Executive Summary
For this thematic memoir I decided to study the social media
influence over the marketing. As a matter of fact, I have been working for 10
month as trainee to develop and set up the web strategy of a small French and
Argentiniean company. As I am very interested in the subject and especially the
social medias, I decided to take advantage of the great opportunity for writing
a thematic memoir to go into details about the new marketing strategies and
improve my knowledges.
In addition, this topic is really compele and even digital
marketing agency still have to test and experiment new strategies. The
environment is constantly evolving and this is very interesting to see what are
the effects on the marketing.
Since 1980, the word is living a digital revolution with
creation of the Internet, then some years later the apparition of the Word Wide
Web or commonly called the Web. The Web enabled to the public to get acces to
the information from the Internet. During a few years we used it like that
mostly to chek out information from websites and read emails. Then appeared the
web 2.0, this is an evolution of the «web 1.0» and such an
improvement. The public was now able to publish, comment, share information
easily... In other words he was able to take part.
That is why it is interesting to ask ourselves what is the
influence of social medias over the marketing.
To respond to that question, it is interesting to notice the
new consumer's behavior facing purchase decision process. Indeed with every
crisis we faced and are facing, consumers had to change its way of consuming
and try to «purchase better » and differently. As a matter, of fact
they started to look for information from other consumers on the Internet and
especially on social medias. They also started to produce their own content
about brands, product and services in order to inform other consumers. This
initiative was eased thanks to the tool disponible on the web 2.0 for free and
simple to use. Finally, those consumers really took power because they really
influence other people. Being friends or family from their social networks or
total strangers looking at consumers' comments, videos or blog articles (User
Generated Content).
Companies noticed this increasing and threatning new trend.
Indeed, if consumers can influence other consumers they can do it and prevent
them to buy some brands... Marketers decided to cope with it and adapt their
marketing strategies. That is why companies began to product brand content.
They tried to be interesting before interested in the profit they can get from
customers. They had to give fun, emotion, usefull information, entertainement,
and convinencyÉ Contrary to the consumers, companies have to produce
qulitativ content, this oblige them to set up editorial strategies. Consumers
as companies have to their disp osition various free, simple and convinent
tools as sharing plateforms, microblogging web sites, social networks and
blogs. All those tools enable companies to produce different content, written,
phtots, videos, discussions, articles... there are three different criterias to
determine if the brand content is potencialy efficient. It has to be
qualitative enough for the time the consumer spends (Value for money vs.
quality/time value), visibile easily and it has to be associated to the brand,
otherwise it has no sense to produce it.
Marketers also noticed that consumers in addition to their
whish to influence consumers wanted to get involved in the brands activity and
life. That is why, marketers decided to organize and set up marketing actions
to encourage and supervise at the same time the content produced by consumers.
We call it User Generated Brand Content. The other solution was to implicate
the one that were ready and willing to, help the brand. That is how
crowdsourcing was born. Companies could ask customers or potential customers to
create or help them create products or advertising campaigns. The other option
is to include them in the decision. Lots of companies implemented votes to
select the best product or TV ad. In that way, consumers are involved in the
brand life but the company doesn't take to much risk getting
poorer quality content. All those are not really strategies but more a new
marketing behavior impacted by new consumer behaviors.
But marketers settled new strategies in direct relation with
those new trends. The first one is the ranking or SEO and SEM strategies.
Google algorithms are getting more and more complexe and take into account the
flow of information coming from social medias. That is why social medias
influence the ranking position. It is know mandatory to be present on the
social medias to get better web site ranking.
Plus, consumers are influenced by the sponsored linked that
Google and other search engine motors offer to companies. Finally, the display
and especialy video diplay disponible on sharing platforms as Youtube are
recording the best figures of impression over consumer. Even better
memorization than for the TV advertising.
Marketers and special marketing adgencies also discovered the
power of generating converstions with clients and potential clients. They are
willing to interact with the brand, exchange with other clients about common
problems and topics. Conversation marketing is a growing tendancy that include
creating, animating and managing communities. The company has to be the center
of the community and help people interact together. The community management is
quite complicated because it also includes risk exoposition and lack of control
and moderation (if too moderated, consumers are angry). The community managers
have to produce and share content, animate the community but let the community
speak. Indeed, companies can learn a lot and take advantage of this great
source of information. This can help them to target better their customers'
needs. It is important to understand that we are changing from a ntrusive
marketing to a permission marketing where customers give their autorisation to
be marketed. And this is such a big change.
Finally, great and pertinent conversations and communities
management can lead to more engagement from the community. This means that they
will be particularly involved in the sharing process. The more engaged persons
will talk about the brand and try to evangelize their friends and related.
