In this brave new world of digital marketing, it may seem daunting for business owners to sort through all the options they have for getting their message out. And with new technology emerging at a breakneck pace, the future of marketing might seem uncertain enough to prompt more than a few desperate tweets about upset stomachs and anxious nights.
But there’s no reason to panic. According to Jiri Marousek and Amy Rohn, Lindsay, Stone & Briggs‘ vice presidents of interactive and PR/social media, a little planning will allow you to navigate your way through today’s vast wilderness of technological baubles.
Marousek and Rohn, who are giving a presentation today titled “Twitter, Mobile Web, Tablets, Apps: What Will Last? What’s Converging? What’s Coming and Why Should You Care?” for LSB’s Brandworks University Conference, say that it’s far more important to define your marketing strategy than to be the first on the block to adopt a particular technology.
“Certainly on a broad level, I think we’re experiencing more toys or tools or whatever you want to call them coming out at a really dizzying speed,” said Rohn, “whether it be new social networks, new ways to use our mobile devices, certainly the advent of tablets, microblogging, and things like that are all things to consider, but the trick and the challenge for marketers is not to go chasing shiny objects but really to determine which of these tools is going to work best in the overall context of the marketing plan and their business objectives.
“So the goal of our presentation is to provide a little bit of a framework to help marketers get at that and determine how these things – these valuable tools that are going to help them be more relevant to their target audience – they have to figure out which ones will work in the context of their marketing plan as opposed to just doing one-offs because there’s a new toy in the toy box.”
But how can businesses know whether they should adopt a social media-based strategy, dive into mobile Web, create an app, or try a little of everything? What strategies should they pursue?
“It’s not necessarily guesswork, mainly since we’re obviously expecting that most brands know their targeted consumer to some degree and can reach out to learn more about them,” said Marousek. “They’re all tools with the ability to drive hyper-relevancy of content and hyper-relevancy of messages, so the key is to take a business objective, knowledge of what the consumer does and how they prefer to engage, and overlaying the new technologies over that to where we can actually gauge and deliver services in a much more relevant way.
“The key, however, to selecting [new technologies] is taking a business objective and consumer insight and finding the technology, not starting with the technology and trying to force that on the consumer.”
For instance, says Marousek, while Twitter is a hot commodity these days, it may not be appropriate for everyone.
“Twitter is a medium of frequency, not just substance, so if a brand doesn’t have a capability and content to publish information that’s relevant to the target consumer on a frequent enough basis – and I’m saying at least multiple times a week, especially today when consumers are more selective about what they follow and what they read – Twitter might not be the right thing even if the target is using it.”
As for social media in general, Marousek and Rohn both caution that businesses should not become too enamored with social media marketing at the expense of more proven methods.
“Measuring on a true ROI basis, social media is not going to be the most successful one out of all the things we can do,” said Marousek. “That said, it doesn’t mean that social media shouldn’t be a part of the tool set, it just can’t be what replaces some of the traditional digital tools like search marketing, e-mail marketing – none of these are going away. They’re all part of the tool set, and they have already proven that they work. Social media has proven that it works in some cases, but it has to be really well integrated into other things.”
Mobile on the move
According to Rohn, it may also be wise to disregard the glimmer of all those different shiny objects – which may or may not last – and focus more on broader trends.
“When you talk about what will last, you need to take a step back from the specific tools and think about mobile as a trend,” said Rohn. “Mobile is not going away. It’s a way of life, it’s how we conduct commerce, it’s how we conduct conversations, it’s how we entertain ourselves. So the specific tools may come in and out and morph or evolve, but reaching your consumers via this screen is not going away.
“Mobile is not only a way for us to reach out to consumers or merge with consumers, it’s also a way for us as marketers to get really valuable information from consumers, because the purchases they’re making on mobile, the conversations they’re having on mobile, the location-enabled activity, that’s a data goldmine that we can use to become increasingly relevant to them. And if there’s one point in our presentation that we want people to walk away with, it’s that these tools are ways for us to be more relevant to the target, whether it be a consumer or a business-to-business target.”
Of course, the idea that marketers might be able to track your location or activity through your smart phone is chilling to some, as recent media coverage shows. But attitudes about location tracking may be evolving just as fast as the technology is.
“Preference and location and those types of things that in the past would have been considered private information – based on that information, mobile is allowing marketers to deliver hyper-relevant messages and relevant content,” said Marousek. “That reciprocity between the consumer giving away some of their private information and actually getting value in exchange is defusing a lot of the privacy concerns that – while they make a splash in the media – consumers are actually caring less and less about because of that intimate relationship with their mobile platform. And through that level of reciprocity based on their preferences and their private information, they’re getting a lot of value.”
Sign up for the free IB Update – your weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices, and the names you need to know. Click here.
