Audiences are skipping TV spots with their DVRs and learning how to ignore ads on the web. Instead, they’re talking (bluntly) about products and brands on Twitter, chatting about them on Facebook and searching for the reviews and opinions of other customers on Google before they buy. Armed with free, easy-to-use tools that allow them to ask trusted friends what they think or give an unsolicited opinion to hundreds in an instant – it’s word of mouth on fire. The truth is, as people are increasingly empowered by social media, marketers are losing control.
In a lot of ways these trends are great news for the world because more customers are getting the real story and finding out from each other which products and services have real value, and which ones don’t. But where does this leave the people who’ve build honest businesses being experts in push strategies that used to work? A lot of them are scratching their heads wondering “How the hell are we going to make money now?”
If you’re one of the ones scratching your head, here’s the good news…your clients are about to need you more than ever. The bad news…in order to consistently deliver measurable value to your clients, you’re going to have to shift the way you do business in a major way.
Here are some ways that traditional advertising and marketing agencies can reposition themselves for what’s next, as well as some opportunities and challenges they’ll face…
Getting Clients Up And Running With Social Technologies
This is an obvious opportunity. Social Media is the most overused buzzword in marketing right now. Executives are hearing about it and know they need to get involved, but most of them don’t have a clue what a coherent, well organized social media presence looks like. Companies are going to be looking for experts to quickly get them up and running with blogging and social media, and to intelligently integrate social technologies into their existing sites. However, because so many of these tools are free (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc) and only require setup once, from a cost stand point, hiring full time employees to do it in many of cases isn’t going to be as cost effective as outsourcing the task to a third party expert. That’s the selling point.
The challenges with focusing on these types of engagements are that:
- They are largely fixed cost projects, and beyond rate-based technical support agreements, they don’t offer much of an opportunity for continuous revenue streams,
- Social platforms have their own technical support teams (i.e. Facebook and Twitter’s teams support the client’s profiles), and
- Internal marketing teams will learn how to use the technologies quickly (they are designed to be simple!) so clients may assume they can fly solo once they are set up and try to pay you as little as possible once you’ve helped them jump over the initial technology hurdles.
Unprepared Companies With No Strategy Will Flounder, Smart Companies Will Seek Help
Good marketing is never about the technology. It’s always about people, relationships, emotion and experiences…but you knew that already, right? Hundreds of companies out there don’t get that and wont until they fumble. They will be dazzled by buzzwords and tall tales that imply the magic of social media. They’ll see dollar signs, they’ll jump in with both feet thinking they can just stick a low level employee at the keyboard, and many of them will fail miserably.
Knowing this, advertising and marketing agencies can reposition themselves well by selling strategy & campaign planning expertise. Companies will still need help evaluating what their opportunities and goals are, and designing campaigns that deliver against those goals in a measurable way.
Traditional Advertising Will Still Exist, But Audiences Will Be Hyper-targeted
Expect companies to still pump money into great design and creatives that capture attention – banner and text ads are not going away any time soon, folks. Ignore the myth that online advertising is completely impotent. The truth is, it still works when the audience is well targeted. Google knows this (Adwords still works well), and popular platforms like Facebook are collecting a ton of demographic data on their users so that advertisers with deep knowledge of their target market will be able to use Facebook’s marketing tools to focus their ads only on the segments that matter. Understanding the tools that are available and being able to use them to effectively target groups by specific demographics and geography for their clients is a must for marketing agencies that want to stay relevant.
They’ll Need You To Stay On Top Of Current Cultural Trends And Know How To Use The Hot Tools.
What’s popular on the social web changes constantly. There’s always a better tool and tribes of users migrate quickly (and often) from one platform to another. What’s more, features within platforms are constantly in flux as companies try new things and adapt to their users’ changing needs. Unless companies have their own social media gurus who watch the social media landscape on a daily/weekly basis, they’ll be looking for experts to help them keep up with what’s going on on the web, as well as what their competitors and related industries are doing.
To keep up with the trends, marketing agencies should consider investing in a social media research function – an individual (or a team) that keeps up with and aggregates news and examples of best practices relevant to current and prospective clients and disseminates the information on a weekly basis to the rest of the team. This research should be made easily available to sales teams and account managers for proposals, campaigns and reports. Having this kind of information made available timely to all can make a big difference to the perceived value for clients who wish to seem hip and relevant.
Recognize That Social Media is Still A Hefty Marketing Investment
Even though setting up a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account is free, a successful social media campaign won’t be. At minimum, companies will need good intelligent setup and design (>2K), people who are constantly listening and engaging – many companies are choosing to hire community managers (55-90K on average), and traditional offline and online advertising will still remain part of the mix (PPC and Impression fees still apply). What’s more, expect social media campaigns to include an increasing number of (costly) offline events that integrate and tie in online experiences.
Clients Will Need To Make Major Shifts In Their Branding Strategies
This is already happening. Brands are integrating “follow us on Twitter” and “join us on Facebook” into their traditional advertising spots. Advertising agencies should expect this trend to increase and be prepared to bring their creativity and expertise to the table to help their clients connect the social sphere to their offline branding strategy.
They’ll Need You To Design, Implement and Manage Creative Social Campaigns
Attention on the web is fleeting at best, and competition for attention will only increase. This is good news for marketers who make it their business to understand the components of goal-oriented campaigns that generate online buzz that drives sales. Simply being on social media is really just listening and reacting. If you want to make waves on the web, you’ve got to create compelling content, connect people that care and get your ideas to spread. Agencies that show repeat success with social media campaigns will have clients banging on their doors.
Embracing The Community Manager
The increased hiring of internal community managers is perhaps the most feared trend for traditional marketing agencies, but I believe this fear is largely unfounded. While this person will be hired to take on a great deal of responsibility for being at the help of the social media tools on a day-to-day basis, marketing agencies should view this person as an advocate, rather than a threat.
First, but most importantly, marketers shouldn’t want to take on the responsibility for listening to and engaging a client’s customers – it’s a highly unscalable activity and it takes them away from what they do best (being creative!). Rather, agencies should see this person as a team member, someone whom they will work closely with to accomplish shared goals. The community manager in any marketing effort will take on the responsibility for interacting with customers and employees, while the agency handles the design and implementation of the campaign. The relationship in a successful campaign should be mutually symbiotic, not adversarial. In other words, “We work with community managers” should be in the proposal somewhere.
The Social Graph Will Travel And They’ll Need Someone To Make Sense Of The Data
I said above that popular platforms like Facebook know that data is their greatest asset. By 2011 we should expect that technologies like Facebook Connect will be commonplace and that people will carry their data and social graphs wherever they go on the web. This has many implications and the actual consequences are yet unknown, but one thing’s for sure: Companies will have access to more data and better knowledge of their customers than they ever did before. They’ll need someone to make sense of it for them. This is a trend marketers will want to watch closely.
Helping Clients Make Cultural Shifts Within Their Walls
Companies that truly embrace social media as part of their business, both inside as well as outside their walls, are setting themselves up for massive cultural shifts. Not only will their relationships with their customers change substantially, their workplaces will too. There’s growing evidence that companies that will get the most value from social media will not only encourage their employees to use the tools, they embrace the idea that their employees are the brand and they invest in tools to help them connect with each other and with customers. BestBuy (case study) and Zappos (company’s twitter site) are two companies that have done this successfully already.
Note that opening up the workplace is terrifying for some executives. Many see too much potential for chaos for their brand and the risk-to-reward ratio for their organization seems out of balance so they’re stalling, waiting it out or just dipping their toes into social without really getting wet. These organizations will need significant hand holding and coaching on best practices and it’s likely that smart outside Ad agencies will be well positioned to provide guidance and support in this regard.
The Final Word: Practicing What You’ll Be Preaching
Marketing agencies who want to be well positioned to embrace the social media onslaught and deliver value to their existing (and new clients) should dive in with their own organizations now and treat their own environment as a dry run – and dive in with both feet. Employees are probably already using these technologies to communicate with their friends, but may be holding off or limiting access to fellow staff because they’re not sure of how their usage of social media with jive with the work environment. Well prepared agencies will adopt a very open global policy and monitor how it affects the team, productivity and working relationships. Going through it and changing their own internal cultures first will better prepare them to empathize and give solid advice to clients in the long run.