With, engagement marketing, companies try to enlist new brand advocates. The
brand advocates are the one that really trust and truly like the brand. They
are ready to talk about and promote it for free because they really belive in
your cause, product or mission.
The last strategy I developed in this party is the Word Of
Mouth (WOM) power and the different strategies that are related to the creation
of word of mouth. The first one, the influence marketing is quite similar to
engagement marketing. The main purpose is to get opinion leaders to talk about
you brand. This mainly includes bloggers and famous ones. The ones that have
lots of readers and can easily influence them. Those leaders are key opinion
makers and are taking an important place in the purchasing decision process.
Companies now have to catch the attention of those leaders being creatve,
original, entrertaining, giving gift BUT a remuneration process can alter the
impact of the marketing campaign. This iniciative could discredit the brand.
Viral and Buzz marketing are relat ed to the WOM. If this type
of marketing campaign is effective it generate a great and important WOM. The
main objectif of those two strategies is to spread the word about a news, an
event, an funny fact about the brand. They are two orchestrated actions that
are depending a lot on the consumer willing to share and spread the word. Such
campaigns are unpredictable and quite risky. The viral marketing is a
methaphore with the speard of a virus (medical) it symbolize the fact that
consumers are the vector of the brand promotion and communication. Information
goes through them and has to reach the maximum amount of people. These types of
viral campaigns are subject of parody or transformations. This can be a very
negative aspect of the strategy!
The buzz is the creation and setting up of a special event,
spectacular, original or memorable action associated to the brand, in order to
attract and amuse entertaine the target. The main objective is to invite and
encourage customers to talk about the brand. Even if the company is really
involved in the creation of the event or action, the buzz leaves a huge margen
of error. Indeed, the event is settled up, the official video or article is
posted on social medias and even if they properly teased, announced and
promoted . People can dislike it and decided not to share. Worse, it could be
subject of distortion. When people talk together they are enclin to change a
little bit the reality. At the end of the chain, the message can be totally
different.
From the beginning we talked about the influence of social
medias for marketing in general, but small companies are quite different from
the average big companies that implemented social media strategies. Small and
medium companies are also concerned about this impressive and fast revolution.
Thanks to social medias, companies can have acces to constant and permanent
feedbacks about the results of their campaigns. This can lead to much more
reactivity and flexibility. Agile is not only accessible for huge groups.
Indeed, even small companies can have the insights of a marketing campaign and
get the live reaction of their customers. Thanks to that they can try to adapt
and improve their campaigns. As a matter of fact, this is a second advantage of
social medias for small and medium companies; they enable them to be more
self-sufficient. They can easily implement an Adword or community strategy
without consulting a web-marketing agency. Social medias are accebile to
everyone contrary to TV, press, radio or display medias.
Finally, this type of marketing is more accessible because,
costs are much more attractive. Indeed, the major parties of the tools
available on the web 2.0 are free. Some are paid if you need an premimum acces.
But for nothing a small company can sett up a qualitative and pertinent social
media strategy withour spending the marketing expenditures of the year. The
only thing that brands need to take into account is the time factor: «time
is money» and if
they want to succed in social medias, the need to invest time.
Social medias require to invest a consequent time and on a regular basis. Plus,
it takes time. A small company, even if it animate and manage very well its
community will probably not get millions of fans in few days. Small and medium
brands have to be objective, realistic and patient!
The second reason of the accessibility for small businesses is
the great proximity with its clients and potential clients. Some people say
that companies that are present on social medias need to be «always
on». And this is a fact; businesses are now connected to their clients 24
hours a day! Plus, social medias are a way to communicate with people in a less
formal way than trhouh the website. The relationship is more genuine and
friendly.
This new medias tend to force companies to be more transparent
and relable. At last, they can reach easily customers and potential client from
everywhere in the world. Indeed, thanks to the web and social medias, boarders
totally melted down.
To conclude, we can say that social medias, truly impacted the
marketing and the way companies promote and communicate about their brands and
product. The interaction with customers and their wish to participate are the
main trend and is crutial to understand the principals and the reasons of such
changes in marketing strategies.
Even if social medias led lots of changes for the marketing in
general, traditional medias are not dying! They are just going to learn from
the digital environment, adapt and become more agile. Social medias and
traditional medias are complementary and they apparition of the increase of
social medias marketing spendings will not lead to a death of the other
ones.
However, we could think about the mobile trend that is arising
quickly and definitely will impact the social media marketing. Those two
digital innovations are complementary, and each other will help the other to
take more and more importance in the corporate marketing strategies.
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