In the end, all marketing strategies have pretty similar goals and indicators for success. If you ‘zoom out’ far enough, social media marketing can look the same as any other marketing technique – X amount of time and money goes in, X amount of sales come out. ROI is the same for everyone.
But most of us – certainly this of us with titles that have the word ‘marketing’ in them – need to see things up close. In ay detailed analysis, social media marketing is a very different animal to most traditional marketing techniques, and the interactions it provides with your audience are much more finely layered.
While traditional marketing leverages print, television and radio, and 20th century digital marketing parallels those – pop-up ads are essentially TV adverts for the internet, email campaigns are just digital direct marketing.
Social media marketing uses platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn, and these are so different form non-social channels that they allow (and encourage) totally new ways to interact with your audience commercially.
Traditional marketing is really rather static by today’s lights.
Print media is of course literally static and linear. Radio and TV adverts were revolutionary when they were invented, and seemed to be much more active, but really they are the same linear, scripted experience modified to take advantage of a new channel.
They reach out with a broad net, trying to influence a wide segment of your potential market at once. They are expensive to produce and expensive to show, but they do tend to make a good ROI.
Social media marketing allows for fluid, finely targeted and even fully interactive messaging.
You’ll be interacting with fewer people at first – maybe a dozen users rather than ‘everyone watching the world cup’, but SM marketing results can snowball, taking in a life of their own and being amplified by different parts of the online community, hopefully to your benefit.
Skilfully crafted SM marketing interactions are just that – interactions. They aren’t a linear, scripted experience the audience rides out passively. They are often minutely targeted to small groups, sometimes individuals. They seek to gain a response form their targets, then reply to that response. They are much, much less costly to produce or deliver than a TV advert, and they work in a vastly different way.
The real benefit of an interaction-based social media marketing campaign is that even if your marketer is only interacting with one or a handful of users, it is all done publicly and visibly. Other users see this interaction. They see both sides of the discussion. They often join in, adding their own ‘2 pence worth’ and spawning new interactions and discussions. That 10-minute interaction with an individual might be spun out for weeks, reaching millions, and getting them actually involved.
Alarmingly, the process is now completely out of your control, but not beyond your influence. A skilled marketer can craft thigs so they are unlikely to go ‘wrong’, and add a little but of spin to the debate as it evolves along its most important lines. That simply doesn’t happen with traditional or even non-social digital adverts.
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