large forwarding → hand → data management, China's social marketing into the third stage

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The concept of "social marketing", a new concept that has been preached in China from a professional researcher and opinion leader's blog, has now become a high-frequency term used by every brand and company's marketing manager for a few short years.

But in this short period of time, the industry and the public understanding of the definition and concept of "social marketing" is in fact always changing: what is social marketing? What is the key behavioral model for the enterprise to carry out social marketing? What are the successful cases of social marketing? What are the criteria for judging success? The answers to these questions have been constantly discussed and constantly changing.

Coupled with the development of social marketing as the foundation of the platform has been constantly evolving, Sina Weibo from the popular to a lot of questions to the present low-key but the movement of frequent commercialization, so that we can not see whether this is a wound zhongyong story or a story of the hardships. Tencent Micro-Credit of the public account of the product details and imaginative space to stunning, and then the decade does not come to Beijing's Zhangxiaolong how to deal with the company's micro-letter on the choppy marketing needs, is now a no historical precedent can be inferred doubt. Looking at the second echelon, easy to believe, contacts, micro-mobile social networks, in the beginning of the design of a variety of marketing open interface and product mechanism, the old qzone, everyone, watercress is also pondering how to conform to the tide of social marketing. Looking to the United States, photo Agency network Pinterest, Instagram, video social network Vine and so on are in the rapid introduction of relevant advertising and data interface, quickly attracted the market social marketing budget. In short, it all tells the brand and business owners: social marketing is still in the process of evolving and improving, and this process has only one goal, that is: continuously improve the social marketing to the enterprise's value realization and efficiency promotion.

To see the history of past development, we can grasp the direction of future development. As China's social marketing from birth to today's full participant, and thousands of customers have cooperated with the practice, but also systematically on the international development of social marketing has carried out a number of in-depth research, Having invested billions of dollars in this area and recruiting more than 300 social marketing enthusiasts to innovate in a variety of product technologies and marketing methods, I would like to share my summary of the stages of development that have been experienced in China's social marketing in the past, and why I think China's social marketing practice has entered a new stage.

First stage: Large forwarding Stage

From the very beginning of the product form, the market's understanding and demand for socialized marketing focus on the rapid diffusion of information. As a proliferation node of the "grassroots large", quickly become the best choice to meet this demand. And these grassroots large in the social network of poor content in the early days also have a unique growth space, grassroots large creators by the media as a new business model of entrepreneurs. Therefore, at that time many enterprises to the social marketing understanding is to buy large forwarding. For example, in the early days of a big electric platform, the number of large quantities purchased at each activity was thousands, and the average monthly purchase of large amounts was at the million-dollar level. Therefore, the market also appeared in the large forwarding of advertising trading platform, the monthly flow of the peak over billion.

Quality large forwarding does give advertisers a lower exposure cost. But the corresponding problem also follows: first large forwarding of the final exposure is difficult to statistics, and many large fan group consumption attributes difficult to accurately describe, for example, a large number of cold jokes account, basically can only be seen as a gain visibility of the pan-public channels. At the same time there are a lot of brush zombies painted large, so that advertisers can not judge the quality of their account. Plus, the advertised content is completely in a state of no monitoring, therefore, a large number of fraud and shoddy products occasion spread, so the platform quickly realized that the large spread market must carry out advertising content audit management, otherwise it will bring huge risks to the platform, and direct sales of advertising resources is the platform itself indivisible business model. Therefore, Sina platform for grassroots large-scale launch a series of management measures, but also launched its own "micro-task" platform to standardize the market, which touched a group of stakeholders, many of whom later became a micro-Bo platform of the firm to sing the Air Force. At the beginning of the opening of the micro-letter quickly absorbed the experience of Weibo, the development of large firm limit. This behavior makes more business managers understand that social marketing is not the purchase of large forwarding, so, the golden age of the large ended.

Phase II: Content marketing (hand) stage

When the business owner realizes that just seeing social media as a fast-spreading medium doesn't really tap into the core goals of social media that are closely related to consumers, there is a growing tendency to emphasize creativity and content in the marketplace, Many brand owners believe that the essence of social marketing is through a good creative content to continuously promote the real spontaneous consumer forwarding and participation, in addition to fan-oriented activities, so that more people continue to become loyal fans of the brand.

