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In News

3 Things Marketers Can Do to Delight Your Customers

July 4, 2017 No Comments

In this digital space, businesses are increasingly relying on advanced technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and mobile apps to scale up and grow their brands. With this advanced shift, marketers strive hard to satisfy their customers in order to get better user engagement.

Obviously, your customers want your products and services you offer at fair prices, but that doesn’t good enough to create a meaningful experience. Providing a consistent amazing experience needs planning and structure far beyond the desire of many brands.

How Can Brands Delight Customers?

But here is a question, how can brands delights customers if they are not your customers yet? Obviously, you can’t delight your customers if they are not customers, but you can offer an amazing experience to users that focuses on interests, desires and needs that makes them so satisfied. Smart marketers know that delighting potential and existing customers from their very first interaction with the brand can ensure success and greater sales.

Delighting your customers in the right way by creating an intuitive experience is the key to promote your brand. The better the user experience, the happier your customers are, and more likely they repetitively come to your website and tell their friends about the great experience your website offers.

The goal of providing positive experience throughout the customer’s lifecycle will help your brand to stand from rest and improve your bottom line. As happy and satisfied customers stick around longer than those who have a bad experience.

Successful organizations don’t simply focus on attracting qualified leads, converting into leads that their sales team can close. Instead, these brands aim to offer an amazing user experience for potential and existing customers.

Here are a few points that help ensure your brand is doing things right to delight your potential and existing customers.

Solve Users’ Problems

The first and foremost thing your brand needs to do is to offer products and services that solve the problems your potential and existing customers are facing. Offering your customers a quick, easy and reliable solution to the problem they face or make it easier to perform their tasks or meet their goals, can make them to stick around. Provide your customers with the solutions that best fit their needs, preferences and requirements is the key to success.

No matter if they are not paying customers, it is important to solve your potential customers’ problems. Focus on the rule: help people and in return they’ll help you. If your brand can prove to your potential customers that you are reliable and trustworthy even when they are not paying, they’ll be more likely to want your products or services down the road.

Educate Them

Okay, so you are focusing on solving your customers’ and prospects’ problem, but what’s next? What will happen when they face a similar problem in the future? Going beyond just offering solutions to their problems and offering useful information helps them deal with the similar challenges they might encounter down the road.

Empowering your potential and current customers with knowledge, making recommendations and helping them accomplish their goals are essential to build a remarkable user experience. The perks of enabling people to solve their problems and meet their goals instead of providing them with facts are far reaching for users and your brand. If your potential customers get a positive reminder of your brand every time they use information, advice you provide, your brand will become known as a reliable organization that customers want to do business with.

Compelling Mobile Presence

Customer delight and customer retention is the primary goal of your business, but it’s not that easy, especially in this digital space when brand loyalty among users is rare. However, a comprehensive mobile strategy can help retain customers. Since people have access to high-speed broadband through a smartphone in their pocket, and these days they are much more familiar with the online shopping process, making them to buy everything from their favorite gadget to groceries.

So, if you want to delight your customers, your brand must have a mobile presence through mobile apps and mobile optimized websites. Mobile apps are used more often as for consumers, accessing a brand online matters most more than the price and product range of a brand. If truth be told, mobile app users are more loyal to a brand than those who visit a mobile-optimized website. Mobile apps can be an extraordinary effective tool for delighting customers, meeting their desires and eventually turning them into brand’s micro influencers. Mobile apps have changed the way users interact with brands, there are many companies who offer mobile app development in New York and help brands to create a compelling experience users, which ultimately results in long-term relationships.

Conclusion

Brands that invest their energy and time in these strategies will be the winners. Do it now to drive business growth, brand loyalty and engage your customers in a more immediate way.

By Mohammad Ali.

Sourced from Tech Insider Journal

In News

How Taste and Sound Affect When Customers Buy

June 30, 2017 No Comments

The way ads play on our senses influences the timing of our purchases.

By MediaStreet staff writers.

There’s a reason marketers make appeals to our senses; the “snap, crackle and pop” of Rice Krispies makes us want to buy the cereal and eat it. But as savvy as marketers are, they may be missing a key ingredient in their campaigns.

New research finds the type of sensory experience an advertisement conjures up in our mind – taste and touch vs. sight and sound – has a fascinating effect on when we make purchases.

The study led by marketing professors at Brigham Young University and the University of Washington finds that advertisements highlighting more distal sensory experiences (sight/sound) lead people to delay purchasing, while highlighting more proximal sensory experiences (touch/taste) lead to earlier purchases.

“Advertisers are increasingly aware of the influence sensory cues can play,” said lead author Ryan Elder, associate professor of marketing at BYU. “Our research dives into which specific sensory experiences will be most effective in an advertisement, and why.”

Elder, with fellow lead author Ann Schlosser, a professor of marketing at the University of Washington, Morgan Poor, assistant professor of marketing at San Diego State University, and Lidan Xu, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, carried out four lab studies and a pilot study involving more than 1,100 study subjects for the research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Time and time again, their experiments found that people caught up in the taste or touch of a product or event were more likely to be interested at an earlier time.

In one experiment, subjects read one of two reviews for a fictional restaurant: One focused on taste/touch, the other emphasised sound/vision. Participants were then asked to make a reservation to the restaurant on a six-month interactive calendar. Those who read the review focusing on the more proximal senses (taste and touch) were significantly more likely to make a reservation closer to the present date.

In another experiment, study subjects read ad copy for a summer festival taking place either this weekend or next year. Two versions of the ad copy existed: one emphasising taste (“You will taste the amazing flavours…”) and one emphasising sound (“You will listen to the amazing sounds…”).

When subjects were asked when they would like to attend, those who read the ad copy about taste had a higher interest in attending a festival this weekend. Those who read ads emphasising sounds were more likely to have interest in attending the festival next year.

“If an advertised event is coming up soon, it would be better to highlight the more proximal senses of taste or touch – such as the food served at the event – than the more distal senses of sound and sight,” Schlosser said. “This finding has important implications for marketers, especially those of products that are multi-sensory.”

As part of the study, researchers also learned an interesting insight into making restaurant reviews more helpful. In their field study, the authors analysed 31,889 Yelp reviews to see if they could find connections between the sensory elements of a reviewer’s experience and the usefulness of a review.

They found reviews from people who emphasised a more distal sense (such as sight) were rated more useful when the review used the past tense (“We ate here last week and…”), while people emphasising a proximal sense (touch) had more useful reviews when they used the present tense (“I’m eating this right now and it is so good!”).

“Sensory marketing is increasingly important in today’s competitive landscape. Our research suggests new ways for marketers to differentiate their products and service, and ultimately influence consumer behaviour,” Elder said. “Marketers need to pay closer attention to which sensory experiences, both imagined and actual, are being used.”

In News

Stand out from the Wallys of the marketing world by identifying your customer’s story

June 29, 2017 No Comments

By Claire Passos.

In an increasingly virtual market, it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd, which is why you need a strong brand.

We’re all familiar with ‘Where’s Wally.’ Trying to find the cheerful bobbled-hatted character can be fun, but it’s also pretty frustrating. The lesson here is that in an increasingly competitive market, your customers don’t want the frustration of staring at a number of different companies who all look the same.

What is brand anyway?

James Dyson, the industrial-design icon, is famed, or rather loathed, within marketing circles for his infamous statement: “There’s only one word that’s banned in our company: brand. I don’t believe in brand at all.”

Ironic perhaps, coming from the mouth of someone who has created one of the most recognisable British brands of the last century. What we would suggest, however, is that Mr Dyson doesn’t have much time for the skin-deep and superficial understanding that many have of brands.

Branding according to Wally Olins, authority on corporate identity not the stripy hat-wearing book character, is not merely smoke and mirrors but rather “creating and sustaining trust and delivering on promises. Branding is nothing more than creating an emotional attachment between the brand and the person.”

