5 Important things I have learned this term

This term has been one where I feel I have learned more about marketing than perhaps any other term in my college career.  This fact I believe, is in no small measure helped by this class, therefore I find it difficult to narrow my list down to only five things that I feel are the most important.  Nevertheless, I will try.  The list, in no particular order is as follows:

1.  Impressions
Impressions is simply how many times an ad is presented to consumers, it is important to note that it is not necessarily how many people see it.  It may be surprising but I had hardly heard this term before this class, I had a vague idea of what it meant but I was by no means confident in my knowledge of it.  I think that an understanding of what impressions are, and how they can be a useful tool is fairly vital to a marketer.  Having the ability to actually quantify roughly how many people you are reaching is very helpful in a profession where so much of the work is often difficult to measure how successful the campaign is.  It is also a useful statistic because it can be applied to nearly every medium that a marketer utilizes.  It can also be useful as a comparison tool.  For example if I was considering two different campaigns I could take the projected impressions and divide by how it would cost me to run the campaign, then I have a simple metric to compare which campaign would probably be more efficient.  It wouldn't be exact, but if one campaign was much more efficient it would probably aid in the decision.

2.The power of organic search
Organic search is simply the results google or any search engine gives me after I search something.  These are in opposition to the ads that appear and to the side of the organic search results.  Before this class I hadn't really thought about how having a good site could provide a free way of getting more customers to view one's site and potentially make purchases.  I of course knew that google had a complicated algorithm that ranks sites so that my search results are optimized but it hadn't occurred to me that it could be an effective and not exactly free but relatively cheap way of getting more traffic to my companies site.  It also has the added benefit of not really being advertising, in the sense that nobody is being directly paid to have it appear at the top, it is at the top by virtue of being genuinely a good site.  This is definitely something that I will keep in mind as I move forward in my marketing career.

3.Message Strategies
Message strategies are essentially the tactic that the ad tries to utilize in prompting you to purchase the product.  There are three types: cognitive, affective, and conative.  These breakdown to essentially: trying to make a rational argument for cognitive, making you feel something and therefore connecting with the brand for affective, and prompting you to purchase the product right at that moment for conative.  I think keeping these strategies in mind when I am working on ad campaigns in the future will be helpful because it will help me to make the right appeal for the product I am attempting to sell.  It will also help me to keep the message consistent with the other aspects of the campaign that I am working on.  For instance if we are attempting to portray in a healthy light it would probably be best to use either a emotional or rational messaging strategy.

4.Google Adwords
Google adwords are the first few results that come back when you search something on google that have a little yellow box that marks it as an ad.  Companies can pay google to place ads in the highlighted areas in the hopes that people will click on them and bring business to their website.

This can be an effective tool in today's world as more and more people are looking for products and solutions on the web.  It is also fairly reasonably priced and it is easy to set any budget on it and still see some results given the budget isn't too minuscule.  Before this class I had no idea how this type of advertising worked and now I feel that I could employ it reasonably effectively, especially after sitting down with it for a week, for a company if they wished me to.

5.  The power of social networks to build brand loyalty and engage customers
Social networks are sites like Facebook and Twitter, given the ubiquity of these sites I will not go into defining them other than to say they are a way of connecting with people of the web in a multitude of ways.  As more and more people are entering the world of social media more and more companies are giving their customers ways of connecting and communicating with them.  In today's interconnected world almost all companies cannot afford to ignore social networks.  Before this class I knew that many companies had social media presences but I was largely ignorant of how they interacted with their customers.  Now however, I have a grasp of how to utilize these networks to build customer loyalty and help retain customers who are unsatisfied with their experiences.  For example, if I was asked in a job interview for a marketing position at a brewery what sites I think they should have a presence on I would have an answer for them.  My answer would probably depend on where they are and their distribution network but I would say Facebook just because of the reach it has and Twitter because of its ability to show customers new and exciting offerings.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is defined by Merriam-Webster as the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.  When it comes to advertising, I would define it as allowing unknown parties outside the company to contribute to a marketing campaign and create advertisements on their own.

This is a great example of a commercial that was crowdsourced

To me it seems that there are several advantages to crowdsourcing ads.  The most obvious being that they are very cheap.  Where normally a company has to pay for an ad agency to produce an ad with a great deal of expensive equipment and processes, the company only has to pay for some way to reward the winning entry or if they do have to take on some of the costs of production they are surely minimal compared to the big bill from an ad agency.  It seems to me that another another aspect of crowdsourcing that makes it attractive would be the fresh ideas that are brought to the table.  When a company gives the public the opportunity to create an ad, they are opening up the process to such a huge pool of intellect that creativity will surely be in no short supply.  These fresh ideas can propel the ad campaign from a good one to a really great one.  The fact that people know that it was created by someone else who just wanted to do it rather than some big faceless ad agency could also help them to identify more with the brand and pay more attention.

In general I would say that the biggest critics of the new trend of crowdsourcing would be the ad agencies and more specifically the creatives within the ad agencies since companies that choose to crowdsourcing are choosing to do that rather than use the ad agency.  If everyone embraced crowdsourcing than I suspect that a great many ad agencies would find it difficult to stay afloat.  I think specifically it is the creatives within the ad agencies that dislike this trend the most.  I say this because it seems they are saying something along the lines of "I have x number of successful ad campaigns under my belt, I know how to do this well and you shouldn't trust amateurs with your brand because I know better than them what the best way to convey your message is."
Thanks for reading my post on crowdsourcing!