Seeing why all consumers are not created equal
A chapter on competition wouldn’t be complete without addressing the fact that in discussions about social influence and social media marketing, all consumers aren’t created equal. Social influence doesn’t simply mean recognizing that every consumer may influence every other consumer; rather, in specific marketing contexts, specific consumers have an outsized influence on their peers around them. For example, on a social network, one of the authors’ friends posts more comments than anyone else. Just by virtue of his volume of postings, we take his opinion into account more than that of our other friends who aren’t commenting as much.
THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Consumers have always been heavily influenced by each other when they make purchasing decisions. They ask each other for advice; they observe and mimic each other’s decision making; and, frankly, they let peer pressure inform their decisions, whether they like to admit it or not. What’s changed is that digital behavior has caught up with offline behavior, and that’s why social media marketing matters to anyone who has a future in marketing.
Communication technologies such as social networks, prediction markets, microblogging solutions, location-based networked mobile phone applications, and even virtual worlds make it possible for consumers to influence each other more directly and dramatically than ever before. According to Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman, this influence occurs in three ways:
Compliance: Conforming publicly while keeping one’s own private beliefs
Identification: Conforming to someone who is liked and respected, such as a celebrity or a favorite uncle
Internalization: Accepting the belief or behavior and conforming both publicly and privately
In addition to making for good copy in behavioral psychology textbooks, these concepts do translate into tactics for social media marketing.
In this regard, three steps help you gain a marketing advantage from influential consumers:
1 Discover the influential consumers.As you launch a social media marketing campaign and identify your consumers, pay extra attention to who is influencing your potential customers. Who are the consumers who are influencing your customers, and where is this influence taking place? (You can find out more about influencers in Chapter 18.)
2 Activate the influential consumers.After you identify the influential consumers, whether they’re bloggers, forum leaders, or just conversationalists with lots of friends on the social networks, develop relationships with them and find ways to activate them to do the marketing on your behalf. In later chapters, we discuss exactly how you can do this.
3 Turn customers into brand advocates.And finally, after a consumer becomes a customer, deepen your relationship with her so that the customer becomes a brand advocate. That’s not a new strategy, except that now you can ask her to take specific actions within her social networks as a brand advocate. Rather than just ask her to talk about your product, you can have her actually reach out to her peers and then reward her for her participation.
Dipping into Hot SMM Concepts
One way to stay ahead of the competition is to keep abreast of the marketing trends that directly affect your customers. Several major trends have recently impacted the social media realm. You should determine whether those trends apply to your situation. Even if you do not immediately see a way to apply them, you’ll want to monitor them closely. We mention them here and cover them more in depth in the chapters cited below.
Discovering gamification
There are basically two camps of people online — those who believe that online games are a complete waste of time and those who find them irresistible. But are social games actually games? They are, and again, they aren’t. Social games incorporate game techniques in a social setting with the aim of encouraging you to interact with a business, a charity, or perhaps an educational entity, to name a few.
You’re playing a social game if you are on one of the social media platforms and the game encourages you to take action that surrounds a brand. Where do these social gamers like to play?
Typically when you think of a “gamer,” you might think of an adolescent with lots of time and energy to master ever higher levels of game play. But actually, according to the same study, the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Businesses of all types are creating games that integrate the use of their products with the daily play. One example of this is Clarins, a French cosmetics company. Their game Spa Life on Facebook is about the challenges of running a spa. Their products are used at the spa and become part of the game solution.
But lest you think it’s all for fun, gamification takes several different cuts at the online game experience. In September of 2011, a group of gamers who play at a site called Foldit was asked to help solve a complex protein folding puzzle that had stumped AIDS researchers for years. Surprisingly, the gamers were able to solve it within 10 days. It’s reported that the competitive nature of the game drove the teams forward. CBS News reported that one researcher called it the value of “citizen science.”
If your company is thinking about creating a social game, you’ll want to make sure to take a broad approach and see what’s being done online. These games can be short or long term. You don’t have to commit yourself to something untried.
Choosing localized marketing
Many Internet marketers are excited about the opportunities they have to reach around the globe for new consumers. What many have overlooked is the opportunity to reach into their local communities to get more customers. As Adam Metz says in his book The Social Customer (McGraw-Hill), these customers “didn’t exist at the turn of the twenty-first century.”
Tools are now available to help small businesses and local sites of large businesses engage their fans. For example, Facebook has developed several types of advertising deals that help owners reward their customers for visiting the store often in the context of offers. (We cover these types of rewards in Chapter 8.)
Companies like BlitzLocal, shown in Figure 2-12, at (https://localblitz.com/), have sprung up to assist business owners in finding their local Facebook fans. Dennis Yu, co-founder and CEO of BlitzLocal, said, “It’s quality, not quantity that counts” when it comes to fan numbers.
Creating an app for that
According to App Annie, the total number of mobile app downloads increased from 178 billion in 2017 to 194 billion in 2018. Furthermore, total app usage increased by 50 percent between 2016 and 2018 globally. Without a doubt, apps are big business and getting bigger every year. Social media marketers have an enormous opportunity to brand an app that is seen every day by their customers. Talk about product placement! Marketers can help their customers and proudly display their logo while they do it. But not all apps are a hit. It takes careful planning and research to create an app that resonates with customers. Apps can typically be categorized in one of the following eight categories:
Social networking
News