Article by Tomelton
Combining New and Old Media Marketing
Depending on whom you ask, Twitter and social media are changing the landscape of marketing. Old marketing is dead; new marketing is king. They’re surprised that people still advertise in the phone book, on TV and radio, and — gasp — on billboards. « Everyone, » they cry, « is online! Renounce your old ways
and join us on the Interweb. » (Because the really cool people call it the Interweb as a sort of irony.) Meanwhile, the old-school marketers believe that the social-media craze is just a passing fancy and that serious business is still done with a handshake. They cite all sorts of numbers and reasons to continue to advertise in broadcast and print media. « Social media, » grumble the curmudgeons, « is just a fad. People need to quit playing games and join the rest
of us here on Earth. »
But neither of these marketing views is entirely correct. Social media hasn’t changed the marketing landscape, but at the same time, marketing can’t completely go back to the way it was. The smart marketers — by which I mean you, the person who bought this book (see, that action right there already shows how brilliant you are) — understand that the tools may have changed, but the principles are still the same.
You still have the five Ps of marketing — product, price, place (distribution), promotion, and people. The message is still more important than the medium. And you still have to provide a value to your customers; otherwise, they won’t be willing to part with their money. Twitter is just one more tool in the marketing toolbox.
Applying Old-School Marketing and Principles
Marketing has been around since Og and Zog were both competing in the blossoming wheel industry thousands of years ago. Og and Zog had to show customers how they’d benefit from a wheel (education) and how a wheel could
provide value to them (sales), as well as offer customers excellent customer service (follow-up). The same techniques apply today. Marketers educate, sell,
and service by using commercials, brochures, and Web sites. But now they have some new tools in the marketing toolbox.
So, what’s the difference between old-school marketing and the new school? On the face, not much. The principles are still the same.
Say that you manufacture marbles and sell them to marble collectors. Thirty years ago, your marketing plan would have looked like this:
1. Find your ideal customer.
Do focus groups, surveys, and data analysis. Find out who the typical marble collector is. Create a profile about what he or she likes to do, where he or she is likely to live, and whether he or she belongs to any marble clubs. Because collectors make up the majority of your customers, you need to focus
most of your energy on them. You may have an ideal customer who is male, lives in a large city, is in his 30s or 40s, and likes sports.
2. Create a marketing campaign to reach those ideal
customers.
If it’s in your budget, advertise during sporting events on TV, especially on ESPN. Put up billboards around the 15 biggest cities around the country. Buy a mailing list from the different marble clubs around the country, and send those on the list a copy of your latest catalog. Put ads in print magazines that the
ideal customer reads, including sports magazines such as Sports Illustrated.
3. Measure sales before and after the campaign.
If sales went up, the campaign was a success. Also, if sales went down, it is important to figure out what went wrong in the marketing process. Why did you lose money? Test. Retest. Try again.
4. Survey your customers.
Find out where customers saw your ad. Continue to put money into the ads that worked. Don’t pull the plug on the underperforming ads just yet, but make sure to keep a close eye on them for a bit longer, as they may turn out to be money sinkholes. Marketers still follow the process in the preceding list to some degree. Even if companies have more advertising channels to choose from and they’ve gotten smarter about finding the ideal customer just by paying attention, every company still follows this basic plan.
But Twitter and the Internet have changed how you can target your customers. They’ve made marketing easier and cheaper. E-mail accounts and social networks such as Facebook are free to use. The cost of developing (and running) a Web site has dropped dramatically. And thanks to the Internet, performing research, creating your message, and distributing it have become more affordable than ever before.
Here’s what new-school marketing looks like:
1. Target your customers.
Who cares what your ideal customer is like? You don’t have to target people like them because you can target them directly.
2. As long as you tweet about relevant content that these folks
care about, you have a very good chance that they will follow
you back.
3. Create a marketing campaign that involves a Web site and
a blog, and create a Facebook and/or MySpace page. Invite
people to join these groups.
4. Write regular blog content and use Twitter to post
messages, letting your followers know that you have a new
post on your blog
5. Measure your results.
If you are not tracking and analyzing the traffic on your site, you should. You can do it using a platform such as Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), which lets you look at lots of information about your site’s visitors. You also have the ability to add Google Analytics into your HootSuite account for increased support from your analytics platform! Using Google Analytics, find out which messages, which posts, which tweets, and even what time of day produced the best results, leading to the most sales. Armed with this information, you can put more energy and effort into the actions that generate more sales and drop the ones that don’t produce such a good result. You can also try to figure out ways to improve nonperforming messages, posts, and tweets. Most of the ideas stay the same when you transition from old marketing techniques to tech-savvy ones:
Find your customer, create a marketing campaign, create an
effective message, and measure the results.
However, you can improve the return on your investment in some of these areas when you use social media as part of your marketing toolkit:
Find your exact customer, not an approximation or ideal of
one.
Reach your customers right where they are, instead of advertising in places you hope they’ll be.
Send your message only to people who care about your product(s), instead of wasting ink and money on people who don’t.
Create frequent, even daily, content and get it to customers at all hours of the day, not once a month or only at game time. Don’t spend thousands and thousands of dollars in print and broadcast advertising. Spend a small amount to no money on electronic marketing. Encourage retweets. This improvement is huge: Customers can easily share your message within their circles of influence, and their circle of influence may buy your product or service.
Because of social media, you can share information with your friends much more easily than you could even five years ago. Back in the mid 2000s, if you wanted to share information with people, you had to e-mail links to Web sites or forward jokes countless times to each other. Now, you can share photos with friends and family. Upload a 5-minute movie of your 3-year-old explaining Star Wars and get a ton of hits.
Write a blog post that 1,000 rabid marble collectors see or click a button that retweets a message to 10,000 people in just a few minutes. Word of mouth was almost literally word of mouth 30 years ago. You called your friend about a great new restaurant. You asked a colleague whether she saw the billboard over on Massachusetts Avenue. You talked about the great new TV series. But you couldn’t share articles or videos, unless you clipped an article out of a newspaper or magazine, or recorded a TV show on your VCR.
People didn’t share 30 years ago like they do now. Thanks to social media’s growth and tools such as Twitter, you can now easily share information with people who think like you and who like the same things you like. That’s why some people are now calling « word of mouth » advertising « word of mouse. » (Clever, huh?)
If anything is different about marketing today, it’s not the tools and it’s not the technology, and the medium isn’t the message — the ability to share has given consumers a new voice. It has given consumers the power to talk about
experiences and share them with thousands upon thousands of people. And you can make your business a success by sharing your stories, ideas, thoughts, and successes with the clients and consumers using Twitter for communication.
Working with New Media Tools and Techniques
Thirty years ago, you could easily get your message to your potential customers. You advertised on the big three networks, on the radio, and in newspapers. People couldn’t escape your message. They were in your world. You just had to repeat your message enough times for it to take effect. Now, people have hundreds of channels on TV. They get their radio from the Internet, satellite, or one of a myriad of radio stations. Newspapers aren’t faring very well: Both readership and advertising revenues have dropped, many newspapers have gone bankrupt, and people are questioning whether the
newspapers will even be around in ten years. But people are also online. In fact, if you need one place where you can find most people, it’s online. More people are congregating on Facebook and MySpace every day. They’re reading and writing blogs. And they’re using Twitter.
If you want to reach your customers, you need to find out where they’re located. Thanks
