You might have heard stories of how social media was the catalyst for some businesses that made it big. Before you decide to completely change your current marketing strategies, you should read on to see why social media should be used to help you in your marketing efforts.
By the myBusiness techblog team
Some businesses might approach social media as though it was a “cure-all” for all their marketing problems. While not making any changes to include social media might disadvantage your business, you shouldn’t drop all your current marketing strategies for it, just for the sake of change. Using social media for marketing is vastly different from traditional marketing methods, and as such, it should be seen as a useful partner to traditional strategies, rather than a replacement for them.
Traditional marketing is focused on efforts to reach consumers by maximising impressions (the number of times they are exposed to your message)—delivering marketing messages to consumers via TV, radio, print – channels that generally don’t allow for two-way communication. The objective here is just to increase the number of impressions.
Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way communications platform. While we all want our tweets, status updates and online messages to be seen by as many people as possible, the focus here is to maintain on-going communication or active engagement with your target audiences. Social media is about providing consumers with a voice, and that can help create long-lasting, close-knit bonds between brands and their customers.
Engaging customers, therefore, is not a replacement for impression-based marketing, but a supplement to it. Here are some tips in working social media into your marketing efforts:
Assess your existing marketing strategies
Changing your marketing strategies can be good, but they need to be implemented in a systematic and data-supported manner so that you know what needs to be improved, and what can continue. You can start by reviewing your current marketing tactics and evaluate their effectiveness.
If you are unable to determine how a particular marketing tactic supports your business goals, you can either try to estimate its effectiveness, or remove it from your strategies. Having a broad view on your business goals and how to accomplish them should be foremost in your mind before you can even add social media to the mix – both from a marketing and larger business perspective.
Adding Social Media to the Mix
Once you have a better understanding of which traditional marketing portions are working well, you can then begin to evaluate social media’s effectiveness at supporting the same objectives. Bear in mind that social media efforts require a long-term commitment to even show any real traction, so interim goals and milestones are required. If you are trying to drive leads and sales, you should perform reviews of those early efforts with that in mind.
For example, if you are trying to improve customer support or reduce call volume, you should have some estimated numbers assigned to these efforts and see if the time required in using social media offsets the reduction in call volume.
Augmenting your traditional marketing
Another way to start with social media is to connect them to your traditional marketing. What are some ways that you can use social media to support existing offline efforts?
Imagine that you are participating in a trade show, and you’ve already spent a large portion of your marketing budget to support this. As the cost of using social media is low, you can create a social media campaign that starts several months before the trade show to help create buzz, plan events around your booth, inform your customers on discounts or sales, or tease product releases. This can also lead to the building of a community that you can tap on for future events. Remember to set some measurable goals to determine the success of the social media campaign once the event is over, as this will help you work out which part of the campaign worked, and what didn’t.
As marketers begin to realise that traditional and social media can co-exist together, their strategies (and their brands) will be able to reap the rewards not just of a new evolution in technology, but of a powerful new hybrid marketing approach.
Are you using social media to beef up your marketing campaigns? Let us know of your experiences in the comment box below.