7 key reasons you need Social Media and Enterprise Marketing

Today, Social media is part of the business ecosystem, not separate or autonomous. The question is less of implementation and has more to do with integration into existing business processes.  Beyond that, it has the power to change business in fundamental ways. It is this last point that leads many to think that social media is: new and its own autonomous entity.

First of all, social media is simply the current iteration of the Internet, with user generated content, semantic storage, APIs and far improved parseability via XML/JSON and the community of users as an asset.

Social Media allows a new cultural infrastructure that is more responsive to current and potential customer behaviors. Because this new social internet is becoming so interlinked with the business process, a better term is Enterprise Social Marketing.

Enterprise Social Marketing technologies have rapidly matured and can provide significant value, efficiencies and insight. More compelling is that these tools are giving competitors a cost, authenticity and reach advantage. Let’s list the reasons you need to implement an Enterprise Social Marketing solution. 

Cost/The Recession

This recession has been, and still is, so deep that fundamental changes in business thinking will have to occur. This would seemingly not affect an unrelated IT industry, but the devastation wrought by overvaluation has changed business thinking in general to the point that sexy is being replaced with ROI and Real Intrinsic Value.

Customers and clients of all kinds will ask about ROI and less about design, UI and innovation. Markets, businesses and buyers are going right back to basic principles and they need to save money. However, in business one must still compete, innovate productively, create efficiencies and inspire.

Enterprise marketing and its social media tools have the ability to accomplish these tasks for less money if implemented correctly. The efficiencies created by integrated marketing with social media are real, as are the risks. Because some of your competitors will get it right and save money that can be used to develop their brand, products and businesses, you also have no choice but to begin defining your approach.

1. Flexibility

Unlike traditional media, Internet marketing possesses a wide variety of channels to utilize. Video, Banner ads, Injection into communities, Bulletin boards and many others. Every year a new platform and method to advertise on that platform is created. If done correctly, customer engagement can also lead to sales, if not too obvious.

2. Analytics

Rather than simply tracking changes in sales after a given campaign, marketers can track activity by site, channel, media, method, message and a wide variety of other metrics. Coupled with real time response capabilities, marketing efforts can adapt and profit from knowledge much faster than before.

3. Targeting

Platforms like Facebook allow ad targeting to occur by age, sex, education, location and a whole host of other demographics. There is simply no way that traditional media can accomplish this and even if it could, the cost would be enormous.  Online, this cost is much less and direct to the people who’s attention you need. Beyond that, public reaction to outgoing messages can be monitored and measured.

4. Value Creation

Enterprise marketing actually adds something of significant value to the business as an entity. As it evolves, it will continue to achieve greater integration with a companies business processes. Think of it this way, a company that has a solid and well integrated enterprise marketing platform will sell for more than one that doesn’t.

5. Responsiveness

The turn around time on customer and community feedback can range from one-to-one to days, weeks or months, depending on the companies strategy. The more immediate response is particularly powerful when gauging a marketing effort and making adjustments based on historical trends and incoming data.  Put simply, the wait time between strategy adjustments is significantly reduced. This allows for quicker synchronization with the real-time sentiment of your target market.

6. Increasing granularity

Every year enterprise marketing platforms and their upgrades are able to produce a better defined picture of trends, motivations and statistics. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can not only address their audiences with a clearer message, they can transfer this understanding to product development.

7. Authenticity

Better knowledge of your audience, due to increased granularity, targeting and responsiveness means that you don’t have to pretend to know your audience, you will actually have hard data to back up your assumptions about them. This translates into great branding because real identification with the customer commonly translates into loyalty and evangelism.