When was the last time you looked across a crowded room, noticed the pretty young start-up in the corner and said, “That’s the digital marketing provider for me?”
A good old-fashioned ‘boy meets start-up’ story… You can try romance it all you like, but for the majority of products and brands, the recognition is a carefully crafted combination of content, product, and most of all, message delivery. The question these days is who do you want to be delivering your message?
The days of the door-to-door salesmen are no more – no-one likes to be bothered at home and we don’t trust strangers who ring our doorbell at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon…
Good morning, may I have a moment of your time?
The door-to-door salesman’s ugly cousin, cold calling, tends to rub people the wrong way, but at least it’s easy to end a conversation with the simple action of putting down the phone. Very few people hang up satisfied that they have made the right decision changing their insurance policy over the phone, and even fewer people even hold out long enough to find out what they were selling. The simple fact is, if you’re not looking for something, you rarely want someone else hassling you about it.
Magazine, Radio and Television advertising will always have an impact, but to what degree? And is it measurable? A well-crafted advert will grab your attention, but truth be told, how many adverts are well crafted? I drink Castle Lite because Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer told me to, but I have no intention of changing my razor because the Beast told me to. You may get your brand to reach a wider audience, but how many of them will respond?
The friends you never knew you had…
What has become abundantly clear to me in my ‘digital media immersion’, is that if you can get your message to the right people, you’re bound to make some waves. So how does someone who barely knows how to paste a YouTube video (oh wait, I mean ‘share’) onto a Facebook wall come to a conclusion like this?
It took a while, but after weeks of searching through Twitter profiles, Facebook posts, and blog articles, it hit me. A stark realisation that your preferences in social media are a composition of the way people influence you and the way you see yourself influencing people.
It’s an active social situation with your primary interests at heart without having to leave your house, and people base a large amount of their social ‘profile’ by association with the things they like.
Guilty by association
What does this hold for enterprises wanting to bolster their brand through social media? It means that there’s potential to find and deliver goods to customers you never knew you had, who have similar interests and needs to what you’re selling. The key (I have subsequently learnt over the last few weeks) is to make the best possible associations i.e. reach the highest number of people with common interests.
It’s not by chance that people can find your brand just by having a relevant interest; it’s a venerable spider’s web of strategy that ‘appears’ as a happy coincidence. What I thought was a simple process turned out to be a rather intricate one, which if done right, will get your message to the right people at the right time and in the right place.
The meet-cute
A well-crafted and managed digital campaign could be your ‘start-up’ matchmaker so to speak. You may not be in a crowded room exchanging lingering looks at one another, but you do follow the same five Twitter profiles and that YouTube video you posted has had me chuckling all day…
YouTube sensation Carly Rae Jepson puts it best:
Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me maybe!”
It’s the modern meet-cute: my friends Jack and Jill like Company ABC, and they follow Company ABC on Twitter. Given that Jack and Jill like all the same things I do, it goes without saying that I should probably at least have a look at what Company ABC is all about….
