Social Media Hasn’t Killed Off The Traditional Marketing Funnel, Yet
June 27th, 2008 by Garrick SchmittTags: forrester, funnel, going social now, predicitons, shiv singh, social influence marketing
Back in December my colleague Shiv Singh made 10 predictions about how social media would change the way we do business in 2008. He forecast gloom and doom for the marketing funnel and discussed the rise of a third dimension in marketing — “Social Influence Marketing.”
It was a compelling premise, for sure, but now that we’re halfway through 2008, he takes a sober look at how his predictions are shaping up on his blog, Going Social Now. And — surprise, surprise – the marketing funnel, under attack from many pundits (including both Shiv and myself), is alive and well.
Choice bits:
Forget About The Marketing Funnel.
We talked about Social Influence Marketing having a complex influence on the marketing funnel with the awareness, consideration, preference, action, and loyalty funnel stages looking different thanks to peer reviews, social networks, blogs, micro-blogs, prediction markets, virtual worlds, wikis, and social advertising.
This one we got a little wrong. The marketing funnel still matters—though it is changing. What’s really changed is that understanding where consumers are in the funnel is harder to track. As consumers snack on content, participate in the social web and use cellphones to connect more, finding out what stage they’re at, and how to move them to the next one, has gotten more difficult. But recognize that different Social Influence Marketing strategies can support different stages of the marketing funnel, and we’ve barely begun to figure out how.
For example, viral videos can be used to build brand awareness (the downside is that you can’t easily target these to just your customer segments), twitter channels can be used to cultivate loyalty, on-domain peer reviews can influence consideration while social shopping the action stage itself.
You can also download a PDF version of the article or read an HTML version.
5 Responses to “Social Media Hasn’t Killed Off The Traditional Marketing Funnel, Yet”
After noticing this trend may be a little more intensive than you had originally thought, how do you think things will look in 2009?
I still believe that social media will challenge our conception of what a marketing funnel is — and should be. Personally, I think we are moving from mass to micro and the traditional marketing funnel serves mass audiences, not micro-segments. 18 months out, I’ll think we’ll see this come to fruition…
Interesting perspectives. I think it\’ll take a new generation of marketers for this to happen though. We\’re all measured based on what and how much we push through the funnel.
I don\’t think social media will \’kill off\’ the marketing funnel. I just think it will add another facet to it in the end.
Really SMO is going to be a big part of online advertising and the strategies behind Gorilla marketing will also accept this technique to make better branding and popularity over the web.