Putting marketing back on the CEO’s agenda (3)
Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media marketing programmes usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it across their social networks.
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The resulting electronic word of mouth refers to any statement consumers share via the Internet (e.g., web sites, social networks, instant messages, news feeds) about an event, product, service, brand or company.
When the underlying message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it appears to come from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself, this form of marketing results in earned media rather than paid media.
Digital and social networking websites allow individuals to interact with one another and build relationships. When companies join these social channels, consumers can interact with them directly. That interaction can be more personal to users than traditional methods of outbound marketing and advertising. Social networking sites act as word of mouth.
Social networking sites and blogs allow followers to “retweet” or “repost” comments made by others about a product being promoted. By repeating the message, the user's connections are able to see the message, therefore reaching more people. Because the information about the product is being put out there and is getting repeated, more traffic is brought to the product/company.
Through social networking sites, companies can interact with individual followers. This personal interaction can instill a feeling of loyalty into followers and potential customers. Also, by choosing whom to follow on these sites, products can reach a very narrow target audience. Social networking sites also include a vast amount of information about what products and services prospective clients might be interested in. Through the use of new Semantic Analysis technologies, marketers can detect buying signals, such as content shared by people and questions posted online. This underscores the need to integrate digital and social networks within the marketing strategies of companies. Indeed, a number of companies nowadays are doing strategic investments in IS enabled marketing programs such as social media, customer experience management and new cloud-based services, thus, underlining the utmost relevance of technology in the current marketing discourse.
The goal of any social media marketing strategy is to attract attention to your brand and engage customers. Any social media marketer's ultimate dream is to have his or her content go viral, which is not always easy to accomplish. This is particularly true as more content is posted each day and the attention of users becomes divided.
Social media practitioners points out that content tends to go viral when it meets these three characteristics: it's unique or exceptional, it appeals to influencers, and it can be easily shared. Content with the ability to go viral should also be engaging to viewers, meaning that it is easy for users to become involved and comment.
Not all the content that you produce will go viral, but it is important to aim for that goal by ensuring that each piece of content you produce meets the three characteristics of viral content. Social media marketing can be challenging, but not so much so that you become overwhelmed to the point that you never even get started. When handled properly, social media truly does have the power to transform and launch any startup business.
Lack of strategic vision and impact
In marketing, strategic vision is considered a multi-faceted phenomenon and, is often described as a customer-focused resource configuration to obtain advantages in a competitive environment. There is an apparent disconnect between a company’s overall strategy and what marketing understands to be customers’ needs. Marketing has in essence been regarded as a cost factor and marketers need to establish that they generate consumer demand for the firm’s offerings in a quantifiable way.
This demands that CMOs demonstrate the strategic value of the marketing function, and its role in generating future revenues, which might not always be immediately be detected by current sales metrics. Marketing needs to overcome its perception of abstraction, for example, by delivering evidence for the positive relationships between abstract constructs such as customer experience and word-of-mouth on customers’ buying behaviors, this enhances significantly the chances of CMOs demonstrating the strategic impact of their actions. The key word here is “demonstrating” the impact and the financial contributions of marketing efforts—managing evidence must be seen as core to the job description of every CMO. Doing so ensures that firms understand how marketing is meeting the needs of customers in a way that positively impacts business outcomes. Indeed, marketers must develop insight capable of linking marketing activities to firm performance.
This article closes out with a diagrammatic representation of a roadmap for putting marketing back on the CEOs agenda (left). This diagram crystallizes most the most points I have sought to raise on this three part treatment of putting marketing back on the CEO’s agenda.
The writer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing and Customer Management at the University of Ghana Business School and writes for the Centre for Sustainability and Enterprise Development (CSED), School, CSED is a training, research and advocacy center specialising in marketing; communications, sustainability and social responsibility.
email: csed@ug.edu.gh