Page 86 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

potential marketers for the brand and provide them with the tools and mecha-
nisms to further influence others. While it’s different from asking an isolated
consumer to perform a specific task, increasingly the social media platforms are
developing extremely powerful advertising formats that enable you to use their
platforms for all your direct-response marketing needs.

More broadly speaking, SMM isn’t as measurable as direct-response marketing is,
although that is changing fast. Tracking how social influencers work is difficult;
when a consumer shows brand affinity or makes a purchasing decision, it’s hard
to tell which factors or influencers impacted those choices most directly. In that
sense, SMM is more akin to brand marketing, where the measurability is weak and
needs to be based on feedback similar to that collected in attitudinal surveys. It’s
easy to track expert influencers online using social media measurement tools, but
that’s just part of the equation. Often, the social influencers who sway purchasing
decisions aren’t the most public and noticeable brand advocates.

Another factor to consider with SMM is that the call to action can’t be too
heavy-handed. As a result, some would argue that SMM is much more about social
influence and much less about marketing. Social campaigns that blatantly push
the call to action generally fail because they lack credibility, don’t provide value to
the consumer and appear calculated. For this reason, you can’t always easily rec-
ognize or measure your successful SMM campaigns.

Tying SMM with brand marketing

and direct response

Social media marketing, which is about harnessing and categorizing the local
spheres of influence, complements brand marketing and direct response with its
focus on reaching social influencers across a variety of channels and platforms at
every stage of the marketing funnel. This is done so that influencers socialize the
message in their own communities and conduct the marketing for the brand. Not
all social influencers have platforms to project strong opinions; some are more
anonymous, localized, and less recognizable. That’s the bad news. The good news
is that influencers obviously like to influence and have a meaningful and integral
role to play in marketing online or offline.

Social media marketing resembles relationship marketing in that both focus on
the relationship, not just the point of sale, and are more personal in nature. The
difference is that relationship marketing focuses on establishing deeper, longer-
term relationships with customers over a lifetime, whereas social media market-
ing relies on customers marketing the brand.

70 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing