CEBU, Philippines - In the age of globalization, interactive marketing solutions arise to take advantage of the social media hype and improve the companies’ reach towards their clients and customers. IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Technical Sales Professional Dennis Guiling said that marketers should embrace the opportunity as most of the consumers are inclined to the online trends.
He further described the consumer adoption of social media as “pervasive” since nearly 80% of online consumers have at least one account on a social network site and almost half of online consumers have accounts on media sharing sites.
Not surprisingly, he added that more than half of the marketers currently market through social media given that this is how things currently work particularly for the young generation.
However, he noted that about half of those marketers admit that their social media marketing efforts are totally sliced and such campaigns are poorly integrated.
“Beyond the hype and anticipation tells an ugly mess. Success is a hit-or-mess concept,” he said during the 6th Cebu Regional Retail Conference and Expo.
Guiling then cited marketing solutions adopting the social media to easily market the product and deliver the message across in strategic means.
“IBM is getting big and social, and has a broader portfolio of capabilities to help you plan and strategize your solutions and be globally competitive. We need to provide a proper channel how to attract and deliver our message to our consumers - “internet” consumers,” he stated.
IBM-acquired company UNICA’s interactive marketing framework helps structure the conversation that is delivered on four fundamentals such as awareness to identify actionable opportunities, decision making to determine best message, cross-channel execution to deliver that message and retaining memory through continuous interactions, and integrated operations to facilitate across all channels and achieve the marketing goals.
Social media analytics, another solution within the IBM UNICA Email Optimization Product, has a “viral value” of e-mail messages which provides tools for tracking mechanism in the total shares, likes and comments from social networking sites.
Other IBM Interactive Marketing Solutions include UNICA Interact that has real-time decisioning in social applications and social sharing which is a marketing task that enables the customers to share the business content on popular social network sites and via email.
Guiling further advised marketers to recognize and treat influencers differently when involving themselves in social customer awareness.
He added that more time should be spent on influencers since once they are pleased, they would be encouraged to share the message and target a greater market.
To gain the interest of more customers, he also recommended personalized, direct posts in social media rather than broad, generic messages in terms of the delivery of the content in reaching out to the people.
Moreover, he warned marketers with the changes in social media particularly in emerging marketing channels like social mobile. (FREEMAN)