customer life cycle Archives - Page 2 of 4

The connected buyer in the social networking age: welcome to the ‘pull’ customer

When looking back at this week’s earlier post regarding the shift from selling to buying, I remembered an article I wrote a while ago about what I then called ‘the pull customer’.

The marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0, social media or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of people in the marketing and communication process, customer-centricity, more focus on value and relevance and so on.

One of the changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have increasingly become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process. Remember those words? Push versus pull marketing?

Social media marketing is not a replacement for other forms of marketing

When talking about social media marketing, many people look at the social media themselves, focus on the seemingly endless opportunities of social media marketing and forget the global picture.

Many people also seem to look at social media marketing as a replacement of other forms of marketing.

That is one of the reasons why I don’t want this blog to become known as some social media marketing hype kind of thing but why I try to focus as much as I can on the integration of social media marketing with other forms of marketing (like email marketing) and on the cross-fertilization that social media marketing enables when you use social media the right way and in the right phases of the customer life cycle.

Yes, in social media marketing, people (customers, prospects, partners, fans,…) are key and relationships are crucial but this does not mean that social media marketing is some kind of relationship marketing 2.0.