THE IMPATIENCE ECONOMY™️ | Take Consumers on a SRM Journey

Social Retail Marketing is a new paradigm. One in which you take a consumer on a journey, build a relationship, create a two-way flow of engagement.

To reach, sell, and serve consumers in today’s “Impatience Economy”, companies need to take a consumer on a journey that starts with a story, an experience, a reason for someone to want to click on a social ad. A journey thar present frictionless choices, or clicks, for products or services, for consumers to choose. A journey that allows AI and marketers to analyze the path a consumer takes in engaging and buying a product or service to better serve them. With traditional marketing and advertising, touchpoints and call-to-action effectiveness are impossible to track

As the world reopens, you can slam the door shut on traditional retail and marketing. The old rules won’t apply. Instead, retailers must recognize that we’ve entered what I call “The Impatience Economy”. Consumers expect and want “Get now”, not just “Buy now”.

In traditional marketing, businesses had three core marketing options: television, radio, and print. And marketers were unable to really track performance or impact with any granularity. Fortune 500 companies spent billions developing slick commercials and paid to air them at the most widely watched events, such as the Super Bowl. Or they placed expensive ads in glossy trend-setting publications like Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ.

Smaller companies had to settle for radio spots on local stations, city billboards, or tacky inserts in newspapers.

And despite all that spend, marketers were essentially blind to the complex chain of events that lead or did not lead to engagement or a purchase.

Enterprises that thought of themselves as digital, just transformed what they did in television and print and created in essence digital billboards or broadcasts online, on Facebook or Google. It sounds digital and social, but it’s still one-way broadcasting and the objective is still to convince and bring a consumer to their store to sell them something.

Social Retail Marketing (SRM), changes all of that. It’s a new paradigm.

With SRM, you go to the consumer inside social media and you take a consumer on a journey, build a relationship, and create a two-way flow of engagement.

These journeys serve two purposes. First, to build trust. Second, to create a two-way channel so you can reach, sell, and serve consumers more effectively.

When you bring a consumer to the stage of showing them a product, you’ve already learned something about that potential customer. And by creating a SRM journey, you track each customer’s click, what they looked at, how long they looked at it, and when they lost interest or clicked “buy”, just to name a few data points.

You can create multiple journeys and use A/B testing to determine if you get a greater response for a red or a blue shirt, an indoor or outdoor setting, a handsome model or a regular-looking Joe, a famous person with blue eyes or a man on the street with brown eyes. With SRM you design journeys based on data, and use that data to refine your proposition to your potential customer.

A journey that begins and ends in a seller’s store, whether brick-and-mortar, website, or app, falls short in today’s Impatience Economy.

You need to go to where consumers are. You need to reach, sell, and serve consumers inside social media. This means eliminating as much friction as you can, not sending them to a website or app download. Give them the opportunity to “Buy now”, “Get now”.

People spend nearly 3 hours a day on their mobile phone using and engaging with social media. The lockdowns we went through in 2020 just increased that usage and, more impressively, it expanded the number and types of people (consumers) who started using social channels. Video conferencing and remote access elevated social and digital engagement tremendously; with virtual work, virtual school, virtual parties, virtual everything during the Covid lockdowns.

SRM mimics the service model of the long past and of high-end-retail experiences. With SRM, you get to know your customers and their preferences to serve them better. With technology and AI, you can do it more efficiently and effectively than ever. You can use that knowledge to personalize how customers discover and explore products, services, and promotions that you offer them. On the other hand, with traditional marketing and advertising, these touch-points and call-to-action effectiveness are impossible to track.

So what are you waiting for?

Hanging on to the past, living with entrenched attitudes, trusting traditional channels, sentimentalizing old triumphs — none of these are options in the today’s world. Change is scary. Change takes courage. If you can convince yourself there’s a way out, you’ll fail to summon that courage. Guaranteed.

The truth is that there is no way out. You’re facing a binary choice: adopt the SRM approach or be prepared to lose business to those who do. Be brave or be finished. The choice is yours.

By Augie K Fabela II, CEO & Co-Founder, FastForward.ai, The Social Retail Marketing Platform, that enables enterprises to reach, sell, and serve consumers inside social media; and Co-Founder & Chairman Emeritus of VEON, the world’s 10th largest mobile operator. http://linkedin.com/in/augie-k-fabela-ii.