Social Media is NOT Marketing’s Silver Bullet

Marketing Silver Bullet

In Jonah Berger’s 2013 book: Contagious, Why Things Catch On, he drops a huge bomb on the world of marketing. He asks, how much of word of mouth happens online?

It turns out that only 7% of word of mouth happens online. Let that sink in…7%.

And furthermore, I’m not sure if all of that even belongs to social media channels, either. I’d guess a bunch of it happens over email and private chat.

There are hundreds of ways that your customer will find you (or not find you) online and offline. In conversations over coffee, seeing your product on a shelf, in a Facebook ad, in a bus ad, in an article in a paper, while searching on google…the customer’s journey is not at all linear.

Okay, we may not know how every customer found us, but what we DO know is that when it comes to messages, word of mouth has always been the most effective way of reaching people.

According to study by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), online and offline consumer conversations and recommendations accounted for an average of 13% of consumer sales (or $6 trillion in annual consumer spending).

And that may not seem like a lot if you don’t have a comparison point, so here you go: word of mouth drives 5x more sales than paid advertising.

Okay, so…that’s 2.6% for paid advertising, and 13% for word of mouth — up to 20% btw in higher price categories — so then…what about the other 84.4%?

Like I said before, there are hundreds of ways your future customers will find you (or not find you). Advertising isn’t a silver bullet. Social media and word of mouth aren’t silver bullets. Email, door-to-door, public relations, influencer, relationship, scarcity, viral, event, search, direct, ambush, promotional, mobile, tele, affinity, guerrilla, evangelist, and all other types of marketing aren’t silver bullets.

No matter what type of marketing you invest in, you will never see an enormous ROI. The famous quote by John Wanamaker about 50% of advertising being wasted is not only questionable in its origin, but also accuracy in the percentage reported. Advertising, I’m afraid, has never been that effective.

Listen, good marketing means that you will be more findable, credible, and appealing as the standout choice when people find you and there are all sorts of ways that social can help with you being more findable, credible and appealing.

Here are just a few things that social is really good at in your marketing mix:

1. The ability to listen. The only thing that can bring you closer to your customers and potential customers would be standing in front of them. If you aren’t investing heavily in listening and learning from what you are hearing, you aren’t investing wisely — and I’m not just talking about people talking about your brand. I’m talking about knowing everything you can about your customers. Things you wouldn’t know by making the sale face to face.
2. Amplifying serendipity. Social opens you up to constant and amazing opportunities to participate in a broader conversation and by participating, you will find numerous opportunities to lead the conversation and make a great impression. If you’re not there, there are no opportunities.
3. Relationship and trust building. You aren’t going to strike up a conversation through the TV or radio. But that two-way conversation is built into social media platforms. It’s really awesome. You have so many opportunities on social to build trust.
4. Feedback. Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for customer surveys and focus groups, but your customers are offering it for free online. You just have to listen. But you get another kind of implied feedback, too, from analytics. You can’t really tell who paid attention to your television ad, but you CAN tell who watched your video all the way through, who liked it and shared it.
5. Increasing SEO. Content marketing and social are great ways to keep the traffic flowing to your site. It’s not as sexy as the other stuff, but search is such a big part of nearly every customer journey these days.

All of these unique advantages that social brings and yet, many brands continue to dismiss social as another sales pitching, ad pushing platform.

Social isn’t a silver bullet, but what it IS good at is listening, opportunity creation, relationship and trust building, feedback and SEO it’s GREAT at. Invest in THAT.