Go To Social Marketing
Any organization or company which feels like understanding or visualizing the “Digital or Social Market” should visit India. In its enormity, much like social media, one can find sundry people, legion brains, and manifold opinions. It can easily teach anyone the art of people engagement through customized communication, one of the protagonist for succeeding in social media marketing. It can also teach the science of churning big amount of data, +1.2 billion population, to carve out relevant statistics per your need. Last but not the least, it can also make anyone understand the craft of cult branding and value associated with the same. Combine above three learning and you’ll end up with a Social Media Success frame of mind which no framework, either developed in some boardroom or classroom, can beat. Winning in social market place is akin to winning in India. It requires diverse learning and skill set to win in a diversity driven market.
It’s a human beehive, intertwined like a spider’s web, where a walk down the road validates whether a particular thing/idea is worth going to the market, challenging the very existence and framework of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. It’s a common customers’, yet highly skilled, mirror glazed with technology, much like digital media. The constant reflection from the mirror is that Go-To-Market is passé. The need of the day isn’t GTM but GTSM i.e. “Go-To-Social-Market” and don’t just go to market but “Go-To-Succeed in-Market”.
So, when the Goliath called Apple nuked the market with iPhone, every alternate person in India knew that Nokia and Blackberry are late to react. The market was galore with opinions like Yahoo will become YaWho and Rediff will end up with a big If in competing with Gmail and Google. Very much like social media market place. One needs to connect with the market pulse in real-time to be able to survive. Any organization, irrespective of size or history, can become history or future with being a social brand. The question is, what it takes to build a robust Go-To-Social-Marketing strategy? I’ll try to answer few of them and you can connect with us here to get your business analyzed on all parameters.
Before we move forward with the building blocks of the GTSM, let’s learn about one key difference between the traditional GTM and contemporary GTSM. And the difference is in knowing “which bridge to burn and which to cross”. Digital market has provided an ecosystem for technological evolution, erasing the line of competitive control, challenging the proven models and methodology, and real-time social life cycle (SLC). You have to be socially mature to stay at maturity on life cycle curve. Irony is that the SLC starts and ends at maturity itself. In digital market the traditional approach of go to market and performing strategic trial-error could backfire on the entire system. The best way to understand this is that while SAP struggled to enter in cloud-space, especially around SMB, Salesforce kept on growing and Sharepoint has carved out a niche for itself which can be integrated with Salesforce 1 for better value. The mistake SAP did was not adapting to the social way of going to market i.e. knowing which bridge to cross than just crossing any bridge.
GTSM is an integrated approach to marketing wherein adoption and adaption happens real time, in tandem with customers’ expectation and organizations’ capability. Let’s discuss the elements now.
- Real-Time: The synchronization shouldn’t be to learn what’s working for you but also to keep tab on what’s not working for your competitors. It’s social and every insane information is available to every sane individual. It allows you to learn from your competitors’ mistake and take one correct step forward towards creating an enhanced brand value. A GTSM enables real-time enhancement in organizational functions and make social media an opportunity than challenge, unlike traditional non real-time GTM.
- GTM = Business unit–> Customer Segment+ Revenue+ New Customer–> Customer Expectation
- GTSM = Strategic evaluation–> Insight+Value+Model–> Functional Integration–> Customer experience feedback–> Real time–> Functional unit–> Strategic evaluation–> Business Unit
Do let us know the names of the companies which you think have responded to GTSM? No, Apple please.
- Be lean: The beauty of GTSM lies in gaining enough weight that could be managed, at the same time being agile. The digital market is constantly changing where only way to succeed is to evolve with the market. Only lean and agile model can achieve evolution and adaptability at such a rapid pace. One of the key traits of being lean is to be virtual, to be able to understand the local need and choosing the best resource and channel. While GTM was all about trying to sell more in an existing segment or trying to sell to a new customer, GTSM is more about optimizing the overall sales efficacy.
- Integration: There can’t be a better process than GTSM to deliver uniform value to internal and external stakeholders associated with a business. It creates an integration across the hierarchy, fostering the culture of real time solution. Unlike the traditional silos driven independent sales approach, as advocated by GTM, GTSM is more about a transparent process wherein everyone knows a specific decision making unit and its alignment with customer experience. The efficiency and usability of GTSM lies more in achieving transparency between the external customer and internal decision maker.
One fact which can’t be overlooked is that digital market is here to stay and is expected to evolve further in coming days. One way or another it’s going to be an inevitable need for any organization to adopt the adaptive model, the earlier the better. The future lies in empowering your employees to understand the pulse of millions of customers on the social platform.
In a country with +1.2 billion population lack of knowledge or awareness can’t be an alibi for failure. But, unwillingness to juice out the knowledge can definitely be accepted as a suicidal way of doing business. It’s an opportunity to fill the glass up to brim, drink it all, and refill it with new elixir called customer expectation.
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