When Online Marketing Misunderstands Social Media.

Oct. 5, 2010 - PRLog -- Too many businesses are simply regarding social media as another way to simply and cheaply market their message, products and services. It’s the reason why social media is not working for them. Their messages are being ignored because it’s obvious there is no real intention to engage.

When businesses misunderstand social media then their scattergun online marketing blasts are simply misappropriating the channel too, leading to over saturation by today’s ‘social media’ marketing. The concept of ‘getting in front’ of your target audience by traditional social networking feeds into today’s social media interaction. However, the process still requires building a relevant, information rich relationship, but online.

Many businesses will adhere to the marketing strategies they know and understand.  Migrating their thinking online has simply confined itself to PPC campaigns they can readily see as successfully driving traffic – with actual reported, measurable return. In addition there is the almost daily email marketing blast outs to the company database in an old-style  ‘push’ marketing blitz in the hope of keeping brand identity vaguely ‘out there’.

Instead of carefully  identifying and shaping messages to focus on reaching out to draw the interest of the ideal, niche client, the obsolete approach attempts to bully potential clients into obedient buying customers. The problem is of course, no one wants to engage with this type of one way broadcast behaviour!

Marketing only really starts to perform within the social media context by concentrating on creating a relationship with the prospective clients, which involves being willing to offer genuine and valuable content. The real key to social engagement is to always define its purpose for the company who wants to use its channels and realistically interact according to objectives.

For eCommerce to succeed online, marketing has to do more than just say why a service or product is needed, it has to actually show why a decision to purchase should be made.

Online marketing may be past its tipping point. So the challenge for positioning unique business presence is to appear less like a simple competitor vying for traditional consumer attention and more like a company that a potential visitor would want to relate to and better understand how they can be helped and their problems solved.

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