Let’s start with your story

The first step to creating a strong brand involves getting your company story straight. Simon Sinek, TED legend, leadership guru and all round bright spark, tells us we should ask just one question when developing our brand identity. Why? He puts forward the compelling argument that companies need to think less about what they do and more about why they do it.

Red Bull is a classic example. While they may be purveyors of a sickly sweet, caffeine infused liquids, they present themselves as fearless embracers of life in all its extremes. In the process they stand head and shoulders above their competitors – whoever they may be!

And if we just hop back to our friend Mr Dyson, there are few brands out there with as firm as an identity as the company that bears his name. Everything about Dyson screams that they are engineers with a relentless desire to bring technological innovation into the home.

Your customer’s story

But a great story in isolation is just words on a page. To bring a story to life, you need someone to tell it to; enter your audience. And don’t we just love defining our audience? Dave, a 43-year-old accountant, lives in Hertfordshire and holidays in South Wales.

Some rather clever chums at Cambridge Analytica decided this sort of customer profiling didn’t really cut the mustard. Analytica have put forward the Ocean model that divides the audience not into segments based on background, age, wealth or status, but the personality traits, what they care about, and why they behave the way they do.

When you understand not just what decisions your customers make but why they make them, you can start to build a more compelling brand that touches at the very heart of your customer’s decision making processing, steering them toward your brand; a brand whose ethos and outlook reflects theirs.

Give your brand wings

When you’ve got your stories straight, you’re ready to bring them to life. As Su Matthews Hale of the design firm Lippencott explains: “a company’s logo is its shorthand, a visual cue that tells a story of the brand’s culture, behavior, and values.” A logo can send out all sorts of signals about who you are and what you do.

By Claire Passos

Claire Passos is business development director at branding agency iFour.

Sourced from The Drum

In News

119 Facts You Don’t Know About Email Marketing

June 26, 2017 No Comments

Email marketing has been around for a while, and for those who do not know, it is worth pointing out that it represents the practice of sending commercial messages to a group of people via email. It represents a smart marketing strategy that can help build brand awareness, trust and loyalty, while also increasing the percentage of conversions and of revisiting users.

In a broader sense, all emails sent to a potential business partner or customers is a form of email marketing, as these emails can be sent out for various purposes, such as encouraging repeat business, convincing customers to purchase a new item or service, sharing third-party ads, but also enhancing the merchant’s relationship with a past customer.

This infographic will provide you with a total of 119 facts about this marketing strategy, while also sharing tonnes of interesting stats that will help you better understand the niche. Apart from this aspect, you’ll also get the opportunity to view studies, learn what works, what doesn’t, and what you should do to ensure that your email marketing campaign turns out to be successful, rather than a nuisance to your customers.

By WebsiteBuilder.org

In News

YouTube clarifies stance on ‘hate speech’ and ‘advertiser-friendly’ content

June 23, 2017 No Comments

By Gillian West.

YouTube has made changes to “address advertiser concerns” around ad placement clarifying its rules on hate speech.

Speaking via a blog post, YouTube said it would not allow adverts to appear alongside “hateful” or discriminatory content. However, some vloggers have complained the rules are too strict and will affect their income.

The announcement clarifies the kind of content that will not earn money on YouTube describing “hateful” content as any video that promotes discrimination or “disparages or humiliates” people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or “other characteristic associated with systemic discrimination”.

Advertising will also not be placed next to videos using “gratuitously disrespectful language that shames or insults an individual or group.”

Videos deemed to not be “advertiser-friendly” could remain on the video sharing website as long as they don’t fall foul of the new guidelines which also advise users to refrain from making “inappropriate” parody videos.

According to reports, users have criticised the move with one – Captain Source – telling the BBC that the algorithm used to determine “advertiser-friendly” content was far from perfect.

