A new study of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has revealed that these firms are spending the largest portion of their budgets on email marketing, committing significantly less of their financial resources to marketing on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
If you’re a brand getting started with social media, it can quickly get overwhelming. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook come with a pretty steep learning curve – certainly when used for business marketing – and to maximise return on investment it’s essential that you implement a winning strategy.
For starters, you’ll need to empower the right employees to manage your social channels, sharing responsibility and goals. You must learn to listen to your audience, using specific metrics to analyse feedback and success. You’ll need to position yourself as an authority within your field, identifying the one thing that separates you from your competitors. And, perhaps most importantly, your brand needs to be human, as social media is very much about people – not logos.
In less than a decade social media has established itself as a powerful marketing tool for brands of all shapes and sizes in every major country across the planet, but which strategical tactics drive the most engagement for these businesses? Which social marketing methods deliver the best results, and which nuts are proving the hardest to crack?
Digital design agency JESS3 teamed up with media strategist Brian Solis to create a special social marketing graphic for his book, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.
The team sought to create something that would provide brands with a physical guide and measuring tool for interacting effectively online with customers, peers, and influencers. They examined who the key players are in social marketing, where the communication is happening, and to what end.
Check out what they came up with, below.
In just a few years social media has revolutionised marketing for many businesses, and these channels have quickly become an important communication tool for brands of all sizes, as well as a lucrative (and cost-effective) way to raise awareness and drive website traffic.
But which social network is right for you, and your brand? If customer communication is your primary goal, should you focus on Twitter? What about brand exposure – which social platforms best tick that box? Is Facebook your best choice for pushing customers towards your website? And what about SEO?
Visual social media marketing is the practice of using video, images and other visual content (like infographics) to help your messages stand out from the noise and clutter to more effectively reach your audience.
It’s a system that’s worth adopting. Photos on Facebook get up to seven times more Likes (and ten times more Shares), images are the most retweeted links on Twitter and 81 comments are made by users on images posted on Instagram every second.
Social media advertising is big business – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter combined for well over five billion dollars in ad revenue in 2012.
But while spending on social media ads continues to rise – 81 percent of agencies and 75 percent of advertisers implemented social media ads in their campaigns last year – measuring the impact of these tools continues to prove problematic. Indeed, 62 of advertisers, and 70 percent of agencies, are either unsure or flat-out do not know how to measure their social marketing ROI.
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have revolutionised the marketing departments of many brands, but that doesn’t mean that these tools are applicable to all business types. Nor does it mean that social media can effortlessly convert a pig’s ear of a commercial venture into a lucrative sow’s purse. It takes work and it takes effort, but it also takes the right kind of people, and the right kind of business.
Small business owners (SBOs) have perhaps struggled more than any other to successfully implement a social media strategy into their marketing. This is particularly true if the SBO is limited to a local audience for trade. Indeed, a 2012 study has revealed that while 87 percent of SBOs agree that word-of-mouth and customer referrals are an effective marketing tactic, just 32 percent feel the same way about social media, a drop of ten full percentage points from earlier in the year.
Did you know that in the U.S. Facebook and Twitter are the most effective social networks for brands targeting business to consumer (B2C) channels?
Chinese users are three times more likely than Americans to make a purchasing decision based on user-generated content on social networks (for example, comments), 35 percent of Irish users access social networks via their smartphones and, in the UK, one-fifth of all Facebook users earn more than £50,000 per annum.
Making social media work for your brand takes planning, time and effort. It takes work. You need to put in the hours, and you have to implement a winning strategy – and stick with it.
In many ways, a good social media campaign is somewhat like throwing a party. To mark the occasion, you need to decide on who you want to attend and when and where it will take place. You need to decide on a theme. You must establish clear goals and objectives and, critically, prepare the tools that will allow you to measure success.
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