The impact of social media on advertising competitiveness for small businesses

¶ … Social Media on the Advertising Competitiveness of Small Businesses

Every business, from the largest enterprise to the smallest start-up, faces the continual challenge of staying in touch with their customers and continually earning their trust and business. Social media is the catalyst that is continually changing customer relationships and making them more interactive, open and collaborative. Today's customers have more choices than ever before in terms of how they choose to learn about new products, services, and gain insights into areas of interest. For marketers to be successful, they need to realize that their customers; preferences are changing quickly, and that agility over formal, often static processes from a marketing and selling standpoint, are essential to survive in an increasingly competitive global economic environment. The intent of this dissertation is to show how the foundational elements of social media including its core building blocks of presence, sharing, conversations, identity, groups, relationships and reputation together combine to redefine the brand of any business, large or small. It is on how these elements are synchronized around a common marketing and sales objective that matter most. This dissertation also provides insights into how quickly the value chain of businesses is shifting to be more customer-centric as a result of social media's pervasive influence. No longer can the traditional methods of marketing be relied on, often with weeks or months of lag time between the completion of a program and its results being reported. Social media, due to its digital nature, reports back Return on Investment (ROI) immediately through the use of analytics. Small businesses have the speed and time to value advantage, due to analytics and agility winning over sheer size of a given business.

Conclusion

The most valuable currency any business trades with is trust. Creating, sustaining and growing trust is predicated on creating a very high level of authenticity and transparency with prospects and customers alike. The greatest potential of social media in advertising and marketing is in creating a foundation of trust by engaging in open communication with prospects and customers. The reliance on advertising as a one-way communications mechanism is quickly coming to a close; prospects and customers alike today expect and require a more interactive, responsive experience when evaluating companies and products of interest. And this transcends across Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketplaces as well. The role of marketing must be that of relationship builder with the customer, not just the department that mechanically generates more and more advertising without first hearing what customers want as well. Social media is the catalyst that can fuel these types of highly communicative, collaborative and open relationships over time. Each of these social media channels that can be used for advertising can also be used for customer listening and for building a higher level of trust with prospects and customers alike. In this sense, social media in advertising is bringing an entirely new clarity and precision to marketing, concentrating it on the relationship with the customer first. The quantification of marketing performance possible with social media, as all of it is digitally based, also ensures a very high degree of accountability of performance as well. Agility, accuracy, focus and speed are more possible for a small business to achieve than a large corporation. Social media marketing and advertising is therefore a powerful equalizer in marketing and promotion, and the creation of relationships in small businesses who can react faster and with greater focus,