One of our favourite marketing resource website, MarketingSherpa.com, recently published the results of a survey they did about the effectiveness of social media in achieving companies’ various business objectives, such as increasing brand or product awareness and increasing sales revenue. The results were revealing.
From Marketing Sherpa:
“While organizations in all phases of social marketing maturity rank objectives in the same order, substantially more marketers in the strategic phase find social media very effective in achieving each of these objectives.
Interestingly, organizations that market to consumers through reseller channels (B2B2C) are much more likely to consider social media a very effective means to achieving their marketing objectives. Social media has opened a wealth of opportunities for marketers to reach business partners and consumers at every point in the distribution process.”
Bottom line: If you put social media marketing on a spectrum with awareness & PR at one end, and lead generation & sales at the other end, its role and effectiveness definitely tilts toward the awareness category more so than direct impact on sales. Though there are quite a few case histories starting to emerge about how some companies have effectively used social media for lead generation, we have found you need to scratch the surface a bit deeper to discover that, by “lead generation”, many such stories are actually talking about click-throughs, not identified sales leads ready for follow-up.
Social media marketing is becoming critical to reputation management and, of course, to involvement in and dialogue with a community. But as Jeff Jarvis points out in “What Would Google Do?”, the key is to define what community you serve, then find a way to support that community’s interactions with each other. More than any other medium or marketing discipline, social media marketing is about talking with, not at, the audience.
