This is pursuant to my earlier post: Mobile Marketing and
Local SEO...of iADs and Siri...Catalysts for Businesses (http://moksha001.blogspot.in/2011/11/mobile-marketing-and-local-seoof-iads.html)
If we look at integrated customer-centric social media
marketing, it’s about people connecting with people. Personality is an integral
part and this requires a personal approach.
The evolutionary process of social media marketing has
been going on for years, from communication that was primarily company-oriented
and more of a monologue than a dialogue based, to customer-centric interactive
based.
The convergence of SMAC forces (Social, Mobility, Analytics
and Cloud) has enabled customers/people to voice their opinions in very public
ways and to have more control over how they interact with businesses. This in
effect has contributed to business becoming more customer-centric and listen
to the voice-of-customers. Twitter’s growing importance as a news and
communications tool around the world, LinkedIn’s march to 200+ million users, Facebook’s
acquisition of Instagram, and Pinterest’s rapid rise are good testimonials.
Today, virtually in all business functions, people,
personality and relationships are key; however, many organizations still look at
the tools, mode and channels first and don’t seem to get the overall digital
business picture yet. In the last few years, digital marketing itself has come
a long way, evolving from a nice addition to a company's marketing strategy to
being a necessity for business success. Social media marketing today is more
than just tweet marathons and Facebook updates. It is more about participation,
active engagement, interactivity, knowledge-sharing and establishing a connect
with one's internal and external customers, those to whom companies can add
value, or receive value from.
If we look at recent studies, in America, there was a total
estimated spent of ~US$170 billion on direct marketing, including both physical
and electronic types in the last year alone. Out of all of that, only 3% resulted
in any buying. For, electronic media, the hit-rate was only 0.1%, and for
online adverts the conversion-into-sales was a minuscule 0.01%. This translates
to an amount of about US$165 billion being spent on no revenue generated, and rather contributing to spam, annoying
people, cluttering mail filters and creating huge paper landfills.
There is huge effort, time and money spend by marketing
departments to gather terabytes of data on potential customers, analysis of spending
habits and data-segmentation to attune their campaigns to appeal to specific
groups, and yet the ROI derived is negligible.
The problem lies in the approach that is being followed. Businesses
are trying to understand their customers by studying their demographics. Capturing
data such as age, gender, marital status, place/location, income etc., and
their existing buying habits and designing their marketing strategy based on
analysis of the same. There is an inherent flaw in this approach. It misses the
major parameter of personality, to discover the deep psychological profiles of
their customers, including their personalities, values and needs.
In uni-directional approach, we can see that people are missing
the connect, a bond and losing trust in ads, corporate messages and businesses
in general. We see customers skipping advertisements on TV, increasingly ignore
emails/eDMs, especially when not personalized, Web banners been turned a blind
eye to. Content and Message formats do make a difference, but there is more to
it than what meets the eye. It’s about the people and organization customers trust
and distrust, personality types and psychological profiles.
Rapid development in software and analytics is aiding personality-profiling,
working on technology which could deduce psychosomatic information, such as by taking streams of tweets,
comments or likes from various social mediums and searching and analyzing them
for words, meanings, that indicate user
personality, values and needs.
Smart organizations are understanding this and have
quickly realized that they need to put their customer first and utilize such
technology and medium to provide value and generate more revenue. This is one
of the key fundamentals of social media and business success and also
fundamental in content marketing success. This entails changing the mentality in which organizations put channels, content and messages first, and replace this approach with establishing a connect of the brand’s personality, as per the voice-of-the-customer, with the personality of their prospects/customers. Companies need to essentially connect the dots
between various marketing tactics, medium and provide a linked, consistent and
integrated customer pitch and feel.
Integrated social customer-centric marketing certainly drives
purchases, but can deliver even more if companies can connect the dots and
provide their customers with what they seek. The basis of creating trust and
long lasting bond with prospective customers is to have a strong and personal connect.
The stronger and more personal it gets, the more valuable it becomes. The
foundation of a strong relationship is personality. People see a brand and
business as a whole but the reputation of the brand is the result of many a
contact moments or touch-points.
Additionally, the strength of
more social relationships travels fast in connected reality, as people
are not isolated but linked with each other. The essence of a business is not the
products and services it sells or markets but the people that work for it, the
people that buy and all others in the organizations ecosystem, including partners,
vendors and in today's social and connected reality, the relationships of their
relationships, the audiences of their audiences, the links of their links, the
entire network. This changes the perspective of digital marketing making social
media engagement, personalization, personality-profiling, targeted content
marketing and optimization, mobile optimization, important priorities for digital
marketers.
