DUKKY

Its easy enough to see the shortcomings of being blasted by mass marketers all day, all of which tell you what you have to buy and why. It’s obvious that in spite of a changing marketing environment, some in the industry are still hanging on to this “Mass Market and pray someone responds” approach. Those people often choose not to see the ancient practice as outdated, mostly because of some miss-guided sense of loyalty to the tactic and the false security with what’s always been done.  However, considering marketers use the same practice of “mass marketing” consumer goods that was used when we were still watching black and white television, you would think that we would have come up with a revolutionary change to the method with which customers are targeted and reached.

Turn on your TV, your radio, your computer, and you will see/hear nothing but some person with a nice voice and face cheerfully explaining to you in the friendliest of ways why you need to drop $200 on a vacuum cleaner that can not only vacuum, but find your keys too. As awesome as that sounds, most consumers would not actively seek out a product like that, or the thousands of other deals that are being forced into people’s wallets every day. Yet, for all of the marketing industries short falls, they actually almost got the whole advertising thing right.

Big advertisers spend millions every year on trying to find the perfect figurehead for their money wrenching campaigns, and the people they find that are most successful tend to have one striking similarity with each other, they all look like they could be our friend. Hearing some friendly looking actor or celebrity tell you to buy something is certainly better than hearing it from the guy at the end of the bar with the eye patch and a creepy trench coat, but advertisers are still missing the point. They forget that all of the consumers they’re trying to coerce into thinking that they are friends with their company, actually already have plenty of friends that carry great influence over them.

Luckily for every business and advertiser out there, this is actually a good thing. With the rise of social media in the past couple of years, people are talking and sharing information at an exponentially increasing rate daily. There’s no need to go into the background and many hidden uses of Facebook and Twitter right now, but it is crucial to remember why the sites are there in the first place, so friends can get together and share things with each other. It makes sense that just like when you sent out that hilarious video of your uncle falling into the pool to all your friends on Facebook the other day, that the exact same thing can be done with valuable deals for your consumer. Give consumers something they want and deem valuable, and give them the capability to share it with their friends, and what do you think is going to happen? They are going to share it, over and over and over again. Adding your customers to your marketing team is making the difference for companies in the industry today.

So remember next time before you start digging a hole to dump all the money for your next marketing campaign into, that it is a lot more effective to just get your trusted consumers to market for you. Give them something they want for a good price, and they will make sure that all their friends check it out, if you give them opportunity to share it.

Comparison of Mass Marketing Campaign and Social Media Campaign

BIG CORPORATION – Hello valued customer, come to our super store this weekend for our super sale on our super computers, I guarantee you that it will be super, trust me…you do trust me right.

Your friend Carroll with the good taste in music – Hey John, I just got this great deal from (insert your business here) for a MP3 player, and I know how much your daughter loves music, here’s the link!

To see how you can leverage your customer database to reach more consumers give us a call today and we’ll show the real potential your campaigns hold.

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