Marketing mix-up: Why everyone is all the sudden talking about social media?

Social Media: a Marketing Mix must?

 

Social Media seems to have become one of the inevitable elements of marketing mix. Have you noticed that in quite a lot of companies today there is a great demand for online marketing, primarily through social media marketing and SEO? What was wrong with our marketing strategy until now? Can we survive without social media?

Swept away by social media

 

Observing the communication reality online one can easily find out that there is a lot of pressure about implementing comprehensive social media marketing, SEO (sometimes interesting enough, called SEO optimization, which honestly does not make any sense!), online advertising, traffic control, etc. There are also numerous articles like this one found in Forbes stating that social media marketing is going to become the absolute must in 2014 and there ia a list of media seeing growth and decline.

As a business manager one gets completely swept off their feet by social media marketing promisses forgetting the uniqueness of their business and old and tried out maxima as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Managers are convinced that optimizing their online policy is what is going to save their business. But is that true?

Is social media appropriate?

 

First and foremost, it is essential to understand that not every business is carved to be social. A simple example can be James Nicholls’ scientific research publication, “Everyday, Everywhere: Alcohol Marketing and Social Media—Current Trends” (Alcohol and Alcoholism Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 486–493, 2012). The article discusses social media tactics used by alcohol brands in the UK and their consequences including creation of lasting habits. One can easily predict that many more articles like that discussing fast food companies, candy producers, soda producers, tobacco companies, possibly even companies staying behind environmentally bad products.

 

The danger of being social

Social media is social not only because it gathers consumers and gives companies the possibility to communicate directly and more effectively with target groups. It provides consumers with the power to communicate and discuss with each other and spread news. If there is just one opinion leader out there who finds out something discrediting about your company or the way you do business it is going to spread like wild fire. Because scandal sells even more that sex. Social media means transparency and exposure at levels which you have never experienced before. Many businesses are just not ready for that.

On top of that social media means that you need to provide valuable regular updates. You might want to be funny, or clever, or innovative, or whatever you want. But you need to be able to keep it up. Nobody will follow dull updates and they will not be of any value to you. When did we all get so productive and innovative and funny that we can keep it up daily for the foreseeable future? When did we deceive ourselves into believing that we are the only ones trying to follow such a strategy? Too much funny, too much innovation, too much cleverness is at the end simply too much.

Stuffing social media with corporate messages is going at the end to have the same effect as commercials on TV. Companies need to understand that they are not wanted on social media. Users of social media are people who want to come in contact with their friends, family or like-minded. This is also the reason why apps like Facebook AdBlock are appearing all the time.

Not only that every company’s arrival on Social media is going to avert consumers who in most cases see advertising on social media as too intrusive and violating their privacy, it is going to become significantly less effective in the future. Keeping in mind Facebook’s targeting methods it basically means that both you and all your competitors will have a shot at your target group. How is that better than advertising on TV?

Having a page on social media is more acceptable but as noted above it is not for all as many businesses will be accused in manipulating consumers or creating unhealthy habits or committing another sin. Using your page as an open communication channel is all alright but it is not going to be your miracle cure. Consumers are always more likely to socialize with a brand they are familiar with. For that reason new or not popular brands need to employ heavy marketing before a social strategy can be possible. Beware also of overexposing yourself. More presence will possibly make you visible in the eyes of consumers. Depending on your strategy, that can bring around more damage than good.

Looking back at the very core of social media we encounter another one of its downsides. The almost unlimited freedom of information dissemination makes it impossible for companies to control their image without manipulating posts and comments. However, even doing that will not save them from angry consumers. Regular users are gods in the social media space. The examples of stars’ death hoax are becoming ever more. If someone writes for example that their sister was poisoned by your product and everybody needs to share it to support the grief, they will. No matter if the story was true, the shadow of doubt will fall on your product and you will face losses. Are you ready to face the hoax?

Even if you have all your polices straight and you are 100 % sure that nothing can hit you unprepared you still need to be careful when voting for social media marketing. Analyzing consumer data is still pretty much in the shadows and social media users are not aware of how and how much information is gathered and used for marketing purposes. This is dangerous and might damage your image if information on shadowy data collection is connected to your company’s name. Nowadays there are pieces of data “uncovered” everyday and consumers are getting angry. Even though you were probably just a user of a service the CSR standards demand that you research and keep your supply chain clean. Thus, you are guilty.

Much more can be said about why not to go social. But this as all decisions concerning corporate communication should be made based on your strategy. If you are certain that engaging in social media marketing will be good for you, do it. It does work for many. What you really need to do prior such a decision though, is to make sure that you have double covered all scenarios and have your crisis communication policy close to you at all times. Just in case.

Last but not least, remember to not forget to employ traditional marketing and its basic principles. They still work.

