What Really Brought it HOME for ME: Audience Centric v. Brand Centric
November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing
Showcase your brand all you want when creating that $15000 Google Adwords campaign. Use the best descriptors and showcase all your brand or product’s many wonderful attributes when beautifying your high end website or your company blog. In other words, make sure that all your actions in this realm are brand centric because the reason why consumers come to your website is because they are looking for a solution to a problem and are there ready and willing to be marketed to.
But stop there! Because, once your enter the social realm, the audience is different. No longer are they looking for a problem, at least actively. They are there to build and be a part of a community whether it be by silently observing, by commenting on the content or by actively contributing content. But to reiterate, they aren’t there to be marketed to. This is what, according to this article, most marketers still fail to understand despite understanding all the technical terms of social media marketing.
On the brighter side, just because they aren’t there to be marketed to doesn’t mean that we cannot market our wares to them. Enter audience centric marketing – a relatively new form of marketing that focuses on a long term approach to marketing and is focused on engaging the audience. As Brian Solis, the principal of Altimeter Group and author of Engage! says, social media has democratised influence which means that now potentially anyone with an internet connection and a social media account can influence anyone’s buying decision and that no longer is it a top down simple consumer decision journey with just one way communication from the marketers to the consumer. With this democratisation effect, it is important that engagement is present to avoid missing major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts.
Social media is quick, generally with easy to use interfaces, relatively inexpensive and is a great platform for conversations to humanise the brand. But investing in social media has its own challenges: measurement of ROI is one issue especially because you can’t tie results to any particular campaign and another issue is using any and all data available for measurement. Using the Garbage In, Garbage Out idea, using irrelevant data can prove to be costly in the long run.
Finally, commitment. Social media requires commitment. Unlike the banner ads or the one time email advertising, creating a social media account for a company carries an implicit promise that the company will generally respond to messages within a day and that it will ensure that the content on the site is relevant, reliable and timely. Then there’s the matter of fit. Does it make business sense for a particular product like say, Coca Cola to participate in social forums on the topic of healthy eating? No! Addressing these two issues will save a company a lot of pain and also ensure that they don’t fall in the trap of shiny object syndrome and over indulge in social media.
Learning about social media in the context of marketing has been an eye opening and refreshing experience and I will always remember these lessons learned!