Reinvent your strategy to emphasize value.Value is a secret weapon in this economy. When you boil away all the other ingredients of a product sale, you uncover value. This is a tricky concept because value is in the eye of the beholder. Understanding what imparts that value should underlie your entire marketing strategy. Think about your current SMM campaign. Are you focusing on features and benefits or on how the product makes your customer feel? For example, some companies focus on making people feel smart and sexy when they buy a certain model car. By the same token, others may focus on models that emphasize safety and responsibility. If you understand the value, you can establish a bond with your buyer.
Market to inspire.The globalization of our world via the Internet has given us a window into the lives of others. It’s hard to ignore the poverty and disease that plague much of the world’s population. Many companies are seizing the opportunity to use their businesses to help make an impact. SMM encourages awareness of the connection we share with others. Think about how your business can participate.In fact, in the last few years alone, purpose driven marketing, which is about defining why you do what you do, has become one of the most important ways to engage customers. Dove’s #speakbeautiful movement Twitter campaign, which encouraged women to speak positively about themselves, is a perfect example of this type of marketing as it flowed naturally from Dove’s broader purpose of improving the self-esteem and confidence of women. It wasn’t just about selling a product but demonstrating that the brand has a more meaningful role to play in people’s lives.
Create and curate content.Offering engaging content is a big part of any SMM campaign. You need an editorial calendar that lays out your topics, creation tools, and deadlines. You also need to focus on curating content already published on the web. Becoming a trusted source of information is key to getting your customers to visit often. It’s important to remember that your customers are leading highly engaged and entertaining lives in the social media world. Your content can’t just be about your product. It needs to be valuable to them and their lives.
Know when to resist the next shiny object.As you well know, new web tools pop up daily. The best way to avoid being distracted is to write down your objectives. The last thing you want to say to yourself is, “Everyone is using such and such, so we should use it.” Place your objectives in a prominent place and refer to them often. If they change, revise the document. But whatever you do, don’t try to do something on every social platform — you’ll quickly discover that you don’t have the tools, training, and — most critically — the resources to support all the tools.
Be prepared to be wrong.This is a tough one. In your role as marketer, you want to lead your company to successive victories. SMM is not a sure thing. You need to be prepared to experiment and change course using the feedback that you get from customers. You may start with a small idea and develop it into a full-blown campaign. It’s unlikely that you can start out with a very expensive big effort and not have to correct along the way. When management and staff start out with the notion that they are testing and experimenting, changes in direction won’t seem as shocking. This cuts down on wear and tear of the psyche for everyone. It also limits the risks to your core marketing efforts while you learn this space.
Understanding the role of the influencer
To understand how social influence works, you need to look at how people are influenced in the real world, face to face. Social influence isn’t something new. Long before the web, people asked each other for advice as they made purchasing decisions. What one person bought often inspired another to buy the same product, especially if the original purchaser said great things about the product. That’s how human beings function; we’re influenced and motivated by each other to do things. We’re social beings, and sharing information about our experiences is all a part of social interaction.
Is influence bad? Of course not. More often than not, people seek that influence. People ask each other for advice; they share decision-making processes with friends and colleagues; they discuss their own experiences.
How much a person is influenced depends on multiple factors. The product itself is the most important one. When buying low-consideration purchases (those with a small amount of risk), people rarely seek influence, nor are they easily influenced by others. Buying toothpaste, for example, is a low-consideration purchase because each product may not be that different from the next one, and they’re all fairly inexpensive — so you won’t lose much money if you choose one that doesn’t fit your needs. On the other hand, buying a new car is typically a high-consideration purchase (a purchase that includes a large risk).
The price of the car, the maintenance costs, and its reputation for its safety all contribute to making it a high-consideration purchase, not to mention the fact that you want to identify with a certain brand versus another one. Social influence plays a much bigger role in car purchases than in toothpaste decisions. Mercedes-Benz has used social media marketing time and again to leverage influencers in motivating consumers to purchase its cars. The Mercedes-Benz Take The Wheel campaign for which they hired five top Instagram photographers to each take the wheel of a new Mercedes CLA was a standout example. (Figure 1-2 shows the webpage for this campaign.) Whoever got the most likes on Instagram when publishing about the car and their roadtrips got to keep the car. So as you can imagine, the photographers really worked hard!
FIGURE 1-2: The Mercedes-Benz Take The Wheel campaign.
Considering the types of influencers
When discussing social media marketing, people often ask us whether this means that they should add product review features to e-commerce websites or advertise on social networks. Yes, product reviews and advertising are important, but there’s more to social influence than those two things. When you think about social influence in the context of your marketing objectives, you must separate social influencers online into three types: referent, expert, and positional. These categories come from thinking that social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven pioneered in 1959.
As a marketer seeking to deploy social media marketing techniques, the first question to answer is this: Which social influencers sway your consumers as they make purchasing decisions about your product? After you identify those social influencers, you can determine the best ways to market to them.
Referent influencers
A referent influencer is someone