The formation of this idea, mainly by some of the brand in the content of the topic of the issue of micro-blog account of the rapid growth of the impact, but also by some brands are good at using hot-spot events, occasion launched a creative content topics, triggering a large number of dissemination of successful experience impact. This representative account of course is Durex and Nike.

This trend, in fact, is closer to the social marketing of traditional brand marketing an important subversion: the marketing content fragmentation and real-time. This change has greatly dispelled the traditional creative companies, public relations companies are good at the content of production forms and rhythms, so that a large number of brand owners find themselves need to reconsider the content of creative supplier choice.

But if the socialization marketing only stays on the level of content marketing, there will be several difficult problems to solve: 1, not all the brand content, can easily realize the creative content marketing. This makes for a long time, the content marketing ability of Enterprise Micro-blog becomes a kind of luxury goods, a large number of small and medium sized enterprises or brands with distant culture are hard to start before this trend; 2, the exposure of content marketing and the formation of the forwarding, of course, has a positive significance, but the content of excessive reliance on creativity, In fact, this is a high-risk, unable to optimize management and increase resource input marketing behavior; 3, the value of content marketing is also difficult to quantify, and even a lot of business account of the contents of a considerable part of the fact that the brand itself and consumer value is irrelevant, A lot of followers just keep a close eye on the purpose of focusing on a single account.

The stage of socialized marketing software and data management in the third stage

In the 2013, the rapid rise of micro-credit public accounts, so that brands and business owners need to continue to think, social marketing before the heavy creative content of the play, on the micro-letter platform to display a small space. In addition, millet in the field of social marketing undoubted success, but also continue to promote people to analyze and think: From the point of view of content marketing, Millet's social content can be said to be creative mediocre, and millet vermicelli management is obviously achieved great value, from the angle of return on investment, Millet's social marketing gains are clear, measurable and immense.

Marketing on micro-letters, brands and business owners find that it is not possible to launch meaningful marketing practices without the technical means to increase the minimum fan interaction interface and HTML5 page development, let alone when the need to achieve a fan group accurate down or with the internal CRM through, CMO have to spend a lot of time talking to technology companies or their IT departments about platforms, interfaces, downlink, uplink, Fakeid, data cleansing, identity relationships, and so on, which are completely impossible in the marketing department.

This phenomenon has greatly promoted the enterprise and brand owners to the socialization of marketing must be software and data understanding. In the early years, the marketing sector's approach to purchasing technology and software was simply to get some analysis of the level of data reporting, and now things are changing. International IT market analysis authority Gartner predicts that over the next 5 years, CMO will become a more demanding center for sourcing software and technology than CIOs and CTO.

The reasons for further software and data management of social marketing are clear: brands and businesses are increasingly aware that, in addition to the content itself, communication and dialogue through social media and a large number of consumers is an important part of the work, the social data of consumers and the history of dialogue related to the brand, The real socialization Relationship management (Social relationship Management) must be realized through further management and excavation, and the social advertising system, which is being launched and perfected by Weibo, will greatly increase the exposure efficiency and accurate arrival of the brand content. Without having to rely too much on the originality of the content. But all this work flow because of the large amount of fragmented data, it is impossible to rely on the human brain and Excel forms for management and processing, the need for a large number of automated technology processing capacity, and, more importantly, many enterprises in the social media related data is a large number of data, Without the ability to collect, process, manage and use these data in a timely manner, companies will not be able to enter the next phase of real competition.

Summary

From the simple pursuit of forwarding and digital games, to the beginning of the return of content and creativity, and further from the system management and data management perspective of social marketing, this is the socialization era of all marketing practitioners of an education and baptism of the process. This process is also in line with a three-paragraph theory of "emphasizing short-term interests-the essence of return to change before the transition of rationality to value creation", which is necessary when people accept a new management concept. Social marketing will continue to prosper in China for a long time, let us join hands to meet the new stage of social marketing.