With the increasing penetration of social media among internet users, social media marketing has become amongst the most popular marketing avenues for businesses.
Social media often provides ways in which users discover and further spread content – whether they may be short messages and links via Twitter or using the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ button on a much broader network like Facebook. Given the potentially wide reach that social media provides, it can go a long way in assisting a businesses SEO efforts especially if the content being ‘discovered’ or ‘shared’ is new and constantly updated.
Types of Social Media Campaigns
1) User Generated Content- This can include efforts such as crowd sourcing to build brand awareness. Running a competition to encourage social media users to send in posts about experiences they’ve had with products or services in your vertical, or having users send in pictures using your product are good examples.
2) Brand Messaging- Attaching your brand to a popular, society friendly message like cancer awareness or wildlife and environment conservation, or health and fitness related events, etc can help build brand awareness while at the same portray your brand in a positive light.
3) Podcasts- Using weekly or fortnightly podcasts as a medium to share updates about the latest product or service offered by your brand, or best practices about how to use your product, etc can also prove helpful.
4) Holiday Specific Campaigns- This is by far perhaps the most important type of marketing campaign. Thanksgiving, Christmas Season and related seasonal events see a these type of social media marketing campaigns reach a peak.
5) Milestone Campaigns- When businesses reach a particular milestone like opening of a new branch, anniversary of first store, new product or service, etc is a good way to generate excitement among a businesses followers.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
1) New potential customers and increased brand visibility- One of the goals of a marketing is to increase the visits to your website or offline store. By using attention grabbing content on various social media marketing brand awareness campaigns, you can potentially get new or unique visitors and some of them might turn into qualified leads.
2) Build brand loyalty- Using social media platforms to engage in personal, one on one interactions with visitors or peoples who have commented on your content can help brand loyalty. After a positive one on one interaction, the chances of the individual sharing your content within their network or subscribing to your updates increase.
3) Access to user data- Most if not all of social media platforms have inbuilt analytics tools that can help you with insightful data of your visitors and potential customers. These can include- geographical location, demographic information, repeat visitors, time of day and day of week when you’re visits spike. You can also use this data from different social platforms to see which platform is driving the most traffic for your business.
4) Understand how your brand is viewed in the market- Often while reviewing the comments and reactions of visitors from social media marketing engagement campaigns, you can get an idea how your brand is performing with respect to others. Many times comments can include a comparison between brands. These can include aspects like features users find most useful, price comparison between brands offering a similar product or service, etc.
To sum up, the sheer reach of social media marketing campaigns makes it almost a crime for businesses to ignore social media when planning their marketing strategy for the year. Compared to the traditional marketing avenues, social media is perhaps the most consistent and scalable way to spread brand awareness, rope in new potential customers, build a quality lead pipeline and engage with existing users.
