Overreacting towards social media and digital marketing? (Week 12)

What does social media and digital marketing mean to you?

For non-marketers, social media is a channel to interact with friends and family, and to keep up with external factors such as celebrity updates, news updates, promotion updates and more. However, for marketers, social media and digital marketing is a popular new communication method to reach out and understand customers.

Mark Ritson argues that digital is meaningless as similar marketing prints are applied through traditional channels such as newspapers and synergistically linked with social media and stands by his opinion that they are just tools that when combined and used together in a campaign, it brings better results as the integrated marketing campaign. He also holds a point of view that relying on social media as the only digital tool is restricting from using more powerful marketing tools.

According to the Society for Marketing Professional Services, marketing is “The process of creating firm awareness; building and differentiating the brand; driving business development activities; and identifying, anticipating, and satisfying client objectives to achieve profitable business goals.“. This coincides with some points that Mark Ritson had pointed out in his video.

The common goal of social media, digital and traditional marketing is to be customer-centric by thinking of their target consumers as their long-term investment. Therefore, a combination of social media, digital and traditional marketing leads to a strong marketing campaign overall as it will target all contact points to ensure higher chances of reaching and interacting with target and even non-target consumers.

Is there an overreaction towards social media and digital marketing like what Mark Ritson had pointed out? I do not think so. I feel that social media and digital marketing are new tools developed to fit the modern era of technological advancements and digitalisation, and these developments added on more avenue for marketing to expand and capitalise on.

Mark Ritson also mentioned that marketers should listen to customers before strategies and tactics and this is important as the main goal of marketing campaigns is to reach consumers in the end. Therefore, understanding what consumers want by standing in their position provides more insights to select the right marketing tools and strategies.

Therefore, marketing campaigns at present times can incorporate social media, digital and traditional marketing as a whole marketing campaign to generate better results with “proficient development of strategies and tactics along with the prioritization of such programs” (Kieran Hannon, 2016). This is backed up with Mark Ritson’s belief that a good marketer should be trained in marketing in aspects such as in developing and executing diagnosis, strategy and tactics.

Final Conclusion:
Just like how social media marketing was not a popular option in the past, the stigma that social media was just for connection has changed to become a popular marketing tool to target present day consumers. Thus, the tools and capabilities of marketing will continue to advance and be developed further as the world advances.