Posts Tagged ‘social marketing’
IPad— The new retail experience.
Posted by Eric Welsh | Filed under Advertising, Interactive, Social Media, Technology, Tips and Trends Series, Updates
For all of you denim loving fashionista’s across the web. Gap has really stepped up into the iPad space with an amazing experience in the 1969 Stream app, which was launched earlier in this month. Watch the video below and be sure to turn on the sound! Also, a great article about this revolutionary step in retail can be found on the Adage.com site. It makes us wonder, who will be the first hospitality company to embrace these new app opportunities?
Social Media: The New Frontier
Posted by Tracy Stottler | Filed under Advertising, Interactive, Media
“Five years ago, we thought of the Web as a new medium, not a new economy.” ~Clement Mok
I’ve been in advertising and marketing for over 20 years. In the early days, we outsourced typesetting and laid everything onto boards. We had wax machines in our studio to lay down the type. Email was just starting to be used and the commercial Internet we know today wasn’t even conceived of yet (thank you, Al Gore!).
We printed a whole lot of brochures back then. I remember in the mid-90s when we were working with clients on their marketing strategies, we started looking at adding a website to their communications plan. The response to that recommendation was consistently, “But how am I going to pay for THAT?”
Back then, having a company website was the new frontier. It was unfamiliar territory, but a necessity. No one really knew how to design an effective site or make it a revenue generating tool, but it was clear this would be a major addition to the marketing mix. We needed to take a fresh look at the budget and reallocate money from one category to make room for this new category. We had to print fewer brochures and ask for a little more funding at the same time.
As marketing experts, it is our job to support our clients needs, keep the door open to new developments, and deliver ideas on how to expand business and generate more revenue. One of the most recent and exciting opportunities is in the area of social marketing. But how does this fit into a company’s overall marketing strategy? How do you track its effectiveness and measure ROI? How do you pay for it?
I just read an online article from Business Week called “Debunking Six Social Media Myths”, by B.L. Ochman. It’s a valuable read on the subject when you’re ready to add social media to your marketing mix.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090218_335887.htm
It says, “For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.
Customers are itching to interact with brands and talk to people like them about their products/services. Companies must continually adapt, engage with customers and innovate to stay competitive.”
One of the issues addressed in the article is that “many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use, however, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money.”
The article goes on to explain that “a budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. Some companies have spent less and some have spent more … but building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing… It takes skill, experience, and money.”
Additional budget guidelines are given and although some of the costs quoted may sound a bit daunting, particularly in this economic climate, the point is to start somewhere. Find a way to begin incorporating social media into your plan at a level you can afford. Dana has identified some simple ways to ease into this new medium, enabling its clients to see what social media can do for them.
Measuring the value of social media is a bit trickier, but “you can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.”
Think about websites 10-15 years ago. No one knew how they would make us any money and only seemed to cost us a lot. But over time, they became more cost-effective revenue generating tools that we now can’t live without. Social media is the new frontier. Even before recent months, when many resources have been cut, it’s an important reminder that we still need to make room for social media in any marketing strategy and understand what an investment in social media actually means.
As the newest medium available in your marketing arsenal, social media will demand a fresh look at your budget so you can reallocate money from one category to make room for this new category.