 

DIDI

Professional Communication: project an image, don't be creepy

How to create an image? How to communicate professionalism? Are there standards which can help us enhance the communication strategy?

Study Case

The answers to those questions are correlated and almost impossible to find separately. However, there are quite a lot of companies out there trying to cut down the communication costs while making efforts to score high on image rankings. I have in mind a recent experience from a big international corporation operating in the office space renting business. The experience included both online company research and visiting the local office. The research phase showed non-existing CSR policy, non-existing employee benefits, accusations of careless behavior in connection to the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center a few years back, and company-produced marketing videos. The visit at the local office revealed a high rate of employee turnover, very unusual hiring policy (hiring only for lowest hierarchy positions with no requirements for education and experience, on minimal wage), and deceiving job descriptions.

When walking through the door you are greeted way too eagerly by the staff which makes you almost uncomfortable. What they pride themselves for is great flexibility in services and high level of professional customer service. The only customer feedback is available through the corporate marketing videos though.

Communicational no go

What was observed at that company is an absolute communicational no go. The non existing CSR policy and the lack of personnel benefits in a country as Denmark where CSR is becoming more than a standard and employees are treated with special care as assets is a sign of unprofessional management. The smile of the receptionist is not enough to make up for corporate mismanagement or irresponsible behavior. It also needs to be in line with services, surroundings, corporate culture and needs to be rooted in a thorough policy. Otherwise it comes across as insincere and creepy. Smiling while doing your job needs to be just as professionally distanced as your work style. Are you flirting with the customer or servicing them? Make it clear.

Image: communication standards and guidelines

Image management, even though there is such a discipline, sounds very wrong as image management is nothing but the tip of the iceberg. Hiring a professional to work on your image does not make a lot of sense if you have not clarified what the company stays for and how it wants to be regarded by your stakeholders. Stakeholders are all individuals and groups that are or can be affected by the operating of your business and/or have an interest in your business.

You need therefore to start from identifying your business’ core characteristics and analyzing the strategic stars for your brand. After clarifying what is desired and what is possible you need to get very practical and analyze in what ways your vision and mission can be embedded in your culture and business operations.

While you make considerations about communication practices, image building and communicating your values outside of and inside the company you need to get acquainted with the professional communication standards which will be your guarantee that your communication strategy is not going to backfire by earning you critics or even lawsuits in connection to unethical behavior.

 

After you manage to create a thorough and working communication strategy completely aligned with your business operations you might want to go one step further and consider CSR. There are countless studies showing that a CSR policy is considered a plus and sometimes a definitive criterion for choosing your company as a partner, provider or employer. For the policy to work though, you once again need to be consequent. Just as you need to make sure that you have implemented a communication policy that fits your business profile you also need to do the same when engaging in CSR. If you are not careful about this you might end up being accused of using CSR as a promotional tool instead of as a sincere expression of your concern for your stakeholders and the environment. You might for example decide to fund poor children in Africa but you have to explain why it is the poor children in Africa getting your support and not the local caner organization, for example.

After completing your communication strategy you need to make sure that it covers as a minimum mission, vision, development strategy, internal communication and employee management, HR policy and benefits, corporate culture, online and traditional marketing activities, branding, crisis communication, media relations, external stakeholder management, customer relations specifically, community care and involvement, and CSR.

When you are ready you will find yourself under a stack of thick guidebooks addressing the separate topics. You will have to always make sure that they are aligned with strategy and updated regularly. Among those guidebooks you will find the one describing how you need to treat customers in order to communicate the desired corporate image.

Do you now understand why smiling a lot is not professional but creepy?

 

DIDI

Online Marketing and Website optimization. Corporate Communication in practice.

Online Marketing and website optimization seem to be the future of communication. Therefore finding the answers of the following marketing questions is essential: When setting up a website how do we do it? How do we communicate with consumers? How do we make sure that our website reflects who we are? How can we be found by consumers? What about SEO?

Setting up a website as a communication tool

We are used to think that setting up a website is a programmer’s job. They know how to do it and we trust them. However, a website is not simply a bundle of code made to look good. A website is a business’ face towards millions of consumers online. As such it needs to comply with business strategy reflecting image, vision and mission. Even more importantly, it needs to represent the business in a way communicating branch, niche, products, services and all subthemes relevant to consumer searches on the web.

There is no doubt that a website needs to be set up by a programmer. To ensure high quality though a close collaboration between the programming team and the company’s marketing or communication department is necessary. Naming, tagging, titles, highlights, products, etc. need to be done in a way facilitating both the company’s best interest and consumer searches. This is done by reviewing business strategy and pointing out what you want consumers to find about you the easiest. After setting your communication goals for your website you have different options in terms of how you are going to implement your communication strategy. You can do it either through careful coding and content management or through helping search engines understand your content (if your website has already been set up and recoding/content optimization it is not an option). Ideally, you could use both strategies.

What does our website communicate?

Monitoring your website performance in terms of visitors, time spent, visitor behavior, returning visitors, keywords can help you understand the way your website functions and is used by consumers. That is done by your Webmaster using tools as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analyzing those parameters can give you an overview of how good a work you have done setting up a website. If for example you only have new visitors you might want to rethink website structure or content. It might be a sign that your consumers do not like either your website or your business. Which is the case, you might more or less determine by evaluating time users spent on your website. A quick look to your website’s top keywords will give you a good opportunity to find out whether you have made coding/content mistakes.

It is also very important to control how your website appears in searches and on which position it appears. As search engines (mostly) try to provide the most relevant and highly rated results to their users a low position in a search result might signal problems with either popularity or keywords settings and website structure. Keep in mind that the quality of the website in terms of speed is also taken into account when showing search results. Last but not least, be aware that a lot of the content which is not in plain text form might lower your website’s relevance evaluation as it is often skipped by search engines. Therefore you need to provide your key information in a text form.

Consumer searches and SEO

We are made to believe that SEO is the key to success online. However, Google warns that the SEO business has become a bit shadowy and thus not always a good idea. If you though decide that you want someone specializing in the field to optimize your website, you might need to take a look at Google’s warnings and guidelines. The truth is that in most cases you do not need a SEO specialist. What you need is to keep track of your website’s data and optimize content and structure in such a way that you make it easy for both search engines and consumers find what they need.

Still one of the best ways to make consumers aware of you is advertising and marketing yourself both online and offline. In addition to advertising you have the option of establishing links towards your website from different relevant web places. Some of those links you would need to pay for but others like the links on your Facebook or Google + pages will be free.

 

Basically, one of the most prominent rules in Business is to create something of value. Only after you are sure that your product is sellable it makes sense to start marketing it. Therefore think of your business and the process of communicating it as a process of discovery. You have discovered something which you want to share with others. Who are the others and how you get their interest should be what should guide you, not SEO concerns.

A small tip: when starting a business you often lack resources. But you already have a large public thanks to Social media. Use it. Use your friends as your marketers. Asking them to like your Facebook page or share it (once, do not abuse your friends) will instantly give you access to a larger target group than you have imagined.

Communication strategy failure: Information overload

How do we know what is true and what is not? How do we define trustworthiness? How do we get rid of the communication overload? How should a responsible company/public figure communicate? 

The overload

 

There are many who argue that the freedom of expression which Internet and other media provide giving basically everyone the opportunity to speak up has led to a society where nothing can stay hidden forever and thus honesty and transparency should be everybody’s policy in order to avoid image crashes.  However, it might turn out that accepting a reality where information is freely accessible makes us naive and lazy. As we are “drowned” in democracy rhetoric we do not necessarily reflect over the possibility that somebody might be manipulating information to serve someone’s interests. We read news, posts, blogs, forum threads, etc. and sometimes we cannot even tell the difference between them which most of the time is not as clear as one might think. Thus, we take a comment in a forum as seriously as a news post. Furthermore, we do not have the time or the energy to check all referrals and sources of an article for example. Last but not least, we face the so called Clickworker workforce which basically are people hired to write reviews and other consumer content. How do we then separate trustworthy from what is not? On top of that we need to process much more information daily than we actually are capable of: around 5 000 to 30 000 advertising messages alone.

The result is a tired mind nonstop bombarded with information which is a perfect target for manipulation.

Get rid of it

To help ourselves get rid of the overload and thus concentrate on what is really important we need to shut off all distracters. A distracter is a source or a type of information which either is not trustworthy or is not important. It is furthermore what affects our concentration, uses up our processing resources and prevents us from focusing on what is really important. To be more effective and function better both at work and in our private lives we need to learn to prioritize. We need to accept the fact that our brains have limits and we need to use them for what makes most sense.

What to trust?

When we talk about information overload vs. trustworthiness the prioritizing we need to do includes some drastic measures. However, according to your own needs, you might adjust them.

Rule nr. 1 would be to turn all electronics off. Sit down and think what is important to you. Is it really important personally to you that the Greek economic is going down? Do you have some personal investment in the war in Iraq? Do you really care to look through the pictures of a friend of a friend on Facebook or you simply do it automatically? Do you care that that and that public figure in some country had an affair?

Rule nr. 2: Turn off for everything that you are not interested in. If you watch the news because you are bored, that is not a good reason to put your brain through yet another informational attack. If you are interested in sport, watch sports. If you are into politics, follow politics. Especially nowadays it is more than easy to find the perfect source for your needs as there are countless sources and media variations.

Rule nr. 3 comes in connection to trustworthiness. After you have managed to filter the incoming information you should have the time and the energy to separate reliable from unreliable sources. You do that by checking credentials, sources, image, and disclaimers. Normally you will only need to do that once as serious companies value their image and will not allow it to be destroyed by publishing false information. However, a cross-referencing with other publications or following 2-3, maybe more if you have the time, sources provides always a better guarantee that you are being properly informed.

Rule nr. 4 is mostly for those who like reading forums, blogs, reviews. Do not forget that the people writing there are most of the time simply users who come up with some commentary based either on something they somehow have learned or on their own thoughts/experience. Sometimes they also might be people hired to write what they wrote. Trusting them fully is never a good idea without doing some research on your own.

For companies

Even though most consumers do not follow the described steps and often are easy to manipulate by putting images and ideas in their heads it is not recommended taking advantage. Merely from an image point of view you are going to risk destroying your image if your manipulation tactics are ever revealed. Unfortunately for you there are opinion leaders and a bit crazy conspiracy theorists that are always on a lookout for something like that.

There have been many companies through time who have got away with manipulation and even more politicians and public figures who have mastered the art of getting what they want. This does not mean that you will succeed. It is about time companies realize that success may but should not rest on deceiving consumers. Business is always more productive and successful in the long term when you cooperate with your stakeholders and are honest with them.

Instead of taking advantage of the informational clutter, try to stand out with 100 % professionalism and responsibility. Having a clear policy and a clear message will guarantee you a strong position on the market. Imagine being the trustworthy source conscious consumers are choosing. Becoming the trusted partner of your stakeholder brings more value than leaching of them. The time of synergy between companies and consumers has come.

 

DIDI

Pricing: Marketing rules you cannot ignore

 Pricing: The necessity of following basic market rules in order to be successful

 

Study Case

In the last few months a lot of consumers in Denmark experienced a shock when the market leader in milk products Arla increased the prices of fresh milk, both ecological and regular, by correspondingly 14 % and 25 %.

 

Otherwise no mystery there, prices do go up more or less on a regular basis. However, the reasoning behind the decision becomes quite unclear when one looks at market rapports quoted by the Danish press showing that demand is falling and the reason seems to be the high price of milk.

Even more mystically, the price of regular milk jumped with 25 % as reported and reached almost the price level for ecological milk. All this despite the fact that other producers still keep prices of regular milk on a price level 33 % lower than the Arla’s prices even after the recent increase of their own prices.

 

The net result for the company is yet to be measured, however the trend is for grocery chains to periodically put Arla milk on offer in an attempt to sell it or bail on it completely (observed at Kvickly, Rema 1000 and Netto, Denmark, September and October 2013). As for the consumers there is little doubt that they will choose the lowest price of the same product class and thus ditch the pricy Arla milk which does not offer anything beyond what other brands are able to provide on a much lower price (see an article on the topic, in Danish!).

 

Pricing

Pricing is usually decided on by conducting marketing research, evaluating demand, and benchmarking with competitors. A company could employ different pricing strategies depending on market position, brand value, product value, availability of alternative products, demand and supply. A market leader can often put pressure on the market by increasing its prices if there is an indication that either competitors will follow or consumers will stay loyal to the brand. The other way around, which also seems to be the case more commonly, the market leader can win the battle with competitors by lowering its prices to levels unreachable for smaller companies.

However, either move has its risks and limitations. While the risks seem to be easier to identify, the limitations are hidden within the corporate policy and corporate marketing strategy. Lowering or increasing prices is not always an option, as for example, a low cost brand cannot out of the blue come up with pricy products marketed as top quality. Similarly, an expensive brand can seriously damage its image by lowering inexplicably its prices only to win customers over.

This is the reason why low cost brands committed to changing business profile to quality need to go a long way. And this is the reason why many regular or expensive brands employ countless discount tricks in order to sell or to attract new customers.

The marketing policy aside, prices need to be compatible with business logic. Increase in prices should mean increase in quality, higher costs along the supply chain, new taxes, or market monopoly. Most importantly, that logic needs to be translated to consumers. They need to understand why they are supposed to buy your brand and pay more for it now than before.

If you skip that simple step you risk losing your otherwise loyal customers. An example can once again be the Danish dairy queen Arla. When they increased their prices in a country still in crisis and with price conscious consumers the result just a month later is almost constant discounts and special offers putting the milk price below the level from before the increase. Would Arla do that if they were not losing too many customers?

The problem with the increase was that it did not make any sense. No higher quality, yet much higher than the average price of competitors and just few Euro cent under the price of ecological milk which traditionally is sold on much higher prices. Why buy it?

To be successful you need to remember that no matter which pricing policy you choose, it is essential to communicate and explain your policy to consumers so that it does make sense to them. Another bonus of communicating openly with your customer stakeholder group is getting important and timely feedback on planned business moves and thus protecting your business and your image from damage.

In two words: to be successful you need to follow clear business polices, to avoid the thrill of a quick win and to establish open communication with your stakeholders.

DIDI