Where is the data to back up your claim that posting products or services online work? Have you ever been asked this question by a client? Well, the answer is very simple!
There is no data and the reason for this can have a number of contributing factors?
When clients engage with Digital Marketers they think ok, now I have taken this person on board to sort out my online marketing everything will change I am going to receive orders left, right and centre. The phone is never going to stop ringing with orders.
Wrong! What do you mean wrong?
Digital Marketers are not miracle workers. We do the job based on the information you give us. How we put this information together is our job.
A large number of small and medium sized businesses either don’t have the time to engage online or make the big mistakes of posting content that keeps pushing products and services down consumers throats. This is the first mistake, let’s step back and take a look at marketing 10 or even 20 years ago.
Before the era of Social Media, there was a different form of advertising Newspapers, Magazines, TV, Radio, Billboards, although the target market was limited to the budget you had, the message was still the same. Grow your audience by creating the right outcome for the customer.
Let’s take one example from back then and compare it now. Let us examine one of the most iconic ads the Coke Cola Ad from 1971 I’d like to teach the world to sing. This ad was shot on a hilltop in Italy with a number of people from different backgrounds singing the song. The story goes that a Senior Executive was flying to London and his flight was delayed, he notices a large number of people in the queue annoyed. The next day while walking through London he spotted some of the people from the flight, laughing and joking over a bottle of Coke Cola and thought about it and witnessed that Coke Cola brings people together everywhere in the world. This inspired him to create this ad.
The key point to take away from this is empathy with the customer and making your message memorable. He touched on many different emotions in the ad from diverse cultures, togetherness, unity, clean fresh air, happiness and brand placement. Never once did the ad tell you to buy a bottle of coke instead they laid the seed for you to go and buy one now to capture what these people were feeling, joy happiness and togetherness.
This ad was replicated in 2011 the 20-year reunion with the same singers plus their families similar to the first ad with one change saying ”You can’t beat the feeling” The key messages Coke Cola focused on where nostalgia, family, and the customer’s outcome. If you buy one you will get that feeling, both ads create empathy with their customers.
When you move from forcing your message on customers and concentrate on gaining empathy with your customer the results increase your chance of conversions to sales. Studies have shown a much higher rate of engagement when this is done. As businesses start to understand this and take advantage of it, they now have so many different ways to reach consumers with social media today. The key factor is focusing on the outcome for the customer and not the solution because if you give them a better outcome the solution becomes easier to find.
You can hire a social media manager to send 10 tweets a day and get a pretty graph, or you can hire an empathetic, business focused, social media strategist that will make a holistic difference to your brand/image/business.
The role of a Digital Marketer is to establish the requirements of the client and then to create empathy with their customer and deliver meaningful, useful content that will result in engagement with the brand and turn into leads or conversions.
Original blog posted on www.kompassmedia.ie
