Marketers prioritizing social media for product launches
Research among more than 730 senior marketers in the US, UK, and Australia by Five by Five found marketers now prioritize social over traditional channels such as TV, direct mail and radio, within their strategies for promoting new products. Three-quarters (74%) place social ahead of sales promotion (55%) and email marketing (53%).
“Social media has become the most important way to generate buzz for new products and services before they appear,” Five by Five Creative Director Martin Flavin said. “Shareable content and social engagement allow brands to create a groundswell of pre-launch interest in a way no other channel can match.”
As well as the ability to engage with billions of people around the globe, social media is also popular for product launches as campaigns can be created and implemented within relatively short timescales. More than two-thirds of marketers said they usually have around six months to prepare a new product launch which is a short time in which to prep a product and plan for those less accessible channels such as TV and radio.
However, Matt Lawton, managing director of Five by Five (Sydney), said that discovering social was a leading channel “was a surprise” and “urged marketers to ensure they understand paid social and the channel itself”.
“Paid social might be what a lot of marketers had in mind when they answered the question because you can’t use social media for the launch of a new product, service or brand unless you have a sizeable following,” Lawton told Mumbrella.
“With paid social I think there’s a very real challenge and perhaps a danger that an expectation is unfulfilled. It’s really easy to think you are going to generate earned media from social activity but that needs to germinate from a certain level of following and it’s very hard to build that following in a short space of time when you are launching a product.”
