Social Marketing is Simple

sasha uritsky

Sep 06, 2015

In its very essence social marketing is based on one simple foundation - give first, take later.

This concept of giving to the community is hardly possible to overestimate. It defines the way social networks operate and goes even deeper, to the basic principles of social interactions among humans.

In fact it is a much healthier foundation for business than traditional one, based on advertising.

Yet it runs contrary to what many entrepreneurs and business people perceive as a proper marketing approach.

Traditional marketing, such as billboards, radio ads, posters, banners, emails blasts, etc is based on two principles, a) the statistical law of big numbers, aiming to reach out to as large audience as possible while knowing that only a small percent would become interested, b) message of self-promotion and self-advertisment.

Social marketing negates both of these principles.

Social marketing is personal, it operates individually, and in a personalised way. Which makes perfect sense from a common perspective. Would you rather be bombarded by the generic ads that in most cases have nothing to do with your interests and desires, or approached on a one-on-one basis with a chance to discuss your specific needs?

Social marketing is directed towards promoting the interests of others, not yours (or your business). Again it makes sense as we are a social species, we live in societies and rely on communication. The most successful communication strategy is the one that takes care of the needs of your communication partner.

And so, opposing the traditional marketing approach, social marketing is based on the idea of giving to the community. Which makes it more efficient than traditional marketing, if measured against the effort applied. In other words, taken 100 random prospects, we are more likely to convert them into customers if using social marketing than traditional marketing.

But is it scalable?

(to be continued)

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

nmodes Is Helping Businesses to Succeed

With the launch of the new dashboard nmodes is helping businesses to drive traffic and grow sales.

For example, One of our clients needed to increase traffic to their website while at the same time improve the conversion rate. In other words, they wanted to see more quality traffic.

The client made a concentrated effort on social media, however they were having difficulties in finding the target audience - traditional keywords search resulted in too much noise and did not produce desired outcome.

nmodes dashboard simplified this client’s engagement process. We created a dedicated stream that accurately addressed their targeted audience. nmodes dashboard is actionable, so their engagement became easy. nmodes technology identifies potential customers accurately, and so their engagement became efficient.

As a result, the click thru rate rose up to 65%, traffic quality improved by 25%, and conversion increased to 6-8%

Another client relied heavily on mainstream dashboards (such as Hootsuite) These tools do not do a good job finding relevant conversations, in the process producing too much noise and forcing client’s community managers to spend long hours manually identifying these relevant conversations. The client manages multiple social account and this type of manual labour was impeding the business, both in terms of costs and efficiency.

nmodes produces highly accurate results in finding relevant conversations that do not require manual clean up. The client started using nmodes solution, and immediately freed a substantial amount of hours which enabled them to consecrate on servicing their customers and acquiring new ones.

When Big Data is not so big anymore

We are inundated with information. There is so much information around us they coined a special term - Big Data. To emphasize the sheer size of it.

It is, of course, a problem - to deal with a large amount of data. Various solutions have been created to address it efficiently.

At nmodes we developed a semantic technology that accurately filters relevant conversations. We applied it to social networks, particularly Twitter. Twitter is a poster child of Big Data. They have 500 million conversations every day. A staggering number. And yet, we found that for many topics, when they are narrowed down and accurately filtered, there are not that many relevant conversations after all.

No more than 5 people are looking for CRM solutions on an average day on Twitter. Even less - two per day on average - are asking for new web hosting providers explicitly, although many more are complaining about their existing providers (which might or might not suggest they are ready to switch or looking for a new option).

We often have businesses coming to us asking to find relevant conversations and expecting a large number of results. This is what Big Data is supposed to deliver, they assume. Such expectation is likely a product of our ‘keyword search dependency’. Indeed, when we run a keyword search on Twitter, or search engines, or anywhere we get a long list of results. The fact that most of them (up to 98% in many cases) are irrelevant is often lost in the visual illusion of having this long, seemingly endless, list in front of our eyes.

With the quality solutions that accurately deliver only relevant results we experience, for the first time, a situation when there are no longer big lists of random results. Only several relevant ones.

This is so much more efficient. It saves time, increases productivity, clarifies the picture, and makes Big Data manageable.

Time for businesses to embrace the new approach.