1. Understand Your Customers & the Market You are Operating in.
The presence and availability of too many social media channels might be confusing. Do we really need to spend all our time, effort, and money on all the available channels? No. The way conventional marketing starts with Market Research, the same can be applied to Social Media Marketing. Identify the top three channels where your target audience is likely to spend most of their time. Choose only those channels and distribute your time, effort, and budget and invest only in those.
Some key facts and figures that can help:
- More than 90% of youngsters who are fashionably termed as ‘Millennial’ are the most active social media users. Add to them 75% of the GenNext who are born later and around 50% of their parents makes it an even huge number.
- Facebook is the most popular social media platform and has an active user base of more than 2.5 billion people.
- Most of the traffic to all the websites in the world comes from social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. In terms of pure engagement, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ rule the roost.
2. Analyse What Your Competitors Do.
It is always good to have one of your eyes over the competitor’s camp. It can provide great insights not only on the product/service you are competing in but also on the market scenarios on ground. It is a great reference material of what is working and what is not, in the market. A variety of online tools are available to analyse competition and their online activities. The hits and misses can be wonderful sources of inspiration or lessons learnt from your competitors.
3. Start with the End Objective in Mind.
We all know that without setting a target or a goal nothing can be achieved. It is the most important step as it defines the start, the journey and means to achieve the desired destination. It will also help you to calculate the Return on Investment with respect to your advertising spends on the social media. Targets/goals are the big idea which can be broken down into small actions that you need take, to make them happen.
The best way is to set up targets/goals is to link them to data. How much you want to achieve in the given time and how much you are willing to spend in terms of budget can be the good enough data points. Finer tweaking can be done to these numbers based on the analytics that is so easily provided by all the social media platforms.
4. Build Your Brand Image and Recall.
A Brand is a promise that your product or service makes to the Customer without you telling them. Buyers end up buying products or services which they associate with easily. Social Media plays a big role in building this association. One can communicate a story which your customers want to be a part of. It is not merely highlighting the features of a product or a service. It is creating a thirst in the minds of the customer which makes them buy from you. Having consistency in terms of using company logo, colours, fonts, style, meaningful images, words, language, etc. goes a long way in building a brand that can be easily recalled.
5. Do not Just Connect, Engage!
In today’s world, we need to use the power of influence to tilt the decisions in our favour. Marketing with the help of Social Media Influencers is a catchphrase today. These trending people are the so-called thought leaders who have a huge fan following. Like a ‘pied piper’ these Social Media Influencers can lead the target audience to make their buying decisions. They also play a dual role like ‘Brand Ambassadors’. The devoted followers take their words on face value.
Around 50% Customers vouch that they depend on the approval of the Social Media Influencers for making their buying decisions. It is therefore of paramount importance to choose the right personas as Social Media Influencers.
Please contemplate the first five steps. We will cover the remaining five steps in the next blog – ‘ The Ten Steps Formula of using Social Media Marketing for Business Growth – Part2 ‘
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Creating a Brand Kit | Logo Designing | Digital Marketing I Website Development | Social Media Engagement Services | SEO | Paid Campaign Management | Offline Advertising | Corporate Events | Graphic Designing
Give us an opportunity to work on your social media marketing and you can continue to focus on your core strength. Together we can increase the Aura of your Brand!
