley, 2014).
Most old marketing programs were changed by progress in social media. One of the primary causes is that ordinary advertisements on TV or in newspaper and magazines did not bring satisfied results because such networks allowed their users to communicate about brands and services more effectively. For instance, one person read about new great perfume in a famous magazine. This product is very affordable to him/her, but at first this person has to check others reviews about it. According to this fact, one of the main social media influences on the modern business is that it includes third-party people into person’s decision about product or service (McKinsey & Company, 2012). As a result, advertisements on TV or in magazines become expensive and inefficient marketing program. However, using a combination of social media and TV advertisements can bring great results for a company (Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron, & Buckley, 2014).
Another great example of implementation social media into marketing strategy also deserves some words here. The Red Cross is one of the most well-known organizations in the world. Its marketing department created a fascinating imitative in order to be able help more people in the different unpleasant situations. For instance, one girl asked for advice in the social network about the critical and dangerous situation. In a few minutes later, she received answer from the Red Cross with further instructions. Such strategy also helped many people to find a safe place during natural disasters (Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron, & Buckley, 2014). Based on the situation analyzed above I have to admit that social media helps to make human life safer and easier.
Social networking companies help others to create, integrate and use their data. For instance, Facebook is one of those organizations that takes users comments and likes in order to share this information with a chosen socially mature company (Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron, & Buckley, 2014).
In fact, there are also special institution that collects and analyzes user’s likes for creating special predictive models for different organizations and corporations. Jennifer Golbeck from Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland performed at TedxMidAtlantic in 2013, and told about using such data as well as further improvements in this field of study. For instance, scientist stated that her colleagues and she can make life of marketers much easier (Golbeck, 2013). However, this work has also negative side about data ownership that might be used.
Social media has also another interesting way to influence on marketing programs and business strategies as well. Basically, it gathers user’s testimonials and reviews about different company’s services and products in order to show the real situation with them among potential consumers.
Without a doubt, such techniques can bring business into the new intuitive level of interaction with customers. For instance, T-Mobile changed their contracting policy due to the numerous negative testimonials and comments of people in the social media about it. Such decision were not simple but it helped a lot to make bigger profit (Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron, & Buckley, 2014).
In other words, data from social networks helps marketing department to focus on customers and their desires more attentively and listen to their needs and values. Such behavior makes companies more friendly and attractive for users as well as more valuable on the global market.
Implementation data from the social networking applications into the company’s strategies leads to the several changes and creates some challenges for senior management and ordinary employees as well. In order to see this point clearly, the most valuable of them are presented in this paper.
Methods of Standardization Tracking of Social Media
Trust be told, social media creates a huge arrange of a necessary and important data. However, it also requires a lot of time and resources in order to evaluate it. Huge companies can ask for help special organizations that transform this data into the visible and useful form in a quickly and professional way. Nevertheless, there are a lot of companies that cannot afford this service due to their low budget or other circumstances. Therefore, there are several free methods of standardization this data. The most affordable of them are listed as follows.
Total Online Community Size (sCRM) helps to understand the general value of active users in the social networks community or company’s blog. It can include subscribers from YouTube channel, followers from Twitter and Facebook as well as registered users in communities and blogs (McDaniel, 2011). This method is very simple and it requires calculation of all these numbers and creation visual data implementation for more effective manipulation with data.
Monthly Social Traffic (sTraffic) is another interesting feature that can help to evaluate data from the social media. This information can be gathered by using simple tools such as Google Analytics and others. A small query will show the full amount of unique traffic that come from blogs, forums and social networks (McDaniel, 2011). Then this data can be used in order to create spreadsheets and graphs for a further work and visualization.
Social Monthly Impressions (sMI) is also a valuable and smart technique as well as the easiest way to estimate the total amount of mentions about current product in the social media, blogs, and forums. Frankly speaking, this is not the ideal method of understanding the position of the brand in the social networks; however, this one is the most affordable one and can create the general picture of the current situation. It can be performed by using Google Alerts and it also requires gathering necessary data on a daily basis (McDaniel, 2011).
