Published on the 07/05/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Australian airline Qantas runs 50 marketing campaigns a month – and despite senior executive enthusiasm for it, social media marketing isn’t delivering a standout success…
Senior executives with corporate marketing responsibility have warned that social media offers no silver bullets. Speaking during a panel session at Cebit in Sydney this week Stephanie Tully, executive general manager of commercial ventures and marketing for Qantas Loyalty, said; “Business people can jump on things and view them in isolation.
“We run 50 marketing campaigns a month. Senior managers at Qantas say ‘we need to do more in Facebook’. But why are we here?
“Social is the one channel where we are not getting the best results from marketing success,” she added.
Chris Riddell, chief digital officer for Mars in Australia and New Zealand, said that while his company analysed commentary on social networks for consumer insight – going so far as to appoint clinical psychologists to his team to understand consumer behaviour – he was more cautious about using social networks as a marketing medium.
“Business tends to veer back and say Facebook Facebook Facebook. But as a platform Facebook is going through a lot of change. The ROI is more tricky now than it used to be,” said Riddell noting that Twitter was proving more popular.
He also raised a note of caution about the expertise many traditional marketing and advertising agencies may have in social media.
“Our marketing division is trying to keep up and they have agencies banging on the door,” said Riddell. He said part of his role was to help educate Mars’ marketers about digital advances so they know the questions they should be asking and be able to hold agencies to account.
“The agencies all say you ‘need an app, which will develop this reach and access these communities’. ” Riddell said it was important to educate marketers in order to be able to hold agencies to account over their claims.
Tully agreed that the pace of change meant it was important to develop internal marketing capacity which understood the rapidly changing landscape and the impact that was having on the business, arguing that was harder for an agency to grasp.
Kate Vale, managing director of streaming music service Spotify, said that agencies were overworked and agreed they might be overwhelmed by the pace of technological change.
The pace of change is also an issue facing consumers she said, meaning that an element of technical education needed to be factored into marketing campaigns. Vale said that her company was about to launch a campaign explaining the concept of streaming music which was an important first step toward ultimately marketing the Spotify brand.
