Simple Social Media Secrets to achieve your marketing objectives.
When I think social media, I often wonder, what is the purpose? The point?
With so many established brands and new business out there, it’s difficult to not wonder why they are here, what they have to say, and what they are trying to achieve.
It stands to reason that any brand using social media is trying to achieve one of three things:
- Customer Acquisition
- Customer Retention
- Brand Awareness
Customer Acquisition
One thing I’m not short of seeing. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, is competitions. Although not an obvious choice for many, competitions give emerging brands the chance to get their offerings noticed. If done correctly, potential new customers will see your offering and conversions are likely to increase.
Again, with earned media, many overlook the opportunity for display ads and sponsored links. On social media sites such as LinkedIn, we are able to display paid advertisements to a highly targeted, small group of crucial consumers. This gives the opportunity to keep spend down whilst acquiring these key customers.
Finally, with the growth of new technologies such as QR codes, we can marry our offline media with social and allow for integrated campaigns. The added support of social media will surely create a spike in acquisition.
Customer Retention
Social media allows for the all-important 2 way conversation. By being able to engage with the brands core consumers, we stand a better chance and creating important relationships, ultimately increasing customer retention.
Keeping up to speed with what our key consumers are thinking, is an often undervalued aspect of social media. On Twitter we can create lists to see how specific groups of people think and act. This gives us crucial insights into consumer behaviour and allows us to tailor our messages to suit their needs.
Mobile operator 02 has shifted its focus from acquisition to retention this week. Only 16% of marketers say social media is most effective for acquisition. Perhaps this is reason enough to use social media to boost retention?
Brand Awareness
Word of Mouth, perhaps the most powerful tool at our disposal is key to building brand awareness. Recommendations through social media, especially Google+ (which now show likes as votes of confidence in search engine listings) shows unaware consumers who we are, and this is what we have to say.
By generating content, especially that which elicits an emotional response, we can get our messages shared rapidly. It goes without saying how effective this can be at creating brand awareness. Viral campaigns such as the “No Makeup Selfie” are perfect for highlighting the effect.
Summary
Whatever you marketing objectives, it would be wise to employ a mixture of the above.
By engaging with the key audience, creating great content which can easily be shared and by incorporating some targeted paid advertisements, there is no reason we can’t use social media to support all of our marketing goals.