How to Be in Touch with Changes in Social Media
Modern people often face with different changes in the world and society. Social media industry grows rapidly; thus it often includes new features and tools for their users. Despite the fact that most of them are very important and easy-to-use ones, they are not always understandable for everyone. In order to be in touch with the newest changes in social media and quickly transit to them, several simple ways are presented in this paper.
Another interesting opportunity is to subscribe to the different newsletters that provide up-to-date information and news about innovations in social media (Miller, 2013). They can be sent daily, weekly or monthly to the chosen e-mail address.
In addition, there are also a lot of useful conferences and seminars about the social media in the world. All of them rise special topics and they often include detailed explanation of changes in the social networks as well as their benefits for users.
Media Fragmentation and Its Influence on Modern Marketing Strategies
Actually, it is a well-known fact that Internet brought a lot of changes into our society nowadays. Media fragmentation became one of them and made old marketing programs expensive and ineffective ones. Its most valuable implications are listed as follows.
Moreover, the quality of content also plays a crucial part in a marketing program’s future success. Therefore, in order to achieve bigger and more stable profit, marketing department has to concentrate on making it useful, sparkle, interesting, and easy understandable one to the chosen target audience. Besides, video content usually brings more traffic and potential customers than others (Kuefler, 2012).
Search engine optimization (SEO) in cooperation with paid search (PPC) are key points for successful modern media campaigns (Kuefler, 2012). A high rank helps to make content more accessible through different search engines as well as to generate more valuable traffic.
Focus on Media ROI instead of Brand and Implications of This Tendency
Nowadays, media ROI and its active growth and development is one of the much-debated questions among professionals in the marketing field. However, many people consider that its effectiveness and necessity are overwhelmed by some needless information as well as unclear and doubtful calculations.
One of the primary causes lies in the basics of the ROI creation. Without a doubt, it is an important tool in the financial world; but on a contrary, social networking are not always about the finance. Moreover, in some cases it cannot show the real numbers of social media measurements (Ridings, 2010).
In addition, recognizing the fact that media ROI can be calculated in almost every situation, it might reflect untrue situation due to some unpredictable human factors (Ridings, 2010). Therefore, increased focus on media ROI is understandable and reasonable fact because of its ability to calculate some social data in term of finance. Nevertheless, it requires comprehensive approach to all details of such procedure.
Conclusions
Taking into account all of these factors and reasons, I may finally draw a conclusion that social media has a huge impact on the marketing programs and strategies nowadays. However, it demands hard and enthusiastic work with data from social networks, blogs, and forums in order to create the true picture of the brand achievements among Internet users.
References
Golbeck, J. (2013). The Curly Fry Conundrum: Why Social Media “Likes” Say More Than You Might Think. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think
Kane, G., Palmer, D., Phillips, A., Kiron, D., & Buckley, N. (2014). Moving Beyond Marketing. MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved from http://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/moving-beyond-marketing/
Kuefler, J. (2012). Media Fragmentation: 10 Things You Can Do Right Now. Callahan Creek. Retrieved, from http://www.callahancreek.com/media-fragmentation-ten-things-you-can-do-right-now-1/
McDaniel, C. (2011). 3 Key Metrics to Measure Social Media Success | Search Engine Watch. Searchenginewatch.com. Retrieved from https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2073592/key-metrics-measure-social-media-success
McKinsey & Company. (2012). Making Sense of Social Media: The Phenomenon. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2poKovAZdPQ
Miller, E. (2013). 20 Ways to Stay Up-To-Date on Social Change and Communications Trends. Fenton.com. Retrieved from http://www.fenton.com/20-ways-to-stay-up-to-date-on-social-change-and-communications-trends/
Perrin, A. (2015). Social Networking Usage: 2005-2015. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/2015/Social-Networking-Usage-2005-2015/
Ridings, M. (2010). Is Our Addiction to ROI Killing Social Media? Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting. Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-measurement/is-our-addiction-to-roi-killing-social-media/
