Social Media Marketing is the Future

Traditionally, when advertising and marketing was considered, we did not have much of a choice. Newspapers, Television ads and radio ads and our age old bill boards were the only options, of course after our very own ancient dhol beating announcer dude.

Problem was, me being online for more than half my life now never understood them. When I tried advertising my services a few years back, newspapers here in my place charged around $20 per day of advertisements which could contain less words than half a tweet(for those ignorant, a tweet is 140 chars!).  A 5 seconds ad slot on most national TV channels in the country will run you around $20 minimum in off-peak times. Problem: But how do I know if the people I want to approach will read this paper or watch that particular television channel?

Fast forward to today. Internet is the next marketing channel. Wait, wasn’t it like that since the start of this decade? Yes, but the scene back then was advertising and marketing. Offers and advertising were pushed to the consumer. But in the last few years, internet is toying with the whole Web 2.0 philosophy and user interaction and social media were all the buzzwords.

With the advent of social, advertising and marketing is measurable in terms of visits, clicks, impressions, lead generations, conversions and sales. All your marketing campaigns make sense now in terms of “measurability”. Marketing ROI is now almost exact with internet.

They, the internet users are weary of online ads that promise the moon and give you bull excreta. They now believe friends and people who can recommend them stuff in the right time in the right place. An example that happend to me in January. It was a bad day trying to book a train ticket at IRCTC with all those timeouts and try again errors.

cleartrip-twitter-marketing

In around 60 minutes, I was a fan of Cleartrip and I have bought almost 95% of my train tickets from them since. It was a innovative marketing strategy and they will have my ticket purchases for a long time.

Social Media is all about Targeted Marketing, great results and happy customers and a measurable marketing ROI.

I respect marketers of the previous decade who were able to market with statistics like the TRP and others which make no sense whatsoever. With print and television ads, how can you reach the right targeted audience and how do you measure if they converted or if it is reaching the right people.

With the advent of internet, its Marketing 2.0 and I am really excited about its prospects. What is your view on internet marketing?


Comments

12 responses to “Social Media Marketing is the Future”

  1. IRCTC is still working good for me… I use it early morning hours and no connectivity issues..

    Sites like MMT and cleartrip charge about 5% more than airline websites for a flight ticket, hence I avoid using it.


  2. Absolutely right. No doubt about it.

    But, our guys, in Kerala, doesn’t understand there’s a whole better world out there on web and only tries to condemn it by attributing anti-social character to it. Unfortunate.

    Traditional marketing and advertising are like shooting into air !

  3. @shrinidhi, IRCTC used to work for me too…but sometimes its frustrating.

    @aravind, totally…..our job is to teach people that 😉

  4. There is one group of people who kind of gets the importance of social media – unfortunately, its the politicians. I can see campaigning everywhere.

  5. @Binny,

    Politics is a important part of our life…them coming to the internet is a move towards transparency and in our domain of expertise. 🙂

  6. Also I asked a question on twitter to Cleartrip asking them why their rates are 5-10% expensive than rates quoted by airline websites… They didn’t care to respond.

    1. @shrinidhi, I guess thats their revenue model or something.

      @girish, social media is all about socializing and interacting with the crowd. the more reach you have there, more eyes will fall on your content. Its not exactly about quality. For example, digg has a lot of internal politics going on which determines who gets exposure and who does not.

  7. While talking about social media,

    I am always surprised that for some set of users they use to get very good response regardless the quality of posts .

    Take the example of diggs getting for particular users, I had examined the quality and many of them are sub standard. still they get 100s of diggs, where as a normal user may get 2 or 3 or a max of 50 diggs if posts are excellent ..

    any one disagree with it ??

  8. @anand I need to agree with you that there is some unhealthy politics going on within Digg

  9. may be.. but my point was that they shouldn’t be mentioning “cheap air ticket” when it is obviously not the cheapest

  10. I am still baffled by the whole social media thing, something just doesn’t quiet seem to be right but can’t quiet get my finger on it.

    At this moment in time I am inclined to agree with Girish and believe there is some kinda of mismatching in the system of rating and ranking.

    @Anand I have just discovered your blog and am liking what you put out, thanks for sharing and keep up the good work.

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