Social marketing: You're global, now think local

Mediapost.com

26 August 2010

According to a recent poll of brand marketers by US-based Harris Interactive for Buddy Media, 72% of brand managers agree that social media offers great potential to reach existing and potential customers across the globe, but they are lacking tools and information to leverage it successfully.

On the heels of Facebook's announcement that it has reached 500 million users worldwide, the largest and fastest-growing two-way communication platform in the world, few companies are using Facebook to reach customers globally. According to the poll only one-third of large companies with revenues in excess of $100M are currently using Facebook to do so.

The biggest obstacles brand managers at large companies face when using social media to reach customers globally, says the report, include: Managing and maintaining information; Measuring success; and Keeping region and country-specific content fresh.

Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder of Buddy Media, says "... in order for bands to effectively reach consumers across the globe, they need to ... think global and act local... cost, scale, segmented audiences, inconsistent design and incomplete analytics... all local branding dilemmas... when it comes to social marketing."

The study found that 93% of marketers considered it at least somewhat challenging to reach audiences in local markets with a unified brand message, and the most popular tactics used to market to local audiences were websites with local content (69%), print ads (62%) and event promotion (59%). Less than half of respondents used social media fan pages for this purpose, and less than one in three used paid social media advertising.

Websites with local content were considered the most effective tactic, named by 30% of brand marketers, compared with just 10% who thought fan pages were best.

*Published with kind permission of Mediapost.com