Social media marketing - The why and the how
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Traditionally, marketing has always been about taking your product or service to your target customers and convincing them to try it out. Conventional media like newspapers, television channels have been great for this purpose in the past, but today’s day and age needs a more agile, more flexible means of reaching your customer. The solution is simple - social media marketing!
You might say “Why social media?”. Just one factoid will be able to give a convincing answer to this question. Out of the seven billion (and growing) people on the planet, about 5.11 billion use a phone. Out of these, over 3.26 billion people use social media apps/platforms and each of them uses 8 social media accounts on an average. So, hypothetically speaking, there are over 25 billion ways in which you can reach your customer, assuming that you want to reach each one of those. If that still hasn’t convinced you (we highly doubt it!), read on to know how social media marketing is your best bet to establish your brand in the minds of your customers.
Some of the biggest benefits of using social media marketing to reach your customers are:
1. Reach your customers where they are. Social media marketing lets you “push” your content and ads to your customers while they are using their phones, rather than needing them to “pull” information like they would do with newspapers or TV.
2. Since you know who you are reaching out to, and can accordingly customise your content, you can personalise your content for your target audience.
3. You get access to a rich variety of information about how your campaigns are performing. You can use this information to measure their impact and fine-tune them for better results.
Now let’s take a look at how we at Idecution go about designing a social media marketing strategy for our clients. This is what we do:
1. Understand why the client wants to be on social media, or why social media marketing would be a good option for the client. Typically, this is because the target audience regularly/frequently uses social media or because the client has no social media presence and wants to establish their brand.
2. Determine the target audience. A “spray it everywhere” approach does not work well and can be counter-productive. It is essential to understand the target audience based on the client’s needs and then focus on the platforms where it is present. For example, if a client’s target customers are working professionals, LinkedIn would be the best place to reach them.
3. Decide on the type of content to create and share. The content needs to be engaging and suited to the taste of the customers, and convey the brand image and message of the client effectively. Depending on the brand message, we can decide on which content (images, videos etc.) needs to be created.
4. Just as it is important to know who your target audience is and where it can be found, it is equally important to know when to reach out to your customers. For example, if your target audience consists of travel enthusiasts, they are more likely to be active on social media in the evenings and on the weekends, when they are planning their next trip. Tuning your campaign to your audience’s online presence will always get you better results.
5. Last but not the least, it is necessary to arrive at a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) beforehand to measure the performance of the campaign. This helps to gauge and optimise the campaign so that it gets better results for the client.
Now that you know what the social media marketing benefits are and how they can help you, the next step is quite simple. Yes, all you need to do is get in touch with us.