The first is content. Without interesting content that makes you stop, focus, and respond, your online marketing effort will fail. As I wrote in an earlier post, your campaign needs a value proposition and a large portion of this value is created with really good content. Obvious.
The second factor that gets overlooked a surprising amount of the time is enabling the sharing of the content. Not just enabling it in fact but integrating this act into the very fabric of the user experience. By this I mean, clever marketers (and content creators) understand that a social experience requires involves two or more people. What I do with your content can and should enhance the experience for subsequent viewers. Take YouTube for example. The reason why they display the number of views, favorites, etc. and enable comments is because the perceived popularity (or lack thereof) of a specific video is a key indicator of content quality for visitors to the page. As a consequence of making this information available to the visitor, YouTube increases the probability of the two primary goals of any social media marketing campaign: views and pass-alongs. It’s quite simple.
The next step in the process of engaging users in a truly social experience is to allow and encourage them to share it with others. It’s striking how many online marketing campaigns we see that do not incorporate even the most rudimentary concept of “sharing” into the UI and flow of the user experience.
While all the attention and focus around social media is generally related to the creation of crazy, wacky content and how easy it is for individuals to get their 15 minutes of fame, the real juice for marketers looking to boost the effectiveness of their online campaigns through social media involves the sharing and evangelism of that content across each user’s social graph. Do that and your social media marketing campaign with be a smashing success.
Related Blogs
Shameless plug here. I’m currently in the process of working with a small group of experienced marketing pros (online and offline) to build the curriculum for a new certificate program to be offered through University of Washington Extension during the Winter and Spring Quarters in 2009. The program is ideal for more junior folks in the industry looking to accelerate their development, career changers who might be familiar with the Web and basic online marketing techniques and tactics but want to broaden their skillset in order to get their foot in the door with a company that is active in the field, and seasoned marketers (brand, mark-comm, PR, etc.) who want to merge considerable offline experience with an understanding of online strategies and best practices.
To learn more about this program, click here.
You can also hear a podcast of me (doh!) talking about the program with Mary Larson, UW Educational Outreach Asst. Director of Academic Programs.
Related Blogs
The title of this post caught my eye the other day:
What’s interesting about it is the implication that “old media vehicles” can be measured effectively in contrast to the “unproven” online methods of today and tomorrow.
The author has it exactly backwards. The effectiveness of brand marketing via TV, radio, and print has never been something that could be cost-effectively measured. Even when metrics like “unaided awareness” are computed from costly survey data, one heavily discounts the value of this metric as a predictor of marketing spend ROI.
The ability to record, in theory, every impression and every action exists today on the Web, something never before possible with old media vehicles. As a consequence, the online advertising value chain can be constructed with far greater precision and at dramatically reduced cost than anything one could do with off-line media. The issue then isn’t that the data and metrics do not exist for marketers to quantify ROI and justify increasing spend on online marketing initiatives, it’s that “traditional” marketers and their agencies generally do not have the skills or experience required to construct the performance measurement and financial models that transform the presently available marketing data into information and knowledge that can be consumed and acted upon by upper management.
The fact is that the availability of all of this data is creating new responsibilities and opportunities for marketers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, spot opportunities to increase performance, and optimize accordingly. This approach to marketing and promotion is in the DNA of every successful online merchant today starting with Amazon, Ebay, and Google. They measure and test everything they do and use the results to shape and guide their communications and promotions planning. It is also the way more and more boutique online advertising and marketing agencies combine the science and craft of marketing on the Web.
Going forward, marketing effectiveness will be driven by four things:
- Strategy - The goals and objectives of the marketing plan must be closely aligned with the overall strategic plan of the organization?
- Creative - The message, who it’s for, how it’s packaged, when/where it’s delivered, etc.
- Technology - The effective use of technology to drive expanded breadth and depth (aka scale) of your marketing programs.
- Management Methodology - Is everything being measured and is the data being transformed effectively into actionable information and insights?
Does your agency of record, or if you don’t have one the team you use internally, posses these three capabilities in sufficient strength to deliver the bottom line results your success requires?
Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp have both written extensively on the ascendancy of links as a primary form of currency on the Web. In the Buzzmachine post to which I linked above, Jarvis makes the point that the business of online media is to acquire and aggregate links. Links are what build awareness, drive traffic, and power the growth of one’s online presence. The more you have “out there” on high value sites and locations, the louder and more compelling your “voice”.
In the context of online marketing, the same rule of thumb applies. A s
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