Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Influence of New Media on Marketing Strategies

Meghan Peters say internet has now become the foremost news source for young people, between the ages of 18 to 29. Internet has now surpassed television as a top media source according to this study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Unfortunately, this reflects the situation in Western countries, including the United States of America.


Internet penetration in these countries, specially developed ones, has reached 90% already. The "in" thing right now, is for professionals, students and young adults to be constantly mobile and highly reachable. Technologies have enabled people to be always linked regardless of borders. Fact is, there are no more borders to speak of--only one community talking about the same language--relationships.


Here in the Philippines, 75% of people get their news from television. That's according to a Synovate and a Nielsen study. Only 22 million Filipinos go online every single day, some 9-10 million spending more than 8 hours of their waking hours online. Compared with China, Japan and Korea, the Philippine online community is still small.


However, 22 million people is nothing to sneeze at. Fact is, this is big considering that such a figure may reflect an entire population of a small country. This is also a significant community or market by itself. Imagine, target only 10% or even 1% of this figure, and if you're selling something like a product which cost 10 pesos each, 200,000 pesos revenue is nothing to frown at. Translate that to 10 months, and you surpass a million peso in revenue.


The question really is--how to effectively tap this big market, for marketing and branding purposes. The greatest challenge in marketing is conversion--how best you can show value to your customers so that they patronize and buy your product and services. There is still no definite study on how online or internet users react when they see an online product ad. The buying behavior online is still something of an unknown science. There is still no established laws yet on effective online marketing strategies. 


There are certain individuals and agencies which claim that they already mastered the art of Social Marketing. I know of one agency which claims to lord it over the rest of the competition. 


These agencies are bogus. They are traditional media practitioners pretending to know what works and what not in online marketing. 


For example, someone claims that the best campaign rests on frequency and range--the more you hammer your message out and the more extensive and aggressive your strategy is, the higher chances of reaching out with your target audience and higher chances of increasing sales. 


I don't know about this but what I do know is, even if you hammer your message out hundred times a day, you'll probably get attention but not outright sale. 


The best strategy so far is being controversial and being relevant. For example, a tweet or a Facebook update on a sale at Ayala malls, even if that was updated only once, would definitely catch attention and possible conversion. A click-thru ad if not about real estate or gadgets would simply gather dust.

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