Constructing a social media strategy isn’t just a great idea anymore,
it has become an absolute necessity for building a brand for your business. And social media yields immediate and fantastic returns on investment without requiring much investment.
Standing as a testimony to this is the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report which states that 78% of marketers saw increased traffic with just six hours a week invested in social media. And these wins will get even better as more and more people are owning smartphones and more and more people are accessing social media.
And this gets even better! Because social media is highly specific in terms of its targeting, you don’t need to be everything to everyone as is often the case with mass media. Social media platforms offer deep customer insights, thus you can specify, to the narrowest possible extent, the group you want to target and simply appeal to them.
Below is a three-step plan to help you establish your brand on social media:
1. Market segmentation to target specific-customers:
Market segmentation means breaking down the wide market into individual chunks based on their psychographic, demographic, lifestyle etc. characters (insights are often offered social media platforms) and only targeting our target customer segment. These customer segments can be identified as those individuals who have shown an interest in your brand either by visiting the company website, liking/following our social media handles or otherwise indicated an intent to purchase our goods and services.
Simply put, market segmentation means knowing who our audience is and what they like. Tools like Survey Monkey or Google Docs help do this quickly and relatively inexpensively.
2. Establish strong brand recall:
Retargeted ads, also known as digital retargeting, are a great way to establish brand recall. They are a type of digital display ad that keeps targeting a user who has visited your website. An example of this is a person seeing the ad of your brand in Facebook too after he has visited your website once.
This can even go a step further with search engine retargeting. This is when a person who has searched for a trip to Thailand on Google then sees the ad for Thai airlines or hotels in Thailand on his Facebook.
Using digital retargeting or search engine retargeting can stimulate brand recall and encourage prospects to come [back] to your site.
There are four general ways that you can use retargeting to establish stronger brand recall amongst current and prospective customers:
· Retarget individuals with a preliminary brand awareness.
· Retarget people who have previously visited your site.
· Focus on people who have opened an email.
· Track users who have searched for your general product or service.
3. Customer Engagement should be a priority
While 92 percent of marketers agree that social media is important for their business, only 72 percent actually use it. So, instead of sitting passively waiting for your customers to come to you, you need to proactively search for them. Being proactive can help you to increase brand awareness in your audience and gradually turn them into loyal customers.
· The benefits of being proactive are many but the main ones are as follows:
· It helps build a better brand experience for your customers.
· It helps improve prospective customer engagement levels.
· It turns prospective customers into loyal brand followers.
· It helps establish a dual conversation between your past, present, and future customers.
· Most of all, it turn leads into profitable sales.