“Context around many words is incredibly important and needs to be addressed,” they said.

Others also pointed out that mainstream news networks posted inflammatory debates that could fall under “incendiary and demeaning”, and that music videos often push the boundaries of sexually-explicit content but still carry ads. “Why punish the little guy, but not the big networks?” asked user Eugenia Loli. “This is a double standard.”

Back in August, some YouTubers had complained that their videos had been flagged as “not advertiser-friendly” so were no longer earning ad revenue.

YouTube parent company Google has been dealing with many ad misplacement issues over the last six months with Havas Group making headlines back in March, pulling its clients ads from YouTube and Google over brand safety fears.

By Gillian West

Sourced from TheDrum

In News

“If brands champion their people as their most valuable asset, why do they invest so little in understanding them?”

June 19, 2017 No Comments

By Michael Feeley

Gemma McGrattan of brand engagement agency Synergy Creative explains to The Drum Network why it’s time for large employers to treat employee comms with the same level of care and attention spent on marketing to customers…

Synergy refers to itself as a ‘brand engagement agency’ – what does that mean exactly?

We celebrated Synergy’s 10th anniversary last year, but we found our niche as an agency relatively early on. After a couple of years, we started focusing our expertise and our offering around internal communications and employee engagement. We began working on a lot of employee comms projects: rewards and recognition schemes , induction programmes, that sort of thing, usually based around HR-related comms. Over the years, that has developed into a real specialism for Synergy.

Our clients for this sort of service are typically organisations with 5000+ staff, operating a distributed network of outlets, such as Labrokes, Argos, ODEON Cinemas Group across Europe and various utlility companies, which tend to have lots of small teams and individuals working out in the field for the majority of the time.

What problems are large employers typically trying to address when they engage Synergy?

For that scale of organisation, it can become difficult to keep a large, fragmented, remote workforce fully engaged and up-to-date with the latest information from the company. We specialise in supporting those comms needs, supporting employees on their journey ‘from hire to retire’!

Ultimately, it’s about valuing your employees, encouraging them, motivating them, inspiring them. From a hard-nosed business point of view, there’s clear evidence that employee engagement can have a positive effective on productivity and profitability – Dale Carnegie research found companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%. In 2017, more and more organisations are beginning to regard employee engagement as an ongoing strategic initiative, rather than a short-term tactical project.

How has the market changed in the time that Synergy has been focused on internal comms?

These days, it’s common to see job titles such as ‘Head of Internal Communications, ‘Engagement Manager’ or ‘Employer Brand Manager’. In the majority of instances, those jobs didn’t exist a few years ago. That’s significant as it indicates that employee engagement is being taken very seriously at board level now, which is a big change.

Also, various technology platforms have emerged, such as Yammer, Slack and Facebook Workplace, that make it easier than ever before to create an employee network without having to build your own secure platform from scratch. Big brands are now happy to make use of these secure third party platforms in a way they would have been unsure about a few years ago.

The biggest change is the increased recognition that the brand has value, not only to customers, but also to employees. Employers should treat employees as well as they would customers by giving them the opportunity to be listened to, collaborate and shape things within the business. We’re all more sophisticated now. Today, we expect a heightened level of interaction with a brand as consumers, so why wouldn’t we want that sort of two-way dialogue as employees? All the big brands are talking about ‘employee advocacy’, recognising the importance for would-be candidates to hear perspectives from existing employees via their own social networks. The idea here is that a peer recommendation is more powerful than messaging coming directly from the brand.

Who is doing this well at the moment?

A lot of this depends on the brand itself and how brave and forward thinking it is.

Odeon Cinemas Group in Europe has thrown itself whole-heartedly into improving guest experience and employee experience. As a result, they’ve grown hugely in the last two years and had a very successful sale to an American company. That’s a strong case study of the links between employee engagement and hard commercial success.

Virgin Rail has also been very innovative in this area. They recently moved their employee comms to Yammer and are beginning to analyse employee demographics in the same way as customer demographics to inform and shape employee needs.

