By 2010 the baby boomers will have given way to Generation Y and so your target marketing demographic will have moved on to a generation who are far more au fait with social technology than the generation that preceded them (96% of them have joined a social network). What will that mean for your future marketing strategies? Well for one thing, you are going to have to move your marketing online, if you haven’t already. Social networking has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Internet, that’s where your customers are and that’s where you have to be too.
Not only are your customers moving online, but the rate at which technology is reaching critical mass is increasing: whist it took radio 38 years to gain 50 million users, Facebook gained 100 Million users in less than 8 months and, incredibly, Apple gained 1 billion downloads from its AppStore in just 9 months. You may not think your company/product needs to be on Facebook, but with its 300 million active users, if it were a country, it would be the fourth largest; why would you want to shut yourself off from a market of that size?
Meh, I hear you say, “we’re already online, we have a blog, Google knows where we are and therefore our customers know where we are” Really? Well that might be true, but did you also know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world? You have to think beyond producing the same bland, text based content as your competitors; you must start to innovate with other media, like video for example, to get your message across. Watching video content online is popular; Hulu, for, example, has grown from 63 million streams to 373 million in 1 year.
Of course, when I say you must move your marketing online in order to reach the next generation of the target advertising demographic, I don’t just mean advertise online. Why not, I hear you ask? Simple, no one believes online advertising. Well, okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration; the fact is only 33% of consumers trust online banner ads, versus 90% who trust word of mouth recommendations from friends. So the message is clear, if you want to sell to the next generation you have to talk to them.
Talk to them? But when? Where? Well the answer to that is simple: anytime and anywhere. 17% of Brits and 15% of Americans now social network via mobile phone your customers are never more than a few key presses away from their blogs; think about that the next time one of your staff members upsets a customer. There are nearly 200,000,000 blogs on the Internet with 54% of bloggers posting daily and 26% of bloggers blogging about products or brands. That means there is someone talking about your products. The time for deciding if you want your product to be talked about has gone – the only thing left to decide is: do you want to try and shape that conversation?
Still not convinced that social media is the future of advertising and therefore the future of your company? What about print advertising I hear you say, that still works… doesn’t it? Not so much. Newspaper readership fell from 34% to 25% between 2006 and 2009 and the trend lines have been heading south for years. The truth is the smart money has moved online.
Okay, so I’ve convinced you that you have to at least “dip your toe in the water” of social marketing, the question now is: how do you get started? Well, there are some great books here, here and here. Read them, put the lessons learned into practice and you’ll not go too far wrong. You should also check out these great blogs:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
http://www.steverubel.com/
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
http://www.buzzmachine.com/
But in the end, the best advice I can offer you is to get out there and do it, be honest, and just talk to your customers; they’re already talking about about you. :-)