Social media platforms can be a waste of time or a source of income depending on how you make use of your online presence. Some people waste a lot of time on social media while others have used the same sites to become billionaires.

Mark Ritson highlights the revolutionary nature of social media on a person to person basis, but argues that when the brands get involved, by definition they are not welcome. So further he questions, why do marketers spend so much time on social media?

Statistics show that over 1 billion people have Instagram, however only 25% of smartphone users actively use Instagram. Furthermore, Ritson stated that 66% of Australians don’t follow brands on social media and out of that left-over percentage; only 94% of those consumers follow an average of 1 brand. So how effective is social media, and is traditional media a lot more underrated than what we may realise?

Social media – Do you find yourself following brands on Instagram or Facebook? As the name suggests, social media is used for social to social contact through a digital medium… and sadly, brands are the 3^rd wheel.

SO…Gone are the days of traditional advertising? The answer. NO!

We forget how much we are exposed to traditional media on a day to day basis. My journey from home to uni, without even realising I am exposed to an enormous amount of traditional media! Radio – If you’re like me, you enjoy listening to the radio on your drive to work. This is still a very effective channel of traditional marketing.

We have all heard about the famous Oreo Ad that played during the Super Bowl. The reach for this ad was 64 thousand people. Which may seem like a decent number, but in reality, 40 million Americans buy Oreos every year. That’s 0.02% of their target market that were reached.

In some ways, using social media to conduct market research about your consumers is a great idea. It’s a great way to gather qualitative research- it’s basically a giant digital focus group. However, marketers seem to be spending more on these platforms, even though it may not work for their brand. Why? Because everyone else is doing it!

THE POWER OF CONFORMITY!

I personally believe traditional marketing is still alive. However, it’s just not as popular because marketers believe social media is the way to advertise in this digital age. All I can say is if a company wants to establish a creative impact, traditional mediums are important to consider. They have the reach, create the impact and build the value for a brand. Therefore – marketers, don’t forget about the basics. Social media marketing is good for some things, but businesses should not solely rely on it as their only marketing strategies.

Do you think traditional marketing is becoming outdated? Or is it still just as relevant today even with the presence of social media?

I once received an email from Apple outlining a purchase I apparently made. When I saw it I was extremely confused, as I had not bought anything from the App store in a long time. As I opened the email my eyes went straight to the $479.50!!!

I did not even look at any other detail that would suggest this email was in fact SPAM, and I freaked out. Checked my bank account and nothing was taken out. Now even more confused, I looked back to the email and noticed it wasn’t billed to my address, it was billed to an address in the United States! It them immediately entered my mind, “just another spam email”.

According to the Spam Act 2003, spam is defined as irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising. You know that spam filter on your emails? That’s what we call an authenticating protocol, developed by internet administrators as a response to spam. They created this because we have become so exposed to spam emails that they need a designated place to go!

An article by Justin Rao and David Reiley called the Economics of Spam highlights supplementing current technological anti-spam efforts with lower-level economic interventions in the spam supply chain, such as legal intervention in payment processing, or even “spam-the-spammers” tactics. Email spamming has evolved over the years, advertising so many different varieties of products that are bound to tempt consumers and catch them up in traps. 

So, with the Spam Act 2003 in place, it ensures that Australia is legally protecting its consumers against the painful emails that are sent daily. However, this act does not stop the rest of the world from bombarding us!

What are your thoughts on spam? Have you ever mistakenly fallen for a spam tactic? Or do you know straight away when you’re looking at spam?

Marketing techniques are rapidly changing with the introduction of new technologies, social media, and apps entering the market. Integrated Marketing Communication Campaigns are one of a simple concept. It ensures that all forms of communications and messages are carefully linked together. At its most basic level, Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, as we’ll call it, means integrating all the promotional tools, so that they work together in harmony.

You might remember the  Dove campaign for Real Beauty? This was a campaign created to help boost their overall brand awareness, to stand out form their competitors. It became a worldwide marketing campaign that was launched by Unilever in 2004 that included advertisements, videos, workshops, sleepover events and the publication of a book and the production of a play.

According to CIO Magazine, there are 7 ways to create a successful integrated marketing campaign.

1. Have a clear understanding of who your audience is
Dove focused on an audience of highly engaged women active on digital and social media. They focused on females, ages 18 to 35, who valued natural, healthy beauty products.

2. Pick your channels
Dove used many channels – billboard advertisements, tv advertisements, magazine publications and social media platforms. In 2013 “Real Beauty” sketchers were released which showed women describing their appearances to a forensic sketch artist, this became the most watched video ad of all time.

3. Have a consistent look
It is easy to see consistency in the campaign with predominantly white backgrounds, simple designs and real women. This aligned with the brands values and personality that they are a honest, straight forward and simple brand.  

4. Create clear consistent content
Doves message was consistent and made loud and clear: “ALL WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL”

They incorporated content that was consistent to the theme across all there advertising platforms.

As a result of the campaign, Dove’s sales increased from $2.5bn to over $4bn. It was not only seen as a financial success but also groundbreaking, insightful and authentic. It started a new trend in advertising, making the use of an integrated marketing campaign very successful!

What are your thoughts on this? Are there any other IMC campaigns that you believe have been successful? Let me know in the comments below. 

The Internet is a wild place, wild enough to even cheat on some of our most loyal search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Sorry to all Bing fans, but its not often you hear anyone saying “just Bing it!”

Although we don’t often realise it, most of us use search engines multiple times a day, it is an instinct reaction within our day-to-day lives as a source of information. Nowadays, marketers have a choice when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, to wear a black hat or to wear a white one.

