The Game Changer With Limitations

At my internship I have learned a lot about marketing especially strategies that are particular to the entertainment industry. I have had the opportunity to help with social media marketing at work and have noticed over the past year that it is a great tool but it has a lot of limitations. It is the game changer with limitations in my eyes. Let’s say it is a week before Mother’s day and you decide to put together a promotional campaign to grab the attention of sons and daughters across the nation to lead them to your online site to do some serious gift shopping. How are you going to go about targeting all of your potential customers? You could send them informative emails with stock photos of delighted mothers wearing your new magenta diamond encrusted necklace, but then how are you going to get through all of the clutter of the other emails and spam they get? You could also invest in direct mail, print ads, and other traditional media but that would be just too costly. You pause for a second and think you have come to a revelation; you decided to put together a social media marketing campaign to gain optimum coverage and reach. A 120-volt bright compact fluorescent mini spiral bulb goes off in your head and you could not be any happier. You open your turquoise laptop and do not waste any time updating your FaceBook page, Twitter page, and YouTube videos. Within three minutes, you have four FaceBook “likes” and you are overjoyed. This means people are definitely going to purchase your new magenta jewelry line, right? That is a difficult question, one that marketers try to answer every time they develop a social media marketing campaign. Before the abundance of consumer behavior research and availability of data on purchasing behaviors, marketing was never as complex as it is today. One of the newest and important parts of marketing communications is social media. Marketers are investing more in social media marketing although two of its major limitations are measuring its return on investment and effectiveness of a campaign. Marketers can monetize social media by investing in sponsored Tweets, Google AdSense, or even sponsored YouTube advertisements, but in order to have long-term success, they need to take advantage of social media’s power to reach target markets and encourage word of mouth as well as understand its limitations.