There are good examples across the board, but the key is that you need to be brave enough to truly embrace it and facilitate the dialogue rather than every item of employee comms having to go through a 50-step approval process, which isn’t going to work.

What tips can you offer large organisations currently reviewing their employee engagement strategy?

Firstly, really understand your people. We think nothing of investing huge sums investigating our customers’ preferences but invest practically nothing in understanding our employees as a collection of internal audiences. You need evidence to get under the skin of that and treat your employer brand with the same kind of care as your consumer-facing brand.

Secondly, whenever you launch an initiative that requires the commitment of your employees to successfully deliver it, you have to be crystal clear about why the initiative is happening in the first place. Make the link meaningful to your people and help them to understand what the business stands for and where you are heading as a business. When employees fundamentally ‘get it’, they are on board all the way.

Thirdly, involve your people, don’t try to simply ‘run’ it. Become a facilitator and curator of the internal conversation rather than a leader or controller of it. It takes time for people to become comfortable on the chosen platform, but the more a workforce knows about each other, with plenty of opportunity to contribute, get involved and make a real difference, the better the chance of a high-performance culture.

And finally, continually reinforce your commitment to the value of internal comms and the employer brand. It can’t be a one hit wonder. The real effort, and success, is in maintaining the momentum.

By Michael Feeley

Michael Feeley is The Drum Network’s consultant journalist, advising and assisting member agencies on their editorial submissions and contributions to The Drum.

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Fortune 500 CEOs Still Largely Suck at Social Media

June 14, 2017 No Comments

Only 40% Have a Social Media Presence.

By MediaStreet staff writers.

Engagement with social media remains flat, despite influx of new group of leaders among Fortune 500.

Domo and CEO.com released their fifth annual study on the social media habits of Fortune 500 CEOs.

After studying statistics from 2016, the Social CEO Report showed that while the social media habits of Fortune 500 CEOs have moderately improved over the past five years, they are still sputtering.

The report shows that despite 75 chief executive changes occurring in this group in 2016, these new Fortune 500 leaders had no significant impact on the group’s total social media report card.

One of the winners: Apple’s Tim Cook has the most Twitter followers – surpassing that of Warren Buffett and Marc Benioff.

This new report found that only 40 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs on the list were active on at least one of six major social networks in 2016 (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube), a slight increase from 2015. Of the Fortune 500 CEOs that use social media, 69 are active on more than one channel, and just 15 are active on more than two.

Only 40 Fortune 500 CEOs (8 percent) have a Facebook page, down from 57 in 2015. Of those, 32 were inactive for the last quarter of 2016. LinkedIn, which was acquired for $26.2 billion by Microsoft in 2016, remained the preferred social media “onramp” channel for Fortune 500 CEOs and LinkedIn’s Influencer program features some of the most active leaders on social media. In 2016, 35 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were using the platform, a three percent increase from 2015.

Just 36 Fortune 500 CEOs have Twitter accounts, but it remains one of the most actively used channels – with 70 percent of that group regularly using the platform in 2016, compared to 62 percent last year. Both Instagram and Google+ had modest gains in Fortune 500 CEOs with accounts since 2015, despite very little use of these channels.

New channels for video emerged in 2016. Facebook Live, LinkedIn Influencer videos and Twitter’s Periscope joined YouTube as social video platforms. Meanwhile Vine, also owned by Twitter, shuttered in 2016. These accounts are typically owned by corporate marketing and have featured their top brass, but Fortune 500 CEOs typically do not have their own accounts.

Other notable findings from the study include:

Expedia’s Dara Khosrowshahi is the only Fortune 500 CEO to use five social networks.
Apple’s Tim Cook has the most Twitter followers – surpassing that of Warren Buffett and Marc Benioff.
More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are featured on their company’s YouTube channel.
Executives from the technology, retail, media and entertainment sectors were most active on social channels in 2016.

