5.3.1 Major recommendation
Considering the literature review and survey results the following major recommendations were
formularized.
Social media should become an integral part of the marketing strategy for PACs. It is essential for
PACs to realize that traditional advertising gradually becomes less effective over time. Today customers use
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Web 2.0 sites to attain valuable information. Moreover, customers are savvier, taking advantage of modern
technologies, e.g. using social media for ticket purchase and accessing to downloading and streaming
audio/video music files. These are just a few of the reasons for building increased involvement of concert
visitors in social media activities. Delay in using modern technologies and understanding the shifting
preferences of the market will potentially threaten the ability of PACs to retain their core group of
customers. Those companies that become first adopters in social media marketing will be able to take the
market share of the competitors who are not present there.
The number of actively used social media tools should not be limited to the most popular sites.
There is
no doubt that Facebook and Twitter are the current leaders in social media for almost all industries including
performing arts. Performing arts companies could benefit more from social media by increasing the number
of social media tools they actively use for marketing. For example, the survey results indicated low usage of
Music 2.0 tools. Music-related websites with social networking features may significantly increase the
coverage of the target audience of PACs. Maintaining a customer profile and connecting with the audience
on Music 2.0 websites could be a great opportunity for PACs to promote events and ticket sales among
other opportunities.
Developing social media marketing should be strategic and well planned. Leveraging social media tools
spontaneously without any concrete plan may not bring effective results in promoting business. PACs
should think strategically to monetize social media tools and achieve the desired results. Concrete
objectives should be defined when developing social media strategy. Moreover, it is necessary to plan and
use a set of social media tools and tactics to achieve each objective. Selection of social media tools should
be based on their relevancy to achievement of the marketing objectives. Social media embraces a plethora of
tools that can be used to achieve objectives. For example, there are various social media tools that allow the
passionate supporters of the non-profit organizations to set up individual online donation pages to fundraise
from their friends or families, e.g. chipin.com, sixdegrees.org, change.org, changingthepresent.org, and
firstgiving.org. Using volunteers and supporters of the organization on their behalf is the traditional method
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of fundraising for non-profits. The difference in using online tools for fundraising could make them more
effective and efficient. These new tools are specifically designed for fundraising, allowing the users to
upload pictures/video and provide information about their involvement in the cause. Moreover, these social
media tools for fundraising offer widgets that can be connected with social networking websites or blogs to
reach out to existing online communities. Some of these tools are equipped with functions that allow
monitoring progress of the campaign.
It is very important to develop tactics once a set of relevant tools for achieving each of the objectives is
compiled. Success does not lie with a particular tool. It is necessary to know how to use them and to monitor
the results to understand contribution to ROI. Facebook may be effective now without significant efforts.
But it is only a short-term perspective. It is essential to learn the main principles/mechanism of social media
marketing that can be applied via any other tools. For example, MySpace, once extremely popular, lost its
clot after the advent of Facebook. In the near future something new may come up and the popularity of
present social networking websites could steeply decline. Hence, continuous change and improvement are
necessary.
Simple presence in social media without well-planned strategy will not guarantee success nor positive
outcomes. Marketing professionals of PACs should be aware of the following steps when developing a
marketing strategy in social media.
The first step is defining the target audience of an organization in social media. It is essential to develop
insight about the target audience’s needs and interests, e.g. web resources they use, most common topics
they are interested in, etc.
Once the target audience is defined, the next step is developing marketing tactics that will appeal to the
customers’ needs and interests.
The content should be interesting to web users of a venue. The form of a marketing message may vary
depending on a social media tool and objective the campaign. For example, the form of the marketing
message on YouTube is video, while the content for blogs is a text message. But the form of the message is
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not the most important. The content of the message is of crucial importance. The main goal of each tactic is
total involvement of the audience. For example, PAC can use a ticket sale promoting a concert. However, a
free ticket is not a tactic. An interesting contest/online event would be a tactic that could appeal to brand
advocates. A ticket sale should be used as an incentive to stimulate your brand advocates to share
information about the concert.
For creating brand awareness and building a fan community, it is very important to involve fans with
interesting conversations, posting blogs, or active discussions boards. The topics of marketing messages in
social media should appeal to the customers.
The main goal of the social media activity is involving the fans in conversations to help them interact
with each other. Simple postings about concert venue news do not stimulate them to get involved. People
are not interested in just a concert venue, but music and all related experiences they may garner.
Conversations should be focused on the music trends, singers, songs the fans are interested in and more.
Moreover, people would always be interested in something very intriguing, e.g. the life of the artists,
favorite songs, etc. One of the methods to make people talk is asking questions and creating a dialogue with
them. Posting questions initiates dialogue among people. When people sense a high level of involvement
with the PAC and other customers, this may stimulate further participation.
Creating a donor community as one of the main goals a marketer should keep in mind while creating
the content for social media. Connecting potential donors in the community and engaging them in a cause
could serve as the effective tactics to humanize the process. Instead of automatic procedures, such as a
button “click here to donate”, telling a story can make a cause more personal and touch the feelings of
people. In turn, authentic connections between people create movement. From the affect of a touching story,
community members could communicate with each other and further spread the story to others outside the
community. This process would increase the outreach of a fundraising campaign.
Pull marketing should not be overlooked
.
Using the words in the content that can be used by the
customers in the search system may enormously increase web traffic. Moreover, keywords for tagging
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should be selected based on words the potential reader would use in the search engine. There are many other
tips the social media writer should be aware of to ensure effective generation of traffic to a website.
In general, the content in social media should be valuable and relevant to customers and prospects. Web
users may be more interested in discussing those topics they are interested, rather than commercial
information. Moreover, it is of crucial importance to keep communication with the web users interactive and
mutually beneficial. If a company asks a question from its fans and expects them to answer, it is necessary
to maintain a dialogue to instill the feeling to the customers that their voices had been heard. Interaction
would be more valuable when PACs involve its employees. Responses to fan comments encourage
interaction. Providing valuable information to the web users and keeping interaction with the audience can
insure a strong relationship with a fan community based on trust and loyalty is built.
When creating a social media tactic, a company should always be innovative. Exploring the Web to
find new innovative solutions is valuable. There are a lot of applications and instruments that can be
integrated to ensure a higher diffusion.
However, streaming media and music downloads are not the only options to engage customers into
social media activities. For example, PACs can use iPhone applications to allow their patrons to keep track
of concerts and book tickets. There are always new technologies that can be utilized by PACs. It is essential
to make use of the advancing technology to facilitate experiences and meet expectations of the concert
visitors.
Thus, this study showed PACs use various social media tools to achieve their marketing objectives at
various level of effectiveness. However, the tactics and tools of social media marketing used by PACs are
still limited. The recommendations provided in this study can be used to achieve better results of social
media marketing in PACs. While the content is of utmost importance, the ever developing and changing
technologies should not be overlooked as channels of getting the content to the end user. Similarly,
identifying the channel is only a small part of the job, while the effective means of using each of them is a
determinant of success.
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