Marketing used to be all about the 4 P’s: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. However, with the evolution of technology and the introduction of social media as part of the marketing mix, the 4 P’s have been transformed to the 4 C’s. Industry experts have defined the 4C’s model in different ways.
The one we have chosen to discuss today includes the concepts of Customers, Content, Community, and Conversation. Throughout this article, Egluu identifies a framework for marketers to use in order to create successful social media strategies.
#1 Customers
Since social media is all about customer relationships, the focus is obviously on customers. Indeed, customers should drive the decision-making. In this respect, marketers must find them, understand their habits and behaviors, identify their needs and wants and determine how to respond to them. Depending on the audience targeted, the primary focus should consequently be on where customers spend their time, what content would be helpful and in what context do they expect to receive it. Once this has been identified, marketers should be able to select the channels most relevant to their audience.
#2 Content
As it has already been demonstrated, content is king. Indeed, marketers must provide valuable information that meets their customer needs in order to build strong customer relationships. Communicating sales messages only is highly inadvisable. Social media users want to be informed, educated and also entertained. Sharing and creating valued content is definitely the glue for social media engagement.
#3 Community
A vibrant community has size and strength and is built around a meaningful social object, which can be a person, a place, a product or an idea. It is important that marketers develop communities on social media that are made up of their prospects and clients. Communities are constituted of peers and experts in the field who interact with each other while creating and sharing their own content on the social platform. Indeed, community uses customer-generated content in a customer-aligned context for a customer-serving purpose.
#4 Conversation
The difference between traditional advertising and marketing and social media is the difference between talking at someone and talking with them. Marketers must leverage traditional monologue marketing principles in order to succeed in the social dialogue-marketing model. More conversation and less promotion is consequently required. Marketers have to listen, monitor and respond to their customers by the use of social media.
As a result of building the right communities and sharing the right content, conversations should occur naturally.
The final piece of the puzzle is conversion. Conversion is what marketers should get when doing the 4 Cs correctly. It is the point to which the strategy developed should lead to.
