Social Marketing: Right Idea for the Times
If you had a way to do all kinds of searches at once, you could turn up signs of people interested in a solution or a product category, people looking for help and people upset with something related to your business and much more. To get there, you need analytics -- and not just one kind, but several.
You might be tempted to consider social marketing just another idea in an endless stream of things dreamed up by the software industry -- and pundits like me -- to generate more business. Well, you'd be right about some of that, but I'd like to argue that the idea is more than hype and is, in fact, in sync with the times.
Conceptually, marketing and sales have not changed for a very long time. It's all about finding someone with a problem to solve and budget for the purpose. It doesn't matter if the situation is business to business or business to an end consumer, it's all about finding a need and filling it. I can agree with that, but at the same time I know that if this is as far as you take it, you'll starve.
Look at what's going on in the marketplace.
Things are getting incrementally better nearly four years after the bottom fell out of the economy, but CFOs still watch budgets like hawks. Demand is still squishy everywhere and the gross domestic product of the U.S. -- and the whole planet for that matter -- hasn't grown in five years.
Moreover, new product category introduction is low, and this is very important. When a category is new, everyone -- at least in theory -- needs it and sales people do great business. Marketers' jobs are streamlined, too. They need to focus on building brands and communicating the basic features and benefits of what they have. Products are also relatively simple. They typically come in one flavor and function as general purpose cousins of what they will eventually become as the market grows and differentiation sets in.
If you take an objective look at most of the marketplace today that's about where we are. Established markets are already crammed with products that may not be the latest and greatest, but they work, and customers need compelling reasons for buying what's newest.
You might say, "what about products like the iPhone or the iPad?" Every time Apple comes out with a new version, the market goes wild and buys the new product even though the old ones still do their jobs. That's all true, but the phone industry has a different cadence run by the planned obsolescence embedded in the service contract.
After two years, you get a new phone and a new contract. If you don't, you stay on your old plan paying the same rate. Effectively, you pay the same rate to use a new phone or to stay with the old one, so it's no surprise that iPhones sell briskly and no surprise that the company sells an increasing record number of new phones with each introduction. Every two years there are more old iPhones than ever and more people ready to change. But this is a digression.
In today's markets, where there is no forced obsolescence, we need other reasons to buy new, and there are smaller numbers of new buyers entering the markets for the first time. Smart vendors have realized that this means taking a different approach to sales and marketing. Rather than the selling-to-anyone strategy of early markets, smart vendors today recognize that they have to model who their customers are as well as model the sales cycle. For many this means using social tools, but it also requires a different set of techniques with the tools themselves.
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Social Marketing: Right Idea for the Times