Introduction
According to Oyza and Edwin (2015), social media has proven to be more effective than more traditional marketing methods. It has disrupted marketing as Apple disrupted the smartphone and personal computer industry. So, how savvy businesses can harness social media to encourage business success? What are the challenges they face? That's what we are trying to find out.
How Savvy Businesses Can Harness Social Media to Encourage Business Success
In the past, before the widespread use of social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, new brands and startups have to work very hard on advertising and it's costly. Now, by SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and social media network interactions, businesses have a wise choice to build their empires.
Brands can now use these platforms to interact directly with existing and new customers for their goods and services. In order to interact with more customers easily and cheaply. As a result, they grew business partnerships, reduced marketing expenses, improved search rankings, increased traffic, provided marketplace insight, and developed loyal fans.
The top two benefits of social media marketing are increasing exposure and traffic and more exposure and traffic means more people know your brand. However, you must publish fresh, relevant information regularly for your target customers. Video is an excellent platform for building customer relationships, as it not only gives brands the chance to create more powerful stories. Channels such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have the functionality to upload videos. When it comes to boosting web traffic to brands' sites, video content is increasingly important. If customers have already viewed one of the videos about a brand, they are more likely to visit its website.
However, simply boosting web traffic is not enough to guarantee an increase in sales. Brands have to do something more attractive if they want consumers to become return purchasers and build a long term relationship. Engage online audiences friendly. The positive perceptions will translate into sales and loyalty. Great branding, must be simple, different, and safe. Popular brands today have simple and easy to remember logos and should have their own level of uniqueness for it to be able to stand out from similar products or competition in the market. Also, remember to choose appropriately without offending any particular culture.
What Are The Challenges They Face?
As mentioned earlier, simply boosting web traffic is not enough to guarantee an increase in sales. Brands have to do something more attractive if they want consumers to become return purchasers and build a long term relationship.
Social media is just a great tool and platform for anyone to use, but just like every devil was once an angel, marketers now have to rethink the way they communicate with potential consumers. Freedom is one of the factors that render social media marketing unpredictable and uncontrollable since people all free from expressing their thoughts. Social networking websites allow individuals to interact with one another and build relationships.
When companies join the social channels, they can communicate with consumers directly and consumers can also interact with them. However, the challenge is, how or when should we do these interactions? Not everyone has the same favorites, the same schedule, and the same background. So, how can we attract as most customers as we can? That's where solutions like Google Analysis come in, helps us to do some comparison, and more likely to achieve our targets, goals, and objectives.
After all, not everyone likes being marketing a product directly. It's boring and it's more likely to be resisted. But if you sell them a dream, a story, a belief, or even just a feeling, it is more acceptable.
How Do Businesses "Keep Up" in Such An "Changes so Rapidly" Environment?
Trust is hard to build but easy to lose. Only presence is not enough, businesses still need to do the basics to maintain their successful social media presence such as publish fresh, relevant information regularly, be positive to enhance their sales and loyalty, doing researches and analytics, optimization, and monitoring the results.
Although not everyone likes the same product from the same brand, customized brand marketing still gives brands the opportunity to win some great feelings. Instead of selling them your products directly, sell them feelings, stories, and dreams. Instead of just spend the money to get a boost in sales, businesses now have to build long-term relationships with their partners and customers. Adapt the trends quickly in real-time is one of the keys to win the marketing game. Despite social media can boost your views faster than ever, they still can destroy you faster than ever before. Remember the Volkswagen emissions scandal? The scandal being shared all around the world and destroy people's trust in the automobile brand.
Now, marketers have also been given the opportunity to better understand their consumers directly from the thoughts and views expressed by them, but they still need to fully understand the way to manipulate the use of social media to ensure the power could be taken back from the consumers.
Reference
Oyza, I. & Edwin, A. (2015). Effectiveness of social media networks as a strategic tool for organizational marketing management. Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, S2(006). Retrieved from http://www.icommercecentral.com/open-access/effectiveness-of-social-media-networks-as-a-strategic-tool-for-organizational-marketing-management.php?aid=66382
James, F. & Durham, H. (2013). 50 shades of digital marketing. Bookboon.
Posts