To view the full 2016 Social CEO Report, visit: https://www.domo.com/learn/2016-social-ceo-report

In News

Travel, the New Currency of Influencer Marketing

June 13, 2017 No Comments

Partnering with influencers is turning out to be a better pay-off than other traditional forms of advertising because of how emotionally invested the community of followers are.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers.

Oh the places you’ll go, and the things you’ll see. Never have Dr. Seuss’ rhymes made more sense to adults today than when you start to examine how influencer marketing has turned the travel industry upside down.

Travel writing was relegated to stuffy travel guides written by yesterday’s travel wordsmiths. Now, influencers …social media stars on all manner of platforms are striking deals with destinations, and with brands, and bringing the places they go and things they see to their dream-filled followers.

Chanel brought Stephanie Liu of Honey & Silk to Grasse, France to experience and share the making of their iconic No. 5 fragrance.

Take Tommy Lei, the Hong Kong born / LA raised photographer behind MYBELONGING for example. In the last six months, Tommy has already travelled to Iceland, Punta Cana, Mexico City, New York, London, and Morocco.

Tommy Lei, cashing in on his trip to Morocco.

Tommy partnered with sandal brand Teva on his last trip through Marrakech to the Sahara, where the goal was a ground-swell of destination specific content – Morocco is an Instagram-worthy destination right now. The program was a smashing success, whereby his branded content generated over 40% engagement from his fans, and he was able to use his talent in photography to deliver a robust package of digital content to the brand. These kinds of collaborations are becoming the new win-win for influence deals, and they will only increase in velocity.

Brands who work with influencers get to be part of aspirational journeys across the globe, capturing audiences in a very visual way. Partnering with influencers is turning out to be a better pay-off than other traditional forms of advertising because of how emotionally invested the community of followers are.

Influencers are using wanderlust apps like Sherpa to share guides with their fans, bringing their trips full circle by establishing themselves as travel experts and brand ambassadors – all rolled into one incredible package.

On the other side of the spectrum, destinations themselves are turning into the clients that want to partner and bring groups of influencers to build the buzz. As David Hoffmann, host for popular YouTube travel channel David’s Been Here, noted, “Influencer marketing has branched out beyond fashion into the travel sphere, giving audiences a taste of what it’s like to quit their jobs, travel the world and create a personal brand doing something that was once considered a far-fetched luxury. Now that millennial influencers have taken Instagram by storm, places like the Maldives and Bali have become some of the hottest destinations, triggering flight deals and affordable hotel packages like never before.”

This is a massive shift in marketing dollars for destinations, and brands are seeing the returns in the form of booked hotels, booked flights and exploding local business. Influencers make travel, that often seems like a far off luxury, real and accessible.

The shift is also changing how other related trades are checking off their own bucket lists. Photographer Champagne Victoria has gone from shooting fashion editorials around Los Angeles to spending a better part of her year across Europe and island chains, because of the global impact of influencer marketing. By bundling trips with several brands projects, Champagne has been able to fully fund these trips, allowing her creativity to expand through different settings, and giving brands – many of which don’t have the big budgets of major labels – the opportunity to be shot in desirable destinations like the islands of Greece, Iceland, St. Lucia and so on.

If you imagine yourself waking up in the south of France, exploring the flower fields of CHANEL No. 5 – well, follow Stephanie of Honey & Silk, and see the dream become a reality. If you wanted to take the best Americana road-trip of your life, say from New Orleans to Boston and back, follow Courtney of Pretty Little Fawn. Influencers + travel are creating an exciting new wave of exploration – and thankfully with so many fashion influencers involved, you’ll finally know what to really wear.

For further reading, you can dig around the content of digital influencer management firm, God & Beauty. They discuss how travel is the new currency of influence and branded content.

In News

Too Much Social Media Advertising can Hurt Sales. Yikes!

