How Social Media Fits in Marketing

What is the value of Twitter? Of FaceBook? When and how should companies use either or both?
How Does Social Media Fit in Marketing? All great questions I’ve fielded in the past month.

The best way to answer them is to start with a discussion of the purpose of marketing in general for a company.

The Purpose of Marketing

All companies need to move people along the path from Mutually Unaware to Top Customer/Raving Fan. There are many steps in the process, and steps can be jumped or repeated, but in general the major ones are:

Mutually Unaware – the person has no idea of the company and its potential solution, and the company has no knowledge of the person and their matching need.
Suspect – the person hears about the company and/or their solution and/or the company finds out about the person.
Prospect – the company and person are mutually aware and the person has expressed a need that matches a product/service the company offers.
Trust-Earning – the company and person have some series of interactions (Bid/RFP response/meetings/calls/emails/free trial offer/etc.) that build the relationship and earn enough trust for consideration of purchase.
First Purchase – the person signs the contract and/or approves the payment for the product/service.
Repeat Purchase/Repeat Interactions – the person renews the contract/subscription, places another order, etc.
Loyalty – the person actively recommends the company to others and is willing to knowingly pay a premium to continue doing business with the company rather than its competitors.

Marketing’s purpose is to move people through these steps, from the bottom left to the top right in the value/relationship diagram. Marketing’s value is that, done right, it is the most scalable, efficient set of methods for doing so. To do this best, though, it must use the right combination of messages and methods for each person based on where that person is in the process and the company‘s culture, strategy, objectives and products or services.

How Does this Relate to Twitter and Facebook?

Most companies are fairly good at moving people along in the process once they’ve become a customer. Where many businesses have problems, though, is in finding potential customers and winning the trust of those people well enough to get that first purchase.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites are new – low cost – tools in the marketing arsenal to deal with that pre-sale process.
Absent social media, businesses must rely on unaided word of mouth and interruption methods of marketing like direct mail or television, radio and banner advertisements. They’re left with either little ability to influence their message, reach and frequency, or wasting money, time and effort annoying people with no desire or need for their products or services.

With social media, though, companies have a chance to be proactive yet non-threatening. To be top-of-mind whenever the person has a relevant need or desire, and to begin the relationship-building process so that the first official purchase is a natural next step rather than a significant hurdle.

With Twitter, for example, a company could literally have dozens of low-cost, low-commitment interactions with someone they might have never found or reached via lists or broadcast initiatives – or someone who will forward their communications – making Twitter a source of potential customers, a means for relationship-building, and a more message-controlled word-of-mouth enablement tool. FaceBook and other social media sites have many of the same advantages, and can be used similarly.

So Should I/My Company Use Social Media (or use it more)?

That depends. If you’re looking for a low-cost method of discovering potential customers, having potential customers find you, building relationships with them, and making it easier for people to spread the word about your company, then the answer is likely “yes“. However, there absolutely could be some combination of a company‘s culture, strategy, objectives and products or services that would cause the right answer to be “no”.