As my second year is drawing to a close, I have come to the end of this Digital Communications Unit. I have learnt to love all things in relation to digital advertising and turned my frustrations at certain topics in to knowledge and understanding. So for what may be my final post, a reflection of what I’ve learnt, gained and understand, I’m going to go back to where it all began. For my final topic I will discuss and reflect on Digital Strategies, their history and context and where social media is heading in the future, and I may just through in a bit of brand application for fun.
Andrew McStay (2009, pg 11.) quotes that the ‘ever-evolving nature of digital media is quickly re-writing the rulebook of advertising and marketing.” This is something I strongly agree with and examples of digital media evolving can be seen through writings and examples in my previous blogs. Advances in technology are making anything seem possible, new technological innovations and our online habits are providing a variety of new promotional opportunities to bring products and brands to the publics attention.
Starting at the basics, digital media has moved on from fringe advertising, beyond pop-ups and now social media is the dominant global advertising media form. Having looked at ethical dilemmas regarding privacy and the use of cookies I have formed my own views.
It is important to understand that advertisers want to reach the greatest number of consumers for the least amount of money, and what better way than social media. Consumers are always looking for something new to interact with, so I’ve taken a look at where social media marketers are seeing the most success, and it may surprise you, but the answer isn’t Facebook. Although it currently is the most popular social media site, it only captures 12.5 percent of total networking page views (2011), which means there are thousands of other sites competing to grab your attention. In a study carried out by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth centre for marketing Research (2011) they found that companies that use a mix of social media saw more success. So although Facebook is an obvious choice, Twitter and Blogging are also high on the list.
From this table, which analysed ‘fast growing private firms’, the mix of social media they used which had provided them with the most success was message and bulletin boards. Although the study did show that “85% of companies viewed Facebook as successful’, a significant jump from the 54% of the year before, it didn’t match the success of message and bulletin boards where 93% of the companies reported it as a successful tactic.
It’s only natural to wonder where do we go when we begin to tire of our current online social sites? Although Facebook seems to be pretty steady in terms of competitors, I have read an article in a blog that I follow ‘Mobile news Authority” by Tony B from TheSEOAgency.com in which he blogs that the next big thing in social media will be Quora.com. Never having heard of the site I signed up to look for myself. I can see its potential, however I cant say that I’m ‘hooked’. (Although years ago I couldn’t be convinced to upgrade my myspace account to Facebook, and now I cant go a day without checking it, so who knows?) As ‘Quora’ is fairly new created in 2010 by ex- Facebook execs, it’s an online community that allows members to post an open question or contribute an answer to anything. However to a business I don’t see how they can use ‘Quora’ to their advantage. Yet Irene Au, head of design at Google praises it saying “ there’s a lot of really rich high quality content there. It’s one of my favourite sites to visit on a daily basis now” (2010). So maybe this is where the future lies.
So through looking at the history of digital advertising and new technological innovations its clear that business need strategic social marketing plans, which are durable enough to adapt to the ever-changing preference of their audience.
As discussed it is essential to choose the correct communications platform for your strategy, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or a Blog. As I have just landed my latest work experience role to take place at Chalk PR, I would like to mention their way of gaining PR for their clients through the use of a blog. However they were not the ones writing the blog instead they held a corporate event and invited all beauty bloggers to come and sample their clients products gaining great feedback not only for their company but for all their clients.
The beauty blogs were all read by members of the target audience of Chalks clients and the great feedback worked wonders for them, inspiring women to trial new products and creating a general awareness and buzz, exactly the purpose of PR. So this is an example of how social media works for not just advertising but for PR too.
So finally, how do you know if your social media advertising was effective? The obvious answer is through sales, as revenues are major factor in determining success. However if you measure your traffic and sales leads it can give you an understanding of the number of people you are interacting with the product or brand. As well as this the click-through and conversion rates show how many prospects take the next step. Customer interactions can indicate how the user feels about the product, a way to measure this is through the number of posts referencing the product, brand or company.
So when constructing a social media strategy as part of a marketing or advertising plan, it is worth not going for the obvious and jumping straight to Facebook. Thinking in the long term, it is best to plan something that is relevant to your target audience, and which is of value as this will be the most worthwhile.
At the end of the day the purpose of advertising is to sell products, services and ideas. And as technology, innovation, imagination and design are all major components of effective advertising it is through this unit of digital communications that I have become aware of how much of an important factor digital advertising is today.
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