June 9, 2017 2 Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Social media marketing is currently a very popular practice for businesses. But it isn’t all success and roses. A recent Temple study shows that businesses must find a proper balance in order to avoid negative results. So for businesses who currently rely on social media marketing to attract new customers, listen up.

While the potential for social media marketing seems almost limitless, a study led by Ph.D. candidate Shuting Wang and senior associate dean of research Paul Pavlou reveals the exact opposite. The Temple professionals recently conducted a study which looked to determine the specific value of social media marketing in relation to data from WeChat and a Chinese shoe retailer.

The study revealed that while social media advertising had a positive impact on increasing customer sales in the short term, it actually created a negative impact on the business in the long term.

When looking at the specific figures, the business witnessed a 5% increase in sales on the same day following a social media post. However, this same post increased the chance that customers would unfollow the business by 300%. Within five months, the retailer experienced a 5% decreased in sales paired with a 20% loss of online followers within a year.

With regard to these findings, Shuting Wang notes that people often “get annoyed” by a company’s post in the long term compared to the short term. “In that case, they will unfollow, which will lead to a long-term decrease in purchases,” Wang said.

Researcher Paul Pavlou believes this phenomenon can be contributed to the way in which companies often “over-do” social media.

“They see that the more posts they put out there, the more sales they’re going to see,” Pavlou notes. “Companies should be more careful with this and focus more on their long-term goals. Social media marketing is so quick, so immediate that companies say, ‘Well, let me leverage this as much as possible in the short term,’ and they may actually miss the big picture.”

While the study findings support the idea that too much social media advertising can hurt a company’s sales production, there are contextual factors which also play a role. Professor Paul Greenwood notes that these factors include, “What time of day it is, and where people are located.” In addition, the professor notes that people in large cities “Unfollow a lot faster…and if you post during rush hour, people unfollow a lot faster, but if you post at off-peak hours or smaller locations, that effect seems to go away.”

While the full extent of social media marketing trends have yet to be identified, Greenwood believes that future research will look to address whether dissatisfied customers go to competing firms or simply stop purchasing in general. This information will drastically help businesses fine-tune their social media strategies going forward.

While the Temple study revealed the potentially harmful effects of social media advertising, it is important to note this only took place when attempting to sell products. Businesses who have a balanced social media approach, or one which incorporates potential sales with public relations, are much more likely to create productive customer relationships in the long run.

For some interesting case studies on this topic, click here.

In News

Traditional Forms of Media Coverage Still Valued Over Advertising

June 8, 2017 No Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

In an age where digital media is constantly changing, public relations practitioners and business professionals still see the benefits of traditional media coverage. This is according to study conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia.

The study finds those who use news sources to convey certain information about their products prefer independent media coverage.

Lynne Sallot is a professor of public relations of Journalism and Mass Communication. She says, “We have this intuitive idea that getting our messages covered by the news media makes those messages more credible than when we put them out there ourselves. Everyone believes this, but it’s been difficult to prove it.”

Independent media coverage is a more traditional form of news content like a TV broadcast, newspaper article or radio show, whereas more controlled sources of media are paid media such as advertisements or an organisation’s own website.

Pauline Howes is an associate professor of communications, and conducted the research. She says, “When asked directly, public relations practitioners and businesspeople in this study said they see independent media coverage as more credible than controlled, or paid, media. This seems to support the value of news coverage as part of a communications plan.

“Both types of communication are used by businesspeople, but an independent source may be viewed by audiences as having more credibility because it is not controlled or influenced by the subject of a story.”

When determining what goes into a business’s story, the editors and producers behind these independent news sources have no vested interest in the company or its products.

Differing from past experimental studies, this research looked at real world perceptions by interviewing public relation practitioners as well as business professionals.

Says Sallot, “There is some truth that to some audiences, messages covered by the media are more important. Until now, most of the research has suggested that that’s not true.”

Because of the conducted interviews, Howes and Sallot were able to get more personal feedback from those in the field. This study supported the belief that corporate/ PR messages that are carried by news media do have enhanced news credibility.