In the last fifteen years both the media and information technology industries have been migrating from a traditional push advertising environment then interactive advertising using interactive content and now direct face front marketing with Tap to call Mobile marketing .. The days of advertiser content dominance is being transformed into a democratization process whereby quality content is interacted, shared, and rated. The democratization process allows the consumer greater control and influence to recommend products and services to their peers while advertiser are able to access indiviual and not just massive consumer bring demographic advatage for advertizer to refocus thier advertising program to specific consumers based on demographic groups .
. In the end, it’s creating trust between the buyer and the seller. Trust builds loyalty and repeat business. Trust is the glue that will cement the relationship and it’s done by allowing an interactive participation in the communication and collaboration process. There’s nothing more powerful and trustworthy than when a good friend makes a recommendation.
Using a combination of our imagination and creativity one can use mobile social media marketing tactics within social media channels to capture the attention of millions. Of course, getting their attention is only half the battle. The other half is harder. The real challenge is converting their attention into sales or a call-to-action, and to sustain that effort over a period of time. This is what separates the amateurs from the professionals.
SOCIAL MEDIA ECOSYSTEM
Social Media on Web 2.0 is simply the ability to have conversations with people through a variety of communication tools and communities. By nature people are tribal and we seek to converse and share with other like minded people.
According to the 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, 62% of users polled believe they can influence business decisions by voicing opinions via new media channels. About a quarter have contributed their point-of-view on an issue (24%) or contacted a company directly (23%). 74% expect companies to join conversations about their corporate responsibility practices happening on new media. MediaPost January 22, 2010
Social media platforms can leverage the collective wisdom of the community to collaborate on a given objective, such as; to increase sales, create content, engage customer feedback, nurture a community, amplify your marketing message, and to develop peer relationships between manufacturer-distributor-retailer-partner-customer. Typically, the social media conversation is uncontrolled, unorganized, nor always on target with the message. Web 2.0 has become a democracy of information usage with a bit of anarchy thrown in.
The power of Web 2.0 allows the individual to spread their conversations or word-of-mouth in multiple formats; image, video, text, and audio. Individuals can leverage their social media communities, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MetaCafe, SocialText and a host of others platforms. The most popular social media network activities ranged from posting messages, downloading and uploading music, videos and images. These communities and tools allow photo sharing, videos, communities, blogs, forums, articles, news, entertainment, news, and tutorials. They also allow individuals to use their collective intelligence to collaborate on online projects. The power of these tools is the ability share, create, and product from one-to-many quickly, effortlessly, and seamlessly. Good news can travel fast but with even greater trepidation; bad news can travel at light speed.
SCALING UP MOBILE MARKETING
Scaling up your Mobile Social media marketing campaign requires an environment of easy access and collaboration.
The new paradigm of Social Media marketing is to embrace the democracy of knowledge, respect the intelligence of your audience, and allow them the ability to participate and ideas going viral and establishing a collective intelligence to enrich creativity and productivity. Here are several suggestions to grease the skids for your campaign to generate a higher participation rate.
Make your content access free and easy to share
– Create multiple touch points for others to reach you: website, blog, Microsites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SharePoint, SocialText, and mobile applications.
– Engage and maintain the consumer’s conversations with the goal of closing the loop from the behavior to consider a purchase, to purchase, and finally, to encourage them to make recommendations.
– People want to be understood and recognize. Promote and encourage comments section and recommendations.
– Emotions move us to action. Make it personal. Stories paint pictures and have high retention and share rates.
– Building a community of like minded people can empower greater influence to change events politically, economically, or socially. For example, the Presidential election in 2008 was a milestone in using mobile marketing in social media.
It’s passion that motivates people to share something new. Think of your passions in politics, sports, religion, cooking, or movie stars. When something stirs your emotions you want to share it immediately.
Mobile Social Media marketing offers a rapid and almost effortlessly dissemination of an idea (word-of-mouth) from one-to-many by leveraging both internet and communication tools from one person to millions. Think of tribal communication behavior, think of gossip, think of how people when empowered with special news want to share it with their friends and circles of influence.
To make Mobile social media marketing work you need the tools to spread it and the audience to receive it. As was previously mentioned the evolution of Web 2.0 offers great power, intelligence, services, word-of-mouth recommendations, and the delivery of relevant information in real time. Today, Web 2.0 can deliver multiple formats of content quickly, seamlessly, and effortlessly, which is; email, video, photographs, audio, and text messages..Web 3 pushes further through cloud computing and Smartphone media communication platform integrating web2 and web 3 as a whole .
Common elements for making a mobile social media marketing campaign to work are:
– Make the content seamless and easy to send or transfer
– The content uses existing internet and telecommunications infrastructure
– Products or services are given away for free
– The content is emotionally charged: Polarized messages will motivate action in people
– The content can easily scale from a few people to millions
BUILDING YOUR MARKETING PORFOLIO
To be successful in social media and using mobile social marketing tactics requires the same discipline as any other marketing endeavor.
– Good planning and goal setting
– A commitment for the long run and the patience for campaigns to gain traction
– Ample dedicated resources to sustain conversations and offer a quality level of service.
– Being authentic, transparent, and honest. The end goal is to develop ongoing trust and loyalty.
– Make your touch points intuitive, easy access, and minimal restrictions.
Building your Mobile social media marketing campaign requires four major segments.
1. Start with the proper planning, messaging, target, audience, and budgets.
2. Build a Worthy effective story that benefits everybody .
3. Select the media channels to disseminate your story.
4. Measure and manage user attention and participation.
STEP 1 – PLANNING, GOALS, TARGET AUDIENCE
– Identify and understand the needs and wants of your target audience – put each individual into segments based on actual behavior across the web.
