Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The Disadvantage of not using networking sites for Marketing.

Almost half of senior marketing professionals admit staff are not allowed access to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, meaning they are unable to effectively monitor their clients’ brands, a new survey has found.
The McCann Erickson UK Social Media survey found two-thirds – 65.6 per cent – of marketers admit they do not have adequate knowledge about using social media correctly for the purposes of marketing.
Despite the findings, 86 per cent acknowledge social media is now here to stay and is not just a fad.
Almost half – 46 per cent – of the senior marketing professionals that responded admit their IT departments pro -actively block access to popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
But those that do allow access cited Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as the top three most-used social networking sites.
McCann Erickson, which has a major office in Birmingham, said the lack of understanding of social media as a marketing tool may explain senior marketers reluctance to grasp its potential.
Joanna Randall, head of PR at McCann Erickson Bristol, the office which conducted the survey, said businesses cannot afford to switch off from social media outlets.
She said: “There is a real thirst for information and knowledge on the subject of social media which is constantly evolving – making it hard to keep up with the latest trends.
“This study highlights that some of the UK’s major businesses are ignoring social media channels – but they do so at their peril.
“Word of mouth is now more powerful than ever; opinions can be shared with a global audience at the click of a button; we all have the ability to influence, both positively and negatively, and therefore as marketing professionals we should be considering how best to harness the power of social media.”
The survey also revealed that 67.5 per cent of marketers thought social media is used more by the under-25s, despite a Nielsen survey finding people using Twitter tend to be older than this.
Forty-two per cent of traffic on Twitter.com is made up from 35 to 49-year-olds, with the majority – 62 per cent – accessing it only at work.
Opinion was split on how social media impacts on traditional forms of communication – for example, telephone and face to face – with 48.2 per cent agreeing that this new form of “keeping in touch” has a negative impact on traditional communication methods versus 51.8 per cent disagreeing.
Three-quarters of those questioned – 75.9 per cent – did acknowledge that social media has a place in business, commercial communication and marketing activity.
And those that are proactive in using social media cite profile raising and PR purposes as their main reasons for using sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Researchers for the survey quizzed 100 UK-based marketing and communications professionals at manager level or above.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Get Ahead or Get Behind

Using a professional athlete to market your product has many major advantages. The biggest advantage that I feel using a professional athlete offers is that they are given the spotlight many times a year they are watched twenty four hours a day so if they promote a specific product it will be seen more often than any other form of marketing. As well as being seen more often the product will be shown in use and so its not a artificial advertisement, it will also promote more people to use the product because the American way is to be like our heroes, or idols however you want to classify it.
The second advantage of using a professional athlete to market your product is merely a simple answer, Children. However the depth is much deeper than that, if the companies use athletes to market their product than children are more likely to want to imitate the professional athletes than adults are. If that company gets the children hooked on their product at a young age than their length of time of returning customers is much longer therefore they waste less time trying to get return customers because they can focus on hooking the new young customers that will become customers for life and then they grow up and still use the same product than they pass the belief in that product on to their children.
If you look at the money that is made because of the marketing success you will see your leaders such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and many more that use professional athletes as their main marketing source. Nike came out with Air Jordan’s using Michael Jordan. Adidas came out with the T-Macs using Tracy McGrady. These two examples are only a few of the many that are out there.
Having a professional athlete has a much larger chance of success than if it was marketed elsewhere, number one because these people are well known and well respected, two gets more publicity without additional cost, and is ongoing there are always athletes willing to promote because of opportunities to shed more light upon their play, or their sport in the case of Tiger Woods. Tiger made an already popular golf product used by NIKE a more envied product. This caused more people who may not typically play golf to go play just because they want to try the new product. This has made of them new lovers of the sport.