Social Media Marketing, though relatively nascent in comparison to traditional marketing, cannot be ignored anymore. Without an online presence, new brands remain unrecognizable and older brands tend to become forgettable. The primary purpose of social media marketing is to ensure that your brand becomes etched in your customers’ memory. This may not result directly in increased sales, but it will ensure that you are not forgotten.
Without a flexible, dynamic social media strategy, reaching out to your target audiences can get even harder. An online presence not only reminds your customers of your existence, it also helps you as a business to communicate with them directly. And the most important of all, you get direct access to your customers’ likes, dislikes, feelings, moods, style, choices, and everything in between. Though a double-edged sword, social media marketing can help you feel the pulse of your target audience and respond to each of its moods accordingly.
We bring you three key tips that will help you market yourself and stand out in the competitive social media landscape, and most importantly, be seen and heard by your customers.
Want to engage with your audience? Use the power of direct message marketing
Direct message (DM) marketing involves using the direct messaging features of various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to directly create meaningful, valuable relationships with your online audience and grow your network. The best ways to use it are:
Thanking an individual/business for following you, liking a post, engaging in a conversation with you online, and giving your business a shout out.
Giving them sneak peeks or discounts for being loyal followers.
Reaching out to individuals who don’t follow you but have tagged products/services similar to the kind you offer and telling them your brand story.
Thanking users or followers for tagging you in their posts for a positive experience they had with your brand.
Apologizing, if ever needed, to them for a failure to deliver (instead of engaging in a brutal public battle with them).
Use your own experience to create original content
Posting curated and original content regularly is essential to maintaining a strategic online presence. But all of it should not be based only on your online research or be a curation of information put out by other organizations. Use your own experience as a new business to create content and share your story or important information with them. For example, instead of telling your audience that Harvard conducted a study and found that 20% of their sample was vegan for health reasons and 40% was vegan for ethical reasons, use your own database of followers to extract similar data. For instance, if you are in the business of handmade soaps, you can (based on your own research) state that 40% of your own buyer/follower base is vegan or concerned about the environment, and by avoiding the use of harmful chemicals in your soaps, you are happy to be able to cater to a group of sensitive and aware customers.
Diversify your content across your social media pages
Each social media platform caters to a different audience and so thus suitable for a different kind of business. For more lifestyle-oriented products and services, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest do the trick. However, for a business-to-business service or product, LinkedIn or Twitter may prove a more useful platform. What you need to find out, however, is where your target audience is hanging out, and build content accordingly for them. For instance, pictures of wedding flower arrangements may not be a big hit on LinkedIn, and talk about improving the efficiency of supply chain management on Facebook can put off people who are there just to unwind. Simply put, you will do better investing time in developing content for and targeting audiences on a maximum of two platforms instead of spreading yourself thin over all platforms.
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