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Friday, March 9, 2012

Marketing Strategy and Social Media


The readings from Monday’s seminar have highlighted the importance of Social Media Marketing. Today, businesses are realising the importance of their pull marketing strategies. As opposed to the traditional push methods where activities centre on getting the product in front of clients, the pull methods encourage clients to seek businesses out and find out if they have anything of value to offer them. Social Networking and blogging are today such crucial methods. We are living in a society of active, media-savvy consumers who are more likely to respond to discussion and dialogue, where they can share their opinion and foster relationships with brands.

Whilst businesses are keen to measure the ROI from such operations, Hoffman and Fodor encourage them to change their traditional way of assessing ROI. Building relationships with consumers via social media they argue, takes time, because it relies on interactive and on-going conversation. It is perhaps less useful to just say “show me how my company’s tweets will improve sales next quarter” without considering consumer investments: time spent with the application, number of updates and comments. These investments could measure the fulfilment of key marketing objectives such as how much consumers are engaging with brand and finding out about new products. Tying social media activity with direct sales is difficult, but turning attention to customer investment delivers information about short term and long term success.

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