New Media Marketing

Overview

New media marketing is a field that has arisen alongside the Internet. Broadly speaking, it can be defined as encompassing the promotion of products and services within online channels of information, including e-mail, social media, blog posts, and ads on websites. Researchers estimate that the average person in the developed world encounters several thousand advertisements per day, and an increasing number of these are presented via the Internet (Quinton, 2016). Advertisers are well aware of the trend driving people's attention more and more toward the online world, at the expense of media that have traditionally been used for promotional campaigns, such as newspapers, radio, and television. New media marketing exists to take advantage of this trend.

While in the past the primary metric used to measure the success of marketing activities might have been sales figures, this is not necessarily the case today. The new yardstick used for evaluating marketing is known as customer engagement. When a customer engages with a product or brand, it means more than a one-time sale would signify; it means that a mutually agreeable relationship has been established, where the customer does not simply use a product, but trusts it and its manufacturer and remains committed to the relationship. This commitment can even extend so far that the customer, on his or her own initiative, becomes an online advocate for the product and the company, suggesting that others use it and assisting others with using and maintaining it. When a company can create this type of relationship with even a small percentage of its customers, the rewards it can reap are substantial, because these customers will enhance the reputation and value of the company and its products for many years to come (Godey et al., 2016).

Further Insights

At first it might appear that new media marketing simply involves the conversion of old advertising practices and strategies to a different medium, from analog to digital. While this is necessary, it is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Marketing in the digital age is fundamentally different than it was in the past, because technology and the ready access to information have created a different kind of consumer for marketing campaigns to appeal to (Lamberton & Stephen, 2016). In the past, a large part of the marketer's role was consumer education—people didn't have any way of learning about new products, so the marketer would use different tools to first raise awareness about a product and then to explain to consumers how the product could help them. A company that invented a device to make washing machines more efficient might begin by advertising in newspapers, magazines, and on television and radio. Next, it would demonstrate the product at trade shows and conventions, and even visit individual retailers and consumers to explain the product and show how to use it. Much of this has been rendered unnecessary, and to continue using such outdated strategies can be a waste of money and effort at best—and at worst an irritation to potential customers.

Studies have shown that most consumers are informed about a product and its competitors before they ever reach out to a sales person; they have researched what they want online and looked at reviews from other consumers and from product evaluation websites, all before reaching out to the company that manufactures the product. This has forced marketers in the world of new media to develop different ways of interacting with their current and potential customers (Stebner, Baker, Peterson & Boyer, 2017).

Rather than focusing on building consumer awareness of a product, much of new media marketing concentrates instead on developing and strengthening relationships between a company and its clients or a product and its purchasers. This has given rise to the field of customer relations management (CRM). CRM is a set of procedures supported by specialized computer software, that when used in conjunction with one another make it possible for companies to create user communities composed of people who have purchased or are interested in their products. Customers can go onto the company's website and create an account for themselves by providing basic personal information and specifying a username and password. This account can then be used when they interact with the company, whether they are requesting some kind of assistance or simply doing their own research.

In many cases, a CRM will have a discussion forum built in, where users can interact with each other and with company representatives. There might be a forum for a specific model of a product or for an entire product line. For example, manufacturers of mobile phones typically have product forums for each model of phone they sell. In these forums, users can post messages about problems they are having with their device, and others may respond to offer advice about how to resolve the issue, or simply to share that they are experiencing the same difficulty. Some customers prefer to use the forums for their support needs, simply because the time required to receive a response can be much shorter. While these types of activities might seem better suited to a discussion of customer support practices, they also have a marketing component. By creating and maintaining a community of users, a company encourages people to use its products, and makes it more likely that they will trust the company and use other products that it develops. It is a type of strategy that is effective over the long term, as opposed to one that is intended to result in an immediate sale (Erqing, 2017).

An interesting tactic frequently used in new media marketing is to leverage the social networks of existing customers to reach others who might also be interested in a company's products. This can take different forms, but in general it involves a company either asking or requiring its customers to "spread the word" about their interactions with the company, by using social media (Choi, Fowler, Goh & Yuan, 2016). An example of this is a company that offers to give away one of its products for free to one lucky winner of a contest. To enter the contest, one is offered a variety of choices: post a tweet mentioning the company, share the contest details on Facebook, or e-mail one's contacts about the contest. Regardless of which option the user selects to enter the contest, the company is able to either inform the user's social network about its products, acquire the personal information of the user's contacts, or both.

