Generating interest via online channels

Besides costing significantly less than traditional media, online media allow companies to track consumer data and form two-way communication platforms that enhance the relationship between companies and target consumers. 

Another benefit is that online media can tap the positive influence of bloggers or third-party reviewers who purchase these products to excite target consumers when extolling their benefits. 

As a result, many people who possess in-depth strategic and technical knowledge of online marketing have established their own companies which offer an array of online and offline strategies, and the latest online technology that they promise will attract target consumers’ attention. 

Many individuals have also become reputable bloggers who have won the trust of their followers, and this power has made them increasingly become a part of many marketing strategies to support and endorse new products and organisations.

As a result of the advances and influence of different target consumers that are moving in many different directions, many marketers constantly seek new strategies that will draw consumer attention to their products in the hope that they will spread the news by word of mouth to their social network.

It should be noted that most online marketers work by trial and error. In fact, some agencies even admit that they learn new lessons and strategies together with their clients. 

Due to increasingly rapid changes in technology and marketing formats, it is not always easy to assure clients that what had worked successfully in the past will always be relevant to the present and future. 

Conversely, sometimes using conventional strategies can generate unexpected success. There are many factors that are beyond the marketers’ control and expectations which contribute to the success or failure of each campaign.

A case where I personally experienced a level of success beyond expectation was with Aspire Sathorn-Thapra, when we sold the entire project of more than 1,200 units within two days. Demand was so high that customers even queued up one day ahead of the launch date. 

Even though many people felt that the timing of our launch coincided with an economic downturn which would elicit little interest, it was our ability to read market sentiment which we captured through social networks that clearly indicated sufficient demand due to ongoing positive and negative feedback about the project in our consumers’ online community, where people shared their thoughts and generated many ideas for us. 

What the agency had planned online by seeding, creating search-engine optimisation, banners and registration pages were merely complementary elements of these online networks and a source of basic consumer information. Their work did not generate genuine interest in the product.

In the example that I cited, I discovered the in-depth feelings and demands of our target consumers by creating activities aligned with their daily lifestyles patterns, by using language that they use, and feeding information to them during their peak activity periods.

For this reason, we are witnessing many organisations creating new divisions with a strong understanding of the contexts of the industry, company and their customers capable of devising strategies and activities to maximise customer response. 

Each organisation needs to create their own network to directly interact with consumers and set up technologically savvy teams to study and seek out critical tasks to generate genuine interest and engage customers at an in-depth level to understand their needs. 

Assembling these factors which are tailored to each organisation is more important than finding or being an expert in social networks and online media. 

There is little use in finding an expert possessing a broad-ranging understanding of products who operates on the basis of transferring strategies from one industry to another, even when the customer bases of each organisation differ markedly. In such cases, those online agencies are merely technicians on a par with software programmers and hardware experts.