The keynote session at the Marketing Automation Virtual Summit by ETBrandEquity.com by Professor Niklas Myhr, the social media professor at Chapman University covered different aspects of what automation or artificial intelligence can achieve in today’s social media centric world. Myhr spoke about the opportunity the digital age offers marketers and how the sky is the limit if one were to ask the right questions, and use the correct tools.

One of the big tradeoffs since the internet came into play has been between trying to reach a lot of people versus communicating in a rich manner. “Can you find a trade off? Where do you put yourself on this trade off? Should we go for many with low levels of richness? Or should we go for high degrees of richness with only reaching a few people? And the promise of the internet is that you can do both. Is it possible? Can you go out there and get the best of both worlds and what would be implied? Can you scale personalisation? Is it truly possible? Or do you have to limit yourself? I think these are some of the questions that come to mind,” said Myhr.

He went on to list the four steps involved in the interaction between a brand and a consumer. Starting with visibility, moving on to likeability, and then to trustworthiness followed by loyalty.

Visibility or discoverability is a true challenge in the digital world since one’s competitors have the same access to the consumers’ share of attention and wallet. When the consumer is spoilt for choice, the challenge of standing out from the crowd is huge. The question remains how it make yourself available. What are the platforms you’re going to use? Where are you going to invest your time and efforts? And how are you going to make sense of it?

“It’s all about making yourself not just visible, but also making a good First impression, once people find you, some people judge you for a simple things like are you even present on social media? And if you are present on social media, can you be dismissed quickly because you are not showing up in the right way? Do you have the wrong tonality, the wrong frequency, the wrong interactions, the wrong people hanging out there and a lot of things are being judged very quickly,” Myhr added.

According to Myhr, with a strong sense of curiosity, and learning and learning willingness, the future would be had by those that are continuously, not just curious, but obsessing about learning new things, testing new platforms, testing new responses. One of the keys for marketing automation is to help in that process.

Another aspect of social media and marketing is that online reputation management ties into building credibility also with the content that you produce. In this sense, content marketing and social media have a symbiotic relationship because social media needs content to have something to share while content marketing needs social media to share this content, Myhr concluded.

Source: Brandequity