Another important element of modern marketing is the use of social media influencers. Companies may pay people with large social media followings to use their products and even to encourage their followers to buy the goods. Sometimes companies send products to influencers in the hope that these individuals will review or promote the goods to followers. Influencers have become an essential element of many marketing campaigns.

Social media played an important role in new media marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the United States in 2020. Because of lockdowns and social distancing requirements, more people began shopping online. This enabled customers to avoid waiting in line and shopping in crowded areas. Those sheltering in place also spent more time on social media. People turned to social media for recommendations before buying products. Some social media platforms added additional ecommerce features so that shoppers could purchase products without ever leaving their platform.

Issues

In spite of its efficiencies, or perhaps because of them, some practices associated with new media marketing have raised privacy concerns among many consumers. One such practice is tracking. Tracking allows an online advertiser to employ software that scans a user's computer when the user accesses certain websites or views certain ads. It can also place information on the user's computer so that the advertiser may associate that computer's activity with the identity of a particular customer. To see this kind of tracking in action, one only needs to visit an online retailer with whom one has an account, log in, search for a random product, and add the product to one's shopping cart. Next, if one begins to navigate to other websites, totally unrelated to the product, it will often happen that the ads displayed on these other websites will be for either the same product or one very similar. If one is not accustomed to this happening, it can be a very unnerving experience, as one cannot tell how the system knew what ads would be relevant, or how much personal information the system knows. A similar chain of events can occur after the use of search engines to research a product or topic, with ads about that topic suddenly appearing thereafter (Keegan & Rowley, 2017).

From a marketing point of view, tracking has many advantages. Some of these are advantages to the consumer also, but many are only of use to advertisers. On the consumer side, tracking makes it possible for one to have information from a previous session saved for later use. Usually this is helpful when one begins shopping on a retail website, but is then interrupted after placing several items in the shopping cart but prior to checking out and paying for them. If one were not able to return to the computer until the next day and tracking was not in operation, then one would have to start over again, locating each of the items previously added to the cart, and adding them again. Depending on how well-designed the retail site is, this could be a very time-consuming process. If, however, tracking were in operation, the items would still be waiting in the cart when the user returned to shopping after the interruption, because the site would have stored the information about those items on the user's computer in the form of a "cookie," a file containing information about the user and his or her activities with regard to the site.

Another type of tracking that consumers sometimes find useful pertains to recommendation services. A recommendation service stores information about a user, and uses it to suggest new products that the user might be interested in, either by comparing words the user has searched previously with descriptions of new products, or by comparing the user's purchase history with the purchase history of other users. Such a system searches for instances where the user and several others purchased a product. It then searches the purchase histories of the others to see if they contain any products purchased by many members of the group, but not contained in the user's purchase history. If any such items are found, then when the user next visits the retailer's website, he or she will see a message that says something to the effect that "people who purchased X have also purchased Y," thus suggesting to the user that learning more about product Y might be of interest (McCabe, 2017).

Forms of tracking that have little relevance to consumers but are of great interest to retailers and are used by companies to learn as much as possible about those who have expressed interest in their products. The more information that companies can collect, the clearer the picture they have of who is interested in their offerings. Having a clearer picture, in turn, helps the company to make the product more appealing to those already disposed to like it. For example, if a toy manufacturer learned that the board games they sold for entertainment purposes were frequently being purchased by teachers at elementary schools, this might lead the company to develop advertising and outreach initiatives targeting teachers. While this type of activity on the part of retailers usually is not cause for concern, the spread of tracking into social media has for many people crossed a personal boundary of an altogether different sort.

For the average person, it is one thing to have an online retailer know that one likes to eat crunchy peanut butter and not the creamy variety, but it is much more serious if the retailer one buys peanut butter from suddenly seems to know that one is going through a divorce, is unemployed, or has a child with behavioral issues. These are the types of information that invasive tracking systems can potentially acquire by accessing a user's social media profiles. Nor are the potential dangers of such tracking merely hypothetical. With currently available technology, it is entirely possible for a life insurance provider to use invasive tracking methods to scan customers' social media history and activities and charge them higher rates (or deny coverage altogether) based on lifestyle data such as photos of one smoking, or engaging in dangerous hobbies such as extreme sports. Consumers have recently become aware of the possibility of scenarios like this one coming true, and as a result calls have begun for retailers to be required to give consumers the ability to opt out of such tracking (Felix, Rauschnabel & Hinsch, 2017).

Some companies have actually experienced backlash due to their invasive tracking, in which some potential customers actively avoid the company and its products simply because they are concerned that there privacy might be compromised. Missteps of this sort can be extremely costly for retailers and represent a form of new media marketing that has found its reach to exceed its grasp.

Bibliography

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