At AIM last week, I was up early for breakfast and wandered into the roundtable Lisa Trosien was leading, called Talk Nerdy To Me. If youve never experienced Lisa, youre missing out on a true force of nature. Ive barely woken up, and shes already full of energy and just moving the discussion alongpresenting interesting websites, asking the group questions and just generally always pushing forward.
Anyway, thats not the point of this blog. About a third of the way through, she asked a senior marketing person (someone Ive known for years and always watched what shes doing as a bit of a bellwether for the industry) what shes found to be the most effective marketing tactics these days. After a pause, the answer came back, Well, I hate to say it, but its still the traditional stuffdriveby, website, referrals, [note: I would add ILS although this executive said they've really cut back on ILS without any pain maybe a good topic for a future blog].
I found that response incredibly interesting on two levels.
Or maybe we just want to be more like other verticals where social media appears to work (caution: the Liminal study by Razorfish Ive written on before has shown that customers of all ages still prefer to interact with businesses through email and corporate websites rather than Facebook, Twitter, et al., so maybe its not as effective elsewhere as we think)? The fact is that we live in a unique business spacea very infrequently purchased, very high cost sale. There are very few other verticals like us. The more we focus on who our customer is, why they buy from and most importantly, HOW THEY BUY from us, the more effective well be.
I dont hate to say traditional channels still work the best, I celebrate it. What a great thing that we, as marketers, actually know what works. And think about this. If traditional channels bring us 100 leases while a new thing like social brings us say 5 leases, then a simple (and small) 5% improvement in the traditional channel would get you the same benefit as DOUBLING the effectiveness of the new channel.
Im not saying to stop all your social media activities. But I am asking you whether you could find a way to get just a 5% improvement from your core marketing activities. And Im suggesting do that firstthen take the money and time you get from that success to continue to experiment with social media.