Source: MarketingSherpa Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Survey 2008
MarketingSherpa recently published a survey revealing marketers’ opinions of where social media marketing fits among what the publication calls the “elite trio” of Internet marketing: social media, search and email.
While it’s hard to disagree with the 97% of marketers who believe that social media marketing complements email and search marketing, the position of the 49% who feel that social media marketing will never become as important as the other tactics is more questionable.
The confusion stems from a couple of misunderstandings. First, Social Media (Networking) is a fundamentally different beast to Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing, in B2C markets at least, has no CRM function: it is the process of content distribution and syndication in a style that matches the vibe of your marketplace and aims at influencers and bloggers as much as consumers.
The second confusion concerns where Social Media Marketing fits in the marketing mix. Except in rare cases like Dell, which uses tools like Twitter for revenue generation, Social Media Marketing is primarily a PR-type activity.
The three tools have different purposes. Specifically:
- Social media marketing is primarily a tool for awareness and credibility-building. Like traditional PR, it is a “top of funnel” tool. It’s as much about reaching influencers as prospects but it can, like PR, create extraordinary reach and loyalty.
- SEO is for lead generation, or more accurately, name generation. It brings “suspects” into your funnel, contact information for people who may or may not eventually become leads and then customers.
- Email marketing is most effective as a relationship-building medium for prospects who have already been identified as prospects: they’ve given you permission to communicate directly with them.
Generally, 20% or more of the people on your house list will open your emails, while perhaps 1% of your Twitter following will see any given tweet. This makes email a far less hit-or-miss medium.
The three tools need to be used in tandem, each for its own unique strengths. Neglecting any one will reduce the effectiveness of the others.
That’s our take on it: what do you think?
3 Comments
From a professional perspective, I believe we need to be well-versed in these three necessary and mutually reinforcing approaches.
Logically depending on our background we will be more adept at one of them. However, we can only ignore the others at our peril…. which is why I am in the middle of a SEO course!
I don’t think the survey results are that surprising, given that social media is still the new kid on the block (and this survey was carried out in December last year - 9 months is a long time in online marketing). Everyone’s interested in seeing where it goes, but it would be a brave soul to predict the death of email.
I have clients who have been successfully using email and SEO for many years, and they are generally interested in exploring social media within the marketing mix. But they won’t be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Not sure about the rigid distinction between ’social media marketing’ and ’social media networking’. For me they are sides of the same coin. Surely it’s a feature of social media that the old definitions of marketing are being redefined - the audience is no longer passively taking in ‘marketing messages’, it is creating its own content, publishing its own ideas & sharing it in ways it controls.
Anyone treating social media purely as a tool for content distribution and syndication is missing the whole point of it, which is engagement, placing it very much within CRM. I’m puzzled as to how social media marketing can ‘have no role in CRM’, if it can, as you say, generate extraordinary loyalty. In my mind, that kind of loyalty has nothing to do with PR spin, promotional tactics or customised messages. It comes about as companies open up, listen in and collaborate with customers, person-to-person. Which sound a bit like social networking to me.
I understand your distrust of the rigid distinction between ’social media marketing’ and ’social media networking’.
I suppose I have felt the need to contrast them so as to illustrate, from a larger firm’s organisational point of view, what it takes to conceive, set up and manage a structure capable of undertaking SMM with a single ‘voice’. For a smaller company, they do merge into one activity, just as sales and marketing are grouped as ‘business development’..
They are sides of the same coin but, at the same time, you need to be aware that the coin is there!