Strategic Digital Marketing: Top Digital Experts Share the Formula for Tangible Returns on Your Marketing Investment by Kates Alexander & Greenberg Eric

Strategic Digital Marketing: Top Digital Experts Share the Formula for Tangible Returns on Your Marketing Investment by Kates Alexander & Greenberg Eric

Author:Kates, Alexander & Greenberg, Eric [Kates, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2013-09-05T16:00:00+00:00


THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The maddening part about social media is that much of it didn’t exist five years ago. When I try to imagine what the future holds, I have to plausibly accept the notion that the current players—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and legions of others—may not exist in their current form. In 2006, no one would have predicted that Google would be fighting for social media credibility, MySpace would barely survive, and Microsoft would be a “non factor” as a social media technology powerhouse. We definitely couldn’t have foreseen Facebook’s billion-person membership base .

So it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate the future based on the current players. Instead, I’m going to back into the future of social media based on the real power players—customers.

Marketing Is Replaced by Social Storytelling

Marketing as an advertising-based discipline will cease to be useful. Instead the science and art of social interactions will absorb and marginalize traditional marketing. Just like direct mail seems quaint in today’s technological age, marketing will barely hold intellectual and practical legitimacy. Instead, a new breed of social storytelling will become the dominant form of commercial persuasion. Social storytellers will draw on the science of statistical modeling, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to discreetly smuggle branded names into customer networks. Customers will care less about brand aesthetics and assign more value to a company’s ability to be practically relevant in their lives.

In five years it’s easy to imagine the networks abandoning 30-second commercials and inviting brands to contribute to screenplays and scripts on a deeper level. The best brands will shape the look and feel of our entertainment on a subconscious level, reinforcing the core story. I’m not talking about putting a Coke bottle on a table, but integrating Coke’s value of nostalgia and classic taste into the story itself. Other messaging via Twitter, mobile messaging, and Facebook will be timed to create a 360 degree experience that invokes the thought “I love Coke.”

Customers as Rock Stars

We are already seeing the rise of customers as key marketing players.

Much of the past marketing orthodoxy was based on the customer as an individual actor. You show the customer an advertisement and wait for them to make a purchase. The customer didn’t have all the information they needed to make a decision. Advertisements acted as the invitation to visit a showroom, store, or website to gather information and start the purchasing process. We assumed that the customer relied on their own information and made an independent decision to make a purchase .

This isn’t the case today and it will never be that way again.

Social media has equipped customers with the tools to influence millions of fellow customers. Customer social networks are used to gather information, read customer reviews, and in some cases, make a transaction directly from their social platform of choice. In the future, companies will focus exclusively on reaching and compensating individual customers who can influence their networks. Companies will create a partnership with these customer rock stars, giving them unprecedented access to the product ideation, manufacturing, and distribution process.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.