When asked about brand building strategies, marketers in a recent Forrester survey said that search and social media were neck-and-neck. But overall, it’s clear that social media is having a big impact.
Digging a little deeper we see that online video is hot with the B2B crowd (who knew) while mobile is the weapon of choice for B2C.
Social media is changing the way we sell everything from accordions to wildebeests, but marketing man can not live by Facebook alone.
Forrester’s “How Social Media Is Changing Brand Building” report points out that there are issues that keep social media from being the be all and end all of marketing. Half of the B2C marketers Forrester surveyed said they weren’t sure how to capitalize on social media for brand building but you can bet that hasn’t stopped them from going all out.
There is no one way to succeed, but we do know that there are two critical points — trust and emotion. All things being equal, they’d rather buy a wildebeest from a family-run business who supports the local Little League team than a faceless corporation known for their environmental faux pas.
The most important line in the Forrester report is this: “social media is necessary but not sufficient for brand building.” Never lose sight of the fact that a good marketing campaign is made of a variety of components that all work together.