– If your product requires consideration to purchase, then determine the level of research your prospects are doing today on the internet.
– Identify your competition. Determine what websites your target audience has been visiting recently and what draws their interest.
– If you’re going to advertise on other websites, then determine which of those sites are already converting ads into leads in your category.
– Determine which social media sites are attracting your best prospects and understand their behavior.
– Determine the health and reputation of your brand by tuning into relevant blogs, microblogs, and forums.
– Close the conversation loop with your visitors by encouraging them to complete a comments or product recommendation.
– What are your goals?
– Sell something
– Build awareness
– Capture their attention
– Engage them in a conversion
– Call to action
– Retain customers
STEP 2- BUILD A STORY
Every good viral marketing campaign requires an emotional story that is original or sticky. Video by far is the fastest and easiest tool to spread a story that sticks. In addition, a sustainable campaign will need layers of various components to keep the momentum going. Using the billboard affect, users will give you three to five seconds to receive your message to take action. All the elements of your viral campaign should have these attributes.
– GOOD STORY – You’re a story teller. Stories paint pictures and evoke emotions. Good stories are remembered, original, and begged to be shared.
– When the story catches on be prepared for sequel stories, bloopers, and behind the scene blog. Keep putting the logs on the fire.
– Be sure to have a comments section. Observe it closely. Sharing emotions is acceptable but edit offensive language and insults.
– Your goal is to engage in conversations and eventually a call to action leading to the fulfillment of your goals.
– Keep the conversation personal, for example don’t place barriers between your stars and audience. People want to connect directly to the artist or rock musician.
– EMOTIONAL – It must offer an emotional appeal. The more polarizing the emotion then the greater chance of becoming viral.
– ORIGINAL-Do not be predictable. Be original and creative. Fascinate them. Make them laugh. Make them cry. Can you make them say – wow?
– RELEVANT-The story must be relevant to your target audience. Soccer fans are fascinated with advertisement demonstrating a trickster pro team.
– WINGS-give it the wings to fly whereby the message is designed to be portable, scalable, and shareable.
– DYNAMIC-You need to develop momentum and sustainability. This requires multiple entry points to experience your message such as (video, blogs, TV, print, quality content, and tie-ins). A well done story will demand a sequel, behind the scenes production, bloopers, and interviews.
– CATCHY-You must have a catch to it that hooks people in and there will be reward in the end. Ask yourself, what’s in it for me? Does it entertain? Does it provide great information?
And two don’ts
– Please don’t compel people to forward their emails for viral marketing
– Please don’t use obvious commercials unless they are especially clever, entertaining, or funny.
STEP 3 – DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS
For a mobile social campaign to be sustainable it will require multiple steps, components and channels to build awareness, capture, engage, and convert your target audience. Naturally, your channels of distribution will be determined by where your target audience shops, researches, and socializes. You can begin to research your target audience at Digital Scientists or Audience Science.
USING Facebook
Today, Facebook is the fastest growing social media platform and a great starting point to launch a viral marketing campaign. In 2010, Pepsi announced they will not advertise in the Super Bowl. Rather, they will invest their advertising using Social Media platforms. Unlike the one-way push of TV advertising communications, Facebook and other forms of social media allows you to capture your audience, engage them in a conversation, nurture the relationship, convert them into sales, retain their loyalty, monitor and shepherd their word-of-mouth recommendations, and scale peer approval ratings without restraint.
Facebook Statistics for early 2013
– There are now 700+ Million users
– 50% perform daily updates
– Less than 1/3 are college students
– 20% of users are just in the U.S.A.
– The fasting growing segment is greater than 35 years old
MARKETING IN Facebook
Facebook requires dedication, creativity, and interactivity. To compete for attention you must constantly provide a steady stream of content, promotions, events, and communications.
As a company you’ll have to define who you are to the market. What’s your brand and personality? Your purpose is not to sell but to inform and share knowledge. Through tacit approval Facebook users will accept you and be your fan.
Engaging Facebook users requires a two way conversation or being interactive. Feed them a good story or video to determine if they will click the “LIKE” button. Encourage them to comment. As your level of trust increases with the users, seek to convert their actions using promotions and discounts into joining a website or making a purchase.
Get your Facebook fans involved in contests and promotions. Make them do things to share photographs or videos. Let them all share in the fun and discovery.
If we can measure it, then we can manage it. As your campaign reaches your audience you’re looking to measure some key variables to ensure your message is reaching the right target audience, you captured, their attention, engaged them in an interactive process for purchase consideration, convert them into a sale, and finally offer the experience to steer and share their positive opinion. As such you are looking to measure variables such as; Traffic Visits, Click through behavior patterns, Conversion rates, and Source of visitors.
CONCLUSION
As a general rule, we are fearful of things we do not understand. As marketing and advertising professionals, once we embrace the idea of democracy and participation in sharing content to our target audience, we can enjoy the immense surge of collective wisdom and the loyalty of our fans. In building a business it’s expensive to acquire new customers and pointless to have a hole in your bucket when they constantly drain out. Embracing the power of Web 3.0, deploying viral marketing, and using traditional media platforms can give you a full complement of tools to reach a vast audience who are most interested in having a relationship with your organization. By increasing the ease of customer access and participation you’ll be able to build a loyal fan base that can deliver a steady stream of profitable revenue. As many business leaders have discovered, by taking care of your customers first, your profits can be realized.
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