Boosting Your Business Through the Social Media

How was the world functioning,communication thriving and people interacting with each other before Facebook and the Social Media influx, i think things were pretty much progressing the way they should, companies and clients were communicating in the usual manner and businesses were attracting customers using the normal sales/brand promotion cycles.

What social media really did for us was to create a more efficient manner of communicating brand offerings and content sharing with people not only close to us but also people out of our physical reach, it really didn’t create a new “field” or “branch” in marketing 101 it actually complemented the already existing marketing techniques used for product and brand.

So by using social media and by understanding how  people use social media you can actually derive the most core marketing objectives out of it.

• Marketing aims to create awareness, it focuses at reaching as many people and relevant audiences as possible, how social media helps here; although you may be sending out the message to a handful of people, those handful further have their own friends, their friends have yet another set of friends,so on an so forth, social media helps in dissemination of the message to a broader scope an reach of focused audiences. All content sharing may not convert into promised purchases but if you are sharing content and your friends are further sharing it,it may end up being seen by more people at the days end, interesting,unique,appealing content has a virality and awareness level of its own.
• Sales, the biggest objective behind every marketer,when using the social media to do this create exclusive offers which might catch the eye of influence makers and in-turn allow them to generate it further among their friends, so instead of going to the masses,when it comes to using social media with the objective of generating sales try being as exclusive as possible.
• a very effective way of using social media is for creating loyalty of your brand among your followers,potential market, you need to use social media to promote your page and presence among your customers whenever you have access to it, create engaging content, visual and textual, create apps and mini competitions which would keep all audiences captivated and maintain interest in what the brand is offering.Get customers to engage with your content, it is very important, it helps in creating a deeper relationship with your customer an generate loyalty with them.

 

Marketing strategies relate very much to social media marketing strategies but you should not try to implement on the online front as they are, cater to offerings exclusively, one size DOES NOT fit all here. Brands in the New Age should be regular social media users, and should be helpful to customers in driving content based conversations by providing them the solutions which they are looking for.

Content Marketing Ideas Worth Putting to Use.

Time and time before i have mentioned, that social media is all about interacting and making connections, creating relationships and expanding your network. Traditional marketing loses out on this one aspect, as it falls dead on its face when it comes to creating a relationship, they “think ” they are establishing a relationship but the truth is that they really aren’t engaging enough with their customers, especially engaging with the customer in his own settings, (home,cafe,office,hotel room), Social Media does all that and much more.

You see its all about building a relationship with your customers and prospects that helps in building trust and turns prospects into buyers and customers into brand custodians,ambassadors and high value repeat buyers. How do you do that? by talking to them,engaging with them, and providing them with what they want to know, in the manner they want to know it…providing them with SUPER CONTENT.

Content Marketing is all about creating compelling,Liquid ( contagious,viral) content and just spreading it like wild fire over the internet.

you start this by first just asking the customer for his permission that you may send him content, this could be through asking them to like your page to deliver them with information and content which they would want to read and watch. Content marketing is not an easy job there are certain challenges which you need to face in order to construct good compelling content. these challenges start with actually finding the inspiration to generate ideas for content, then create it,make it relevant, how to resource it in the long term, and finally managing and moderating it.

The Multi-Media Reign

Traditional marketers do not put heavy faith in alternative media like videos and rich messages since they kind of consider it to be a temporary blip/ bubble in marketing which might fade after time. What they need to understand is that compelling content needs to be in more than one form, textual content just doesn’t cut it for audiences anymore,they need visuals,they need video,they need something to interact with something to “experience” the message with, hence the use of alternate media while making content is advisable, use photos,videos,animations and it WILL work.

in short here are a few ideas for creating compelling content.

Idea: Include images and Photos

Idea: Create a “liquid/contagious” Online video

Idea: Design visuals/grpahics which would explain the content in a better way

Idea: Use Infographics-the hottest trend in content nowadays 

Idea: Create Blog posts or e-Excerpts which are well structured, and relevant.

Hopefully if you guys delve into these elements in a little more detail you will understand what and how useful content marketing, more specifically compelling content marketing is.

 

Look at me…Buy ME : Making your Brand Work in the Social Media era

Enough yapping about What social media is? how social media work? blah blah. We now come to most basic of marketing questions, what do marketers want?….. and NO its not “high brand recall” or “creating a  brand image” it all comes down to how much moolah your brand is raking in, in the real world profits dictate future promotions and “loyalty” of the marketer towards his brand,if the marketer does not believe in the brand himself, he cant make a profit out of it even if hell freezes over.

Since i mentioned before digital has now become a natural part of many organizations and marketing plans,it has also provided a platform for brands to break conventional marketing barriers and excrete sales out of potential customers who might not be within a brands reach conventionally.

so in the spirit of  “marketing”,how do you make branding work on the social media; you start with.

• researching how many people from your target market are on the social media. CREATE A SEPARATE FACEBOOK COMMUNITY.
• have a constant stream of PARTICIPATION within the community.
• keep your peeps engaged on the page, if you notice participation from someone in particular on the rise, ENGAGE WITH THEM DIRECTLY,others will notice.
• if you have a brand which is a hit among the target audience, and you have “loyal follwers to it” good for you. People want to talk about a your brand, give them reasons to talk about it, CREATE GREAT CONTENT around it.

your customers can be spreading word about your brand through various different channels:

• they follow it.
• they tweet about it
• they paste Facebook updates on it/about it
• they retweet about it.
• they put up links, videos, pictures about your brand.

USE IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE.

• Most customers/users post only positive updates regarding a brand (females are much kinder in this aspect 🙂 )
• Generally its been seen that users who have “liked” a brand on facebook, have a larger number of followers and are greater influencers than people who are introverts on the Social Media.
• Another excellent way of “humanizing” your brand on social media is through creating a PERSONA for it.create a character around the brand,bring it to life by giving it a name for e.g. fido dido, direct all your posts through that persona for e.g. fido dido “likes” this, fido dido commented.Create engagement through it.
• Send promotions/Coupons on your brand community, make discounts and coupons available for online as well as physical users.
• consumers would like to get updates about your brand on and off, the most effective way is by short updates through Facebook, consumers prefer email notifications to a certain extent, but consumers absolutely are not fond of offline ads brands place about their promotions/ other things.

Bottom line, be THERE for your consumers, interact with them continuously through the social media,keep them interested…things should work out jusssttt fine for your brand then :D.