Built to Grow

Chapter 9Marketing and Communications Strategy

‘In marketing I’ve seen only one strategy that can’t miss, and that is to market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last.’

—John Romero, Inventor

If there has been one significant change to the way in which people and brands interact over the past decade, it’s social media. The impact of social media has been massive and has brought about such disruptive change that you might well have missed the full scope of it. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest one on the planet today, smaller only than China and India in terms of population . . . and not smaller by much. It carries more traffic than Google in the United States and almost 50% of the mobile internet traffic in the UK is Facebook.

That isn’t just an interesting fact however; for companies wishing to keep control of their brand reputation, it is both a warning and an opportunity. Since 90% of consumers today trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust your painstakingly developed advertising, this puts substantial power into the hands of the people you’re trying to reach. Combine that preference for peer recommendations with the vast number of people on Facebook and you have to ask yourself: are you happy with what they are saying about you?

Those everyday people conversations are taking place all over: 34% of bloggers review products and more than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of ...