Today, online marketing means not only being where your customers are, but also knowing the right ‘amount.’ Being on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are all great, but for consumers, it can sometimes be overwhelming. Remember that the goal of online marketing and social media isn’t to bombard customers and fans with your products and promotions. Just how no one likes pop-up advertisements and rarely go back to sites that have them, customers and fans will lose interest and more importantly trust in your brand if you are overpowering them with your message.

Successful social media and online marketing campaign should always do two things: Listen and Learn.

Why You Need To Listen

In school, the importance of listening skills are repeated over and over. Whether it’s lecture or a business meeting, listening to what others have to say is extremely important. With that said, listening to what your customers or fans are saying is extremely important. Ignoring what your market is saying about you is essentially turning your back on those that made you who you are.

For companies, the success of marketing campaigns are based on dollars and cents. With the evolution of online marketing though, this may all change. Because of the open communication lines online, consumer sentiment has a huge part in the success of products, campaigns, and brands. A great example of this is the impact that users on Twitter had on the highly controversial movie, ‘Bruno.’ In an industry that thrives off word of mouth advertising, Twitter users who voiced their negative opinions about the movie in turn dissuaded others from watching it. During that weekend, negative reviews of Bruno were rampant on Twitter and Facebook. Although the opening weekend was a huge success, the subsequent days following it were nothing short of disappointing. Could this have been avoided? Absolutely. Not only were critics uneasy about the content of the movie, but in the months leading up the movie, Facebook and Twitter users voiced their feelings about leaked content of the movie.

Learn

Aside from listening to what your online community is saying, learning from them is also a key component to online marketing. Studying trends and how audiences react to content is extremely important. Through empirical evidence, organization should always be aware of how markets, fans, and customers are affected by trends and changes. A great example of this is when Facebook decided to change their site design early last year. Although there appeared to be huge animosity toward it, statistics showed that there was actually a drastic jump in site traffic and registration that remained constant after the new site design. Remember that you should never take what’s on the surface and to always dig deep. Online marketing is not just about having great content and pushing it out there for the online world. It involves constant change and the ability to re-invent your campaign at any moment and still remain relevant.