I’ve been pulling together my notes for next week’s New Comm Forum panel on viral marketing and ran into an item on MarketingVOX that just has me scratching my head.
Now, admittedly, I have a bit of a cold today so perhaps I am unusually cranky but I can’t quite figure out what the breaking news is in Social Media Marketing Works Better When It’s Focused, which reports on a blog post by social media marketer advising folks to target their efforts. I don’t have a major problem with the original post, which seems to be a legitimate effort to introduce the basic marketing principle of targeting to a blog readership. I’m just sitting here wondering how someone at MarketingVOX actually thought the idea of targeting was something new….
It’s Marketing 101 level stuff. Would the headline still be news if you dropped the "social media" part (the toolset part) and wrote "Marketing Works Better When it’s Focused?" Right….
I am continually amazed how many folks just don’t seem to understand the same basic marketing principles apply whether you are using social media tools like YouTube and MySpace or the "old stuff" like advertising and direct mail.
Who is our audience, and what is the best way to reach them? How can we target, or narrow, the message, to a specific segment of people so it will have more emotional resonance for them, thus be more likely to lead to purchase. Even when we have a product with broad appeal, every marketer knows (or should know) that the more you can tailor each message to a segment, the more likely you are to succeed. Your basic value may be the same, but the reason someone is attracted to it might be different. The more you can leverage these differences into uniquely targeted campaigns, the easier it will be for the prospective buyer to understand WIIFM (what’s in it for me).
Scattershot marketing has NEVER worked very well. Why would social media be any different??
