Social Influence Marketing Trends

Social influence marketing is a new dimension of marketing and can no longer be ignored.

But what exactly is social influence marketing? In short, it is letting your brand and marketing efforts to be influenced by the communtiy that you are targeting. If that seems strange, it is, at least to traditional marketing. Social influence marketing (SIM) means having a conversation with the target community and asking what they want, instead of just studying them from the sidelines.

SIM markets to the community, not only to the individual. It uses technology to bring you closer to your customers. It also means that you have to reliquish control of your product pages and letting your brand direction be influenced by the community.

A great example demonstrating how this trend is growing is when Pepsi decided to forgo it's traditional advertising in the form of it's Superbowl ad, and instead realocated the monies from it's marketing budget to social media. Another example of letting your customers influence your products comes  Heineken. They are letting customers actually order their own customized beer bottles by letting them design their own labels.

There is much research showing that people believe that they are being exposed to too much advertising. This means that the traditional advertising efforts are being filtered out more and more as more exposure occurs. How can you stand out? By implicating the customer and community within your marketing, you will have found a way to give interest back to your customers.

Develooping your SIM marketing efforts is different from the traditional effort in subtle ways. Instead of forcing the singular image of your company down upon the consumer, you will be  diversifiying your company brand to appeal to different market segments. Even more, this diversification will be not coming from a marketing team from within the company, it will be coming from the consumers.

SIM is the ultimate word of mouth advertising. Before the emergence of the internet and the advent of Web 2.0 properties, it was difficult to get into that conversation. Now, you have the ability not only to overhear those social conversations, you have the ability to interact and lend your voice as well.

How are you improving your social influence marketing efforts for your business?