Since the beginning of social media brands gradually found their way to their customers. This can be done through advertisements and/or creating their own channels and pages on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media application. We all realize that the traditional marketing approach differs from the social media approach and we probably all know a couple of examples from our Facebook News Feed proving that point. We can’t imagine a social media world without digital marketing or advertising. Or can you?
Nowadays more and more people find advertisements annoying and therefore are finding alternatives for the services they normally make use of. Two great examples of this are Spotify and Netflix. People that normally would listen to the radio now prefer Spotify, which is ad free if you buy Spotify Premium. People that always watched their favourite series on TV nowadays use Netflix. And how do people get rid of most of the advertisements on the computer? They have an ad blocker installed.
So how does this ad blocker affect advertisements? I assumed it would have a negative impact for the marketer as those people won’t be aware of the brand and therefore can’t get engaged with the brand. Instead, according to Ben Kunz it possibly is the best thing that ever happened to the ad industry. Now people have ad blockers installed, the marketer knows this person is not interested in advertisements. Therefore the marketer does not need to pay for those that block advertisements on their computer. This will result in higher returns on investments.
Brands have three main social media objectives: brand awareness, brand engagement and word of mouth marketing. In the first stage awareness is created before you are able to get engaged with a brand. And normally you are engaged with a brand before you will start talking about it with friends, assuming it is in a positive way. In case a brand succeeds in reaching these objectives there will be brand evangelism. This means that you are trying to convince your friends and family to buy products from that specific brand.
A great example of this is KLM Surprise. When you tweeted on the airport you were going to take a KLM flight, KLM Surprise would contact you and get you a personal gift. Therefore they were going through all your information on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or anything else they could find to surprise you. And because people were on the airport and had to wait for a long time, they could use this time to share their surprise with all their friends. This helped KLM succeeding with these earlier named three objectives.
On their road to brand evangelism KLM made some huge steps with KLM Surprise as this campaign became very well known. Now you are thinking of brand evangelism, do you reckon you are guilty of it? Are there certain brands that absolutely stand out for you? And did you advice people you know to buy their products?
Sources
Hoffman, D. L., and Fodor, M. 2010. Can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing? MIT Sloan Management Review 52(1) 41-49.
Weinberg, B. D., and Pehlivan, E. 2011. Social spending: Managing the social media mix. Business Horizons 54(3) 275–282.
Gupta, S. 2013. For mobile devices, think apps, not ads. Harvard Business Review 91(3) 71-75.
Kunz, B. (2015) ‘Ad blocking may save digital marketing from itself’, http://digiday.com/agencies/ad-blocking-may-save-digital-marketing/, 16 September 2015.
Low, K. (2014) ‘The Importance of User Experience for Digital Marketing: 5 Key Tips’, http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2380064/the-importance-of-user-experience-for-digital-marketing-5-key-tips, 16 September 2015.
