The world of social and mobile media marketing has made it tougher for businesses to operate according to the old ways of doing things where price, product, promotion and place – or the classic Four P's – reign supreme.
According to John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing and founder of The Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network, in his recent article entitled The 4 Ps of a Fully Alive Business, “the very definition of marketing has changed dramatically enough to render the original Four P’s somewhat useless as a foundational marketing and business strategy concept.” He goes on to say that today’s most important business and marketing directive is one of building trust. This is true now more than ever before. While everyone expects an immediate response, people are becoming increasingly immune to marketers who use innovative new tools like Facebook and SMS text messaging to expel whatever comes to mind out into the vast world of the web. Building trust is truly about gaining credibility in a sincere and direct way that represents an appropriate line of communication for both marketer and consumer.
A recent Harvard Business Review article, On Social Media Becoming Social Business, by David Armano, EVP, global innovation & Integration at Edelman Digital, explains the complex nuances that the new world of marketing and communication has forced upon us all. He states that the age of social media as something spontaneous that reflects how we behave in the real world is coming to an end. “We are entering an age of social business: a purposeful, planned, orchestrated, and integrated way of doing business in a social context which may feel personal to the outside world but combine complexities internally within organizations that will need navigating,” he proclaims.
The article explains that on one hand, consumers want increasingly transparent, authentic interactions in social spaces from real people in real time. People have come to expect this immediate response – just as if they were talking to every business owner in-person. At the same time, a business or organization requires some sort of system for managing the communication and coordinating activities.
As Armano further states, “Organizations that integrate social into how they do business will embrace social as a layer that's woven into the fabric of each business function over time.” While this is true for a lot of business functions, it is especially true for marketing.
Nowadays, demonstrating your value is as much about telling your story in an orchestrated way as anything else. Taking this approach will help you build the trust that your business needs to sustain itself and help consumers build a lasting connection with your brand.
Here are three tips that can help you earn the trust of your target market – the most important determining factor of marketing and sales success.
- Give your customers choices that resonate with how they prefer to communicate. With the advent of each new marketing channel, including SMS text, email, Facebook and Twitter and even voice messaging, marketing has become so fragmented that it is hard to know which channel to use. There is no silver bullet. Instead, it works best to conduct an orchestrated campaign with different but complementary messages that can be accessed by each of your customers in the way that they prefer. So while your mobile text marketing campaign might reach a majority of your customers, there is still that slice of the population who would prefer to digest all the details in your email newsletter. Still, for that group monitoring IM, Facebook and Twitter all day long, it will be more direct to have conversations or interactions in real-time.
- Be genuine and sincerely interested in your customer. The first step to gaining credibility and trust is to thoughtfully consider your customers’ needs, wants and desires. One way to do this is to launch a mobile poll that requests their feedback on the development of your future product offerings. Another idea is to conduct an email or mobile survey about their experience using your current product, their general likes and dislikes and the overall impression of your company. Encourage them to participate by combining the survey with a free or bonus offer. You’ll not only learn more about your customer so you can deliver more effective campaigns. You’ll quickly endear yourself because you simply cared enough to ask.
- Orchestrate a multi-channel messaging approach. Your best shot at success will come from sending out simultaneous and complementary campaigns across a variety of channels. It’s just not smart to make any one channel like Facebook or SMS text the belle of the ball while you treat others – like email and even traditional media outlets – as the ugly stepchild. Don’t forget that different touch points and incidents generally build upon each other to create one strong lasting impression in your customer’s mind.
Solutions like Trumpia’s All-In-One Multi-Channel Marketing Platform relieve you from a big part of the burden of launching an orchestrated campaign. By integrating every popular messaging channel including SMS Text, email, voice broadcast and social media, software like Trumpia creates costs savings and operational efficiencies.
According to Jantsch, “there is a home for the Four P’s in today’s business but it’s in the very mortar of the business and the story of its people rather than in a department on an org chart. He maintains that the Four P’s are now more about how a business is experienced than what it sells, replacing the old Four P’s with new Four P’s including passion, purpose, positioning and personality. “Engagement, connection and story are the new forms of promotional art. Price is a function of value and place has become bytes and ether more often than a shelf or an office.”
Once you have the proper technology in place to effectively capitalize on today’s newest media and messaging channels, you’ll be one step ahead of the game in making your business truly social, personable and purposeful. That means building a lasting trust with your customer while still accomplishing your marketing goals.