Although black hat techniques aren’t technically illegal, its considered the rebel out of the two options. Black Hat SEO is characterised to essentially trick these engines with rule-breaking techniques to strategically gain more traffic.

Techniques include:

• Unrelated keywords: keywords that have no connection to your content

• Invisible text or links: hiding text or links behind images, font size 0 and even white text on white background as shown below

• Gateway pages: fake pages overloaded with keywords and redirected to another unrelated site

• Automation: content with no value to the users, such as bots (not the cute ones like below)

The more innocent of the two is the white hat SEO, which optimises the overall search experience for the intended users. To still gain traffic through an organic and ‘ethical’ way includes techniques such as:

• Original and good quality content: relevant to the target audience, as well as share and link worthy
  
• Valid backlinks: validity in other sites promoting or “voting” for your site as an act of confidence

• Organisation: clear and concise site structure such as headers, titles, contents pages
  
• Meta Description: first few sentences that will appear under the title of your site to grasp attention, an example below of searching the brand Bonds

So for markets to take the reigns and be the angel or the devil subsides with many factors. While the black hat tactic is fairly short-term and fast, various implications are now taking place, especially through Google to ensure that these sites are monitored and penalised for the increased movement they should NOT be receiving. The white hat does take guts, and some patience to see results, but marketers should be used to that, it’s in their nature. By using a strategy that implements all of Google’s rules shows advantages and can also be classified as the teachers pet, or in this case, Google’s pet.

Let me know in the comments below if the black hat method is cheating or essentially cunning? Is it just a smarter way to go about SEO or is the whole idea essentially ‘dying’? What would you opt for personally if you had a site and had to choose a method and why?

“I want it now!” – is usually a saying you would expect to hear from a toddler in a supermarket isle. However, it is also what we as consumers are saying today. We want immediate gratification, and we are making decisions faster than ever before.

The introduction of smartphones has brought about a new wave of customer interaction. Whether it is a quick online purchase, looking up directions or researching information, consumers have an expectation for speed and efficiency when completing these tasks.

Have you ever been talking to someone about a movie you saw the other night, but you can’t recall the name of the lead actor? Without thinking you Google the movie on your phone and within seconds you have your answer?

Have you ever been somewhere you are unfamiliar with and you need directions, so instead of asking the person walking by you, you’re initial reaction is to pull out your phone and check Goggle maps?

These moments are what Google calls, a micro-moment. A moment when a person turns to their device to act on a need. These needs are spilt into 4 categories:

How do micro-moments help to market products? Marketers are now implementing these micro-moments into our every day lives without us even realising.

As consumers, we rely on our mobile devices to inform us and make decisions for us. Brands are becoming more and more aware of this ‘need’ we are seeking, and are starting to adjust their campaigns and advertising accordingly.

Take Bondi Sands as an example. They are a premium self-tanning brand that is gaining global awareness and have gained a huge following through their online social media platforms by generating content through influencers.

They partnered up with a company called Shout Agency to help get their name and product out there through mobile marketing. This lead to a 70% increase in online sales and have achieved the number 1 ranking in brand awareness for self tanning!

None of this would have been possible without mobile marketing through your smartphone. Bondi Sands used micro moments to their advantage through Instagram stories advertising their product and having influencers posting their love of the product. This worked because consumers enjoy seeing what influencers post about and also scroll through videos on Instagram daily without even thinking of it as an invasion of advertisement.

What are your thoughts on micro-moments? Are you now realising that you almost interact with a micro-moment daily on your phones? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

According to Jonah Berger, you only need $50 to go viral.
Yes, you heard that correctly.
Not $50 million, not $50,000 – only $50.

During an interview conducted by Rachel Kipp from Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, Jonah Berger, the author of Contagious and founder of the 6 STEPPS  was discussing a certain technique that a marketing director for the brand Blentec had discovered, which relates heavily to the second principle outlined by Berger, Triggers.

The technique used by Blendtec was a series of advertisement videos that went viral! The series was called “Will it blend?” which showed a scientist placing extremely absurd items in a blender to see if they would blend. The videos were not only noticed by their consumers but triggered over 150 million views!!!

How? Because it was different, because it was so crazy it was remarkable.

Below are links to a few “Will It Blend” videos (yes they are cheesy):

iPhone X

Glow Sticks

Bic Lighters

Soon enough, people weren’t even associating these advertisements as something that marketers were shoving in their faces but were sharing these videos out of pure entertainment!

Turns out a blender turning an iPhone into dust is something a lot of people want to watch. Of course you’re going to share that to your friends or talk about it around the dinner table, but are you actually mentioning the blender, or simply TRIGGERED by the astonishing act in the video?

Berger states that “it doesn’t take a marketing genius to think about this”, which I completely agree with. You need to get inside the consumer’s head, and think about a word, date or even an activity that will trigger that person into thinking about your brand or company. When I say the words “Just Do It”, what do you think of?

I can only assume this was the first thing that came to mind…

We are triggered daily by brands that have jammed slogans or images into our heads to think of their product. I definitely see how it’s a clever way to build a brand amongst consumers.

What brand do you instantly think of when you hear a certain word, or hear a certain song? Anything come to mind when I mention all white headphones? Do you instantly think of a particular airline when I quote the lyrics “I still call Australia home”? Or what beverage do you think of when you hear “It’s a big ad, ve-ry big ad”?

Let me know in the comments below if we are thinking of the same brands because of those triggers, and if you can think of any other successful triggers used by other companies!

Hey guys! I’m Zoe, a third year marketing student at RMIT. As part of my digital marketing subject this semester, I will be weekly blogging my thoughts and views on different topics. Feel free to join in the conversation and comment back your own great ideas!