How to build your social media marketing strategy for 2019
Social media marketing Yes, everyone’s on social media—but how can you leverage that for your business? How can you use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to help you with your Internet marketing campaign? Do you even need online marketing? We’re here to answer all those questions and much more! What is social media marketing? Businesses are increasingly flocking to social media for their advertising needs. There’s a good reason for that. With half the world officially having access to the Internet just before the start of the year in December 2018, companies’ potential for marketing outreach has never looked better. And with eCommerce taking off, access to international markets is becoming ever more pronounced. Online marketing lets businesses to tap into new markets. It lets them establish themselves there so that in a few years they have a firm foothold and can sell more goods and services than their competitors. Added to that, digital marketing has the advantage of being able to target audiences more effectively than traditional advertising. Businesses can do this by carefully studying user experience on social networks and promoting online advertisements that are displayed along with user-generated content, with call-to-actions to their goods and services. Is social media marketing more important than Google Ads? Advertising on social networks shouldn’t replace your Google Ads. After all, people use both Google and social media platforms so it’s important to run ads on both Google and social networks. They complement each other. But it’s also important to note that people spend more time going through their social media feeds than they would on Google’s search engine results pages. When you compare user experience, you see that people tend to stay on Google for shorter periods of time because they’re trying to find other websites to visit. Whereas on Facebook, people will be staying for longer and they might also visit it when they’re bored and want more content to go through. Social media strategy Have a strategy is important. Your business needs to know what it wants, plan to get it, and then execute. There are several things that your business might need to consider when thinking about running ads on social networks. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend money on social media services if it won‘t have a good rate of investment, now are you? But don’t worry, we’ll go over all the important factors that contribute to a successful digital marketing campaign. Audience Bet you saw this one coming from a hundred miles away. It’s always there in any form of content that you produce. But I mean more than just a simple “know your audience” type thing. You will want to do things a lot more differently based on who you’re trying to sell to. If you’re selling to teenagers and young adults, you want to promote your products on Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and TikTok. While we’re at it, consider using memes and social media influencers. And no, don’t generalize them into one or two categories. Learn what they want and need; don’t just assume that they all like avocado toast and spend all their money on the latest iPhone. If you’re selling to new parents, think about running ads on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Memes would work here too as new parents tend not to be too old for them. And if you’re targeting someone in their 40s and upwards, Facebook and Instagram are places where you’d want to run your online ads. As a final note, while some platforms might be unpopular in the United States, this doesn’t mean that it’s true in other countries. Take WhatsApp. Europeans use WhatsApp a lot because their carrier plans often limit how many SMS text messages they can send. WhatsApp is also popular in South East Asia. WeChat and Sina Weibo are popular in China, a lucrative market for many American businesses. Niche Depending on the goods and services you sell, you should favor certain social media networks over others. If you’re cybersecurity vendor, you should be on Twitter. Twitter is one of the most important channels of communications amongst cybersecurity professionals. You may even consider experimenting with Mastodon, a social media service similar to Twitter that’s decentralized. If you’ve just created a new fashion line, you’ll want to promote it on Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest first before moving on to other networks. Why? Because those are the platforms most people go to when they want to learn about the latest fashion trends. If you sell infant clothes, Facebook and Instagram it is for you. Your niche is critical to where your specific audience can be found. Use it to your advantage. How users use a social network This is very important if you want to do well on social media. You can’t possibly hope to be taken seriously on social media if you interact with customers on Reddit like you would on Twitter. Different social network sites have different rules on etiquette. It’s important to follow these rules. Otherwise, you might find your brand name turned a meme. Not a great position to be in when the Internet is making fun of your brand. One way you can get a better feel for user experience is by seeing whether the social network is primarily used as a mobile app (Instagram) or if it can be used on all devices. With messaging apps that support advertising, like Facebook Messenger, you want to make sure you optimize your ads for mobile. Try using AMP links if you can, or otherwise make sure that your links serve up the mobile version of your website and landing pages. WhatsApp Messenger doesn’t yet support ads, though it might in the future. But the reason I bring it up is that it’s a great example of a social media service that emphasizes mobile over desktop. That’s not to say you WhatsApp doesn’t offer WhatsApp download. You can, but it’s essentially WhatsApp Web—which only works if it can connect to your
The Importance of Online Marketing
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]Online marketing is key to doing any business in today’s world. This is something an increasing number of businesses—big and small—are coming to realise. There are many reasons why online marketing is overhauling traditional marketing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_single_image image=”6354″ img_size=”full”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text] Nudging While we may be dismissive of how effective marketing just is on us as consumers, what academics are saying should not be ignored. Study after study has found that marketing is very effective in influencing us to do things. This is called nudging. Despite popular opinion, marketing isn’t about influencing you to buy something. On the contrary, it’s seldom, if ever, about getting consumers to buy anything at all. No, instead, marketing is all about subconsciously making people think about a certain brand.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSkWqI7M3Ts”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The key here is the word “subconsciously”. So long as we’re exposed to a brand frequently and over a long period of time, we will come to trust them more than a brand that we’ve never been exposed to before. This is precisely why businesses like Gillette get away with charging more for men’s shaving products than competitors like Dollar Shaving Club do — although that’s changing too, largely thanks to Dollar Shaving Club’s successful marketing strategy. So we know that marketing is very important in getting consumers to remember brand names. But then, this article is about online marketing. So what’s so special about online marketing? Turns out, a lot.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Internet marketing is simply the marketing but on steroids. After all, if technology can improve our lives by improving our efficiency, they can also be counted on to help us with marketing. And so today’s marketing has all the following benefits for us: Targeted audience. Think about it—unlike traditional marketing where businesses have to share their advertisements and commercials with everyone with the hope that a small subset of the population might be interested in their products, businesses today can deliver their ads to Internet users who are actually interested in their products. Internet platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have developed their capabilities so much that they can, with a high level of confidence, deliver ads that are highly effective and well-curated to their audiences. Businesses are in charge. For the first time in history, businesses decide how much they bid for their ads (ads with a higher bid appear more frequently than those with lower bids), for how long they appear and have real-time access to their ads. This means that they can increase/decrease bids for their ads, pause or cancel their ad campaigns and change its text instantly. Ads are individually-tailored. Gone are the days when marketers had to shoot in the dark and hope that they hit someone, somewhere, who’s remotely interested in their goods and services. Now, businesses can easily determine who sees their ads on the Internet. They can even have different consumers see different ads based on their online profiles. And so, it is for this reason that online marketing is something every business should consider implementing to their overall business strategy. Today, businesses no longer can ignore the benets of marketing on the Internet any longer. And premier online marketing companies like triHead LLC can help with all forms of online marketing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”6357″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row]