The future of marketing – make it personal people!
Social media in 2018 – if you don’t like having your face appear anywhere, then you will have to reconsider your Because this year is the year of the influencer! It’s official, people want to buy from people. Faceless brands and outdated advertising no longer work. Today, I bring you the latest global thinking on the future of marketing.
I’ve just returned from the USA, where I attended the Social Media Marketing World event in San Diego. It’s the social media marketing mega conference, where the world’s top experts share the best (and most current) social media marketing techniques. With 4,000+ attendees, it was the biggest conference I’ve ever had the pleasure of being part of, and it was a real honour to hob-knob with other social media marketers, just like me!
Branding: be consistent. Be you.
Humanising our brands and creating real-life human connections was one of the significant themes throughout the event this year.
The consensus, amongst social media marketing experts, is that people distrust big name brands today. Consumers no longer want to fuel the profits of faceless corporations.
In fact, people are wise to the old ‘advertising’ ways of days-gone-by, and the truth is that they can smell a sales campaign a mile off. People today refuse to be directly ‘sold’ too.
“People distrust faceless brands and people with no personality.”
Our brands need to become more human
If we are going to be successful marketers in the digital age, then we need to come to terms with getting our faces out there. The old style where you hide behind the website or social media page is not working any more. Many concepts of B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) marketing are no longer valid.
In modern-day marketing, these stereotype has been replaced with a new acronym – P2P – people to people marketing!
To get your mind around this concept, consider the idea behind pop-up stores, food vans, microbreweries, farmers markets, and other similar rustic-style, locally-based establishments that have returned to our suburbs.
Your brand needs to have this type of flair in its online form too. The most human, and more importantly, ‘humble’ brand (that finds a way to personalise and share it’s ‘story’) is the one that will win customer sentiment.
Turn up your care factor
Social media in 2018 – In today’s modern marketing era, we need to care more about the folk that follow us and be prepared to accept that smaller, more niche audiences, with shared interests, are more important than having large groups of followers that have very little in common.
It’s time to stop trying to appeal to the masses. Social proof, i.e. our obsession with how many people follow us versus our nearest competitor, must cease.