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Bdaily talks to media expert Alan Stevens

Marketing doesn’t have to cost you the earth, and you could actually do it for free, according to media expert Alan Stevens, who is the director of MediaCoach. He spoke to Bdaily ahead of the “Marketing the Art of” event on 20th November at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne, and told us about how businesses should be thinking about collaborative and integrated media.

Alan told us: “I’m seeing trends and waves in the way businesses are using different types of media. I think there was a wave for a while to move a lot of stuff onto to social media, however people are starting to backtrack, and this is for two reasons; one because they can’t quantify the impact of social media which is frustrating to people who like numbers, but the second thing is they’re not quite sure how to market on social media, because it’s not really about marketing it’s more about communicating and collaborating.”

He went on to explain how marketing has changed and how businesses need to change with it.“The big change as I see it is that people are now making buying decisions in a very different way with regard to how a company markets themselves. They’re doing a huge amount of research, up front, and they’re responding to specific marketing pushes. A lot of work I’m doing now, is to see how companies can act as an influencer online but not to act as somebody who effectively tells you what to buy, because that doesn’t work anymore.

“This would mean getting involved in Twitter and Facebook, listening and taking note. There has been a certain arrogance in the past of some people in marketing saying, we just need to tell people the advantage of this and they’ll buy it. The alternative is more collaborative and if you listen very carefully to your customers, they’ll tell you what to sell them and will give you the opportunities to sell.”

Bdaily asked what the biggest obstacle is that companies face when it comes to becoming involved in social media as a marketing tool.

“The biggest obstacle is fear, people are fearful of social media because they don’t understand. It’s complex and uncertain, which businesses shy away from; businesses like certainty. They’re going to have to look for other ways of measuring response because most buying decisions are made through word of mouth.

“I tend to make myself unpopular in the marketing community because i’m saying don’t spend a big marketing budget and of course the marketing companies are saying you need to run a big tv campaign and a big marketing campaign when actually you don’t- you just need to be clever.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .