Surviving the tipping & falling points of digital marketing
Social media channels are proliferating at a rapid pace. While Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin arrested the most socioholoics, newer channels like Vine & Snapchat are gearing up with coolio strategies to outperform these.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point”, inspired me to write about the sudden rise and fall of the social channels & marketing strategies to survive in the rapidly evolving dynamics.
Just before we embark, how many of us still reminisce of Orkut or Tagged? What made all of us suddenly stop swapping the stories on other old school channels and hop on to Facebook or Twitter?
According to Gladwell, the point at which an idea, trend, concept or phenomena gains sudden popularity, crosses a threshold and spreads like a wildfire is named “tipping point”. The book cleverly delineates little things that make a larger than life difference. Comprising ideas, examples and stories, the book lays a foundation: any good idea (a pandemic or epidemic) as he quotes, passes through three common rules – The law of the few, the stickiness factor and the power of context.
Let’s understand and relate this concept on the social media channels. Firstly, jog your grey cells and remember why, when and how suddenly you chanced upon a new channel? What made you migrate to Vine from YouTube or to Facebook from Orkut? Why Google had to shut down Orkut, one of the most profitable services of yesteryears?
The only constant is the change – Yes, that’s the answer! Tipping point of new channels and falling point of others. The phenomena is dynamic!
As marketers, most of us find it challenging to sustain in this fast-paced and crowded digital age. So, how to ensure a winning and sustainable digital marketing strategy without falling prey to the changing digital landscape? Sounds impossible?
It’s not! Follow these simple rules from the tipping point and make your marketing merrier.
The law of the few in brand advocacy
One of the biggest challenges we marketers encounter is channel development. Consider your YouTube channel for an example. You have posted a lot of videos and gained tons of followers, but now with the new trend of short videos, your competitors are moving on to Vine – Would you stay back to YouTube? Would you blend YouTube and Vine both? Would you migrate to Vine? Case in point if you decide to move, what about your loyal brand advocates on YouTube? Will they migrate along? Well, build up your own few Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Having your own set of few loyal brand advocates will help you ramp up the new channel quickly and boost the advocacy through word of mouth. No matter how new you are to the channel, if you adapt to the “Law of few” right, you will be recognized.
The stickiness factor in content wins
Content marketing is a hot selling cake. Curating appealing stories on your company’s blog that might interest your fans. Develop a community outreach plan for marketing your stories. Stickiness can pull the fans, followers and prospects on your website even when you decide to leverage on the new digital vehicle. Authoritative content will dominate no matter the pace of digital growth. You might however need to adapt to the type of the content asset and channel of marketing.
The power of contextual brand marketing
All of us get influenced and your prospects are no different. Reviews, ratings, word of mouth by a fellow customer and contextual advertisements everything impacts the decision. As Malcolm Gladwell says, “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur”. For example, “zero tolerance” efforts to combat minor crimes such as fare-beating and vandalism and the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide. Likewise, for all of us practising marketing, it is imperative to create an environment and customer experience enabling more conversion. Place targeted ad banners, send real-time email campaigns, run predictive-models to identify the behavior and there is so much more to develop conversion driven contextual marketing. Remember, presenting right contextual environment will fourfold conversion.
Wrapping it all up, retaining online reputation and uplifting a brand is complex, convoluted process. With right context, sticky content and strong relationship with your existing loyal advocates, you will be not only able to sustain in dynamically evolving digital age, but also keep winning lion’s share of social visibility no matter the tipping or falling point of any one social channel.
