Digital Technologies For Marketing (Week 11)
The use of a company blog and social media platofrms can be helpful for anyone that is
unable to attend a launch event, press conferences and other key business events, for example. Blog posts are able to contain a
wide variety of valuable information regarding the company and its products.
Unfortunately, in some cases, not everyone can attend the launch event. In
order for a business to still reach these people, blogs come in useful to still
get their key message across.
Over the years, blogs have been widely used in companies as
a tool to communicate the general public and their consumers in order to share
knowledge with one another as well as to promote their business. Blogs are an
excellent method used to share and increase a business’s brand awareness and
connect with potential customers. The use of blogging can allow companies to
promote an open approach to the public, in a hope that this does not only
increase business, but it can also help give them a “human voice” and engage
with readers.
In addition to this, social media channels has
revolutionized the practice of public relations and the “capabilities and expectations of how people gather and
communicate online” (Weinreich, 2011). Brown (2010, p. 6/15) explains that if
well invested time and effort is put into social media; it can become a
“business enabler”. Controlling an effective social media campaign helps to
effectively engage and connect with customers.
Many organisations now recognise this opportunity when
targeting specific audiences. This is because the use of managing social media
platforms as part of a PR campaign can help drive traffic for the brand and
product. (Tench & Yeomans, 2009, p.313).
It
is also worthy to measure how successful different aspects of particular
campaign is performing. For example, in the case of implementing company blog
and social media channels, businesses can identify whether or not this area of
the campaign has been a success by the number of viewers/followers, Google
Analytics, SEO etc. After evaluating this, valuable lessons can be learned for
help in the future. The results of the campaign activity can help “to see how the company is doing so that the public
relations strategy overall can be revisited and, if necessary, revised” (Harrison,
2000, p. 56).
The
use of social media platforms in any campaign (PR, Marketing and/or
Advertising) can act as an audience facilitator. Members of a brand’s target
audience can be exposed to approximately 3,000+ marketing, advertising, and PR
methods daily. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure the brand’s
message gets noticed. “Competing messages can come from the constant buzz from
social media” (Weinreich, 2011, p.37).
Social
media helps to find and engage with customers on a more personal level,
identify influencers, gain advocates, amplify key messages and develop and
improve the quality of customer relations to increase satisfaction and brand
loyalty (Brown, 2010). A company’s reputation can also be enhanced through
websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as they can ensure
relationships with their consumers are managed well in a quick, effective way.
Brown
(2010, p.12) depicts the use of social media and blogs (or web 2.0) as “fan-out
messaging” (also known as word-of-mouth). For example, if a message is received
well by two people, they are more likely to tell two people, who will tell two
people and so on. The message has “fanned out” and has gained many more new
potential customers or “potential influencers” for the brand. Influencers get
the message out on behalf of the company. For example, retweeting exciting business
news on Twitter, linking the company blog from their own blog, sharing useful links
on Facebook etc. “This network helps to rebroadcast and amplify the original
message”.
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