Recently, Morgan Stewart, Director of Research and Strategy at ExactTarget, conducted a research study on consumers' attitudes toward marketing. He surveyed more than 2,300 consumers and interviewed almost 100 random. Below is an excerpt from his November 2009 results:
70% of consumers who visit Facebook at least once a month and are a "fan" of at least one company or brand don't believe they have given those companies permission to market to them.
40% of those "fans" don't believe marketers are welcome in social networks at all.
Why have a fan page then? Stewart indicates that the following findings from the study* will help you understand marketing to fans without losing them:
- What Is The Facebook Environment
- People visit social networks to communicate with current friends, catch up with old friends, and otherwise express themselves.
- 44% of people who are fans of at least one company or brand on Facebook also say social networks should be used strictly for interpersonal communication.
- People on social networking sites don't believe marketers are welcome. To them, self-identification as a fan is not an invitation; it is an expression of personal taste or style intended to be shared primarily with friends.
- Don't Act Like A Marketer
- Consumers don't trust marketing. Consumers trust people (or brands) that help them and exhibit interests similar to theirs.
- Marketers' first inclination is to build a fan base so that they can send those people marketing messages. Consumers are increasingly put off by offers on their Facebook fan page like “exclusively for our fans.”
- Align With Fans, Don't Sell
o Anything that shows you are aligning brand with the interests of your consumers
can constitute a meaningful brand experience. For instance, if you have a interest in raising money for diabetes
or cancer research then take your offer and align it with that foundation. Something along the lines of “we
gave 10% of all revenues from January's sales…" Make sense?
- Be quick to listen and slow to speak
- When it comes to positive comments, let your fans tell the story for you.
- Negative comments. Two types: those you can address in a helpful manner and those you can't. Don't engage unless you can be helpful, but if you do, do it in real-world dialogue and solve their problem. - Direct consumers to other channels for marketing messages
- When Stewart compared data from this year with data collected in 2008, Morgan noticed consumers' attitudes toward non-permission (or "pushy") marketing messages souring fast. However, that wasn’t true for permission-based messages; consumers are very receptive to promotions and are reporting using coupons more often.
- In marketer-initiated communications, email is the preferred channel (75% of consumers overall), even among teens (64%) and college students (70%). Consumers prefer to maintain that separation of "church-and-state" between how they communicate with friends and how they receive deals from fan pages they follow.
- Use what you learn to improve marketing
- Fans' comments can provide valuable insight in regards to what is and isn't working with your fans. This provides an opportunity for marketers to adjust their message on respective promotional channels accordingly.
- Identifying email subscribers from Facebook fans, marketers are able to better target and communicate with them as members of this vast, motivated and engaged audience.
Peoples' expectations in social-media environments are very different from their expectations of other direct-marketing channels. Approach social media with that difference in mind. To succeed, marketers need to overcome considerable skepticism on the part of their consumers.
If consumers are to change their minds about marketers' being welcome on Facebook or other social networks, it will be because marketers interact as participants in the dialogue instead of attempting to control the dialogue through slick messaging.
Stewart states, "That it's not that marketers can't launch social-media campaigns; rather, they can't act and think like marketers when doing so". Marketers are to create messages that are about service that is aligned with your fans taste, preferences and the like. Then they have no idea that they are being marketed to.
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