Is eCommerce store promotion something that you have been struggling with recently? If so, it might be that you have not been missing out on some potential methods. There are a lot of different marketing channels, and it is understandable why some brands tend to underuse them or discard the idea of even bothering in the first place. Here are some ways to promote your Shopify store.
Lack of time is a big problem, but if you are looking to drive more sales, you need to test different ideas and determine which of them are the most effective.
Idea #1 – Google Ads
Pay-per-click marketing is certainly one of the most overlooked methods out of the lot. It seems that more and more brands are favoring social media or SEO. That is not necessarily a bad thing for you. After all, the less competition you have to deal with, the better.
Even if you have no or very little experience with PPC, it does not matter. Learning the basics should not take that long. Moreover, there are services like Cleverecommerce that can provide you with easy Shopify advertising thanks to the tools they offer.
When you get the hang of pay-per-click and become even more efficient with your campaign management, you should notice how much of an asset this marketing method can be.
Another overlooked method is email marketing. It is not as effective as it once was, but that does not mean you should disregard this idea.
Collecting an email list as soon as you start the store is what is recommended. There are plugins that will automate this task for you. The focus from your end should be on getting people to subscribe. Perhaps you can offer them exclusive perks, such as discounts and coupons.
Having a solid email list means that you can send out offers as well as reminders to people who have subscribed. It is highly likely that a lot of your subscribers have forgotten about your store, or they do not visit it as often. This gives a perfect opportunity to remind them and make sure that they become loyal customers.
Idea #3 – Blogging
Blogging might not seem like the best marketing method, but it has its advantages. For one thing, writing in-depth content gives people another reason to visit your website. It also builds authority.
If you were to look at other eCommerce stores, you would notice that most of them have blogs and publish articles on a regular basis.
Lastly, you will have an opportunity to network with other bloggers by providing them with opportunities to guest post. And getting a backlink from a reliable website is worth a lot, meaning that there will be a lot of interested bloggers.
Search engine optimization can be difficult to master, but one should learn this stuff regardless because it is too valuable. At the same time, there is an option to hire someone who already has the necessary experience and can create a long-term strategy.
Focusing on organic traffic more is always a good choice to make. People who end up on the store via search engines do so after entering keywords related to buying intent. Provided that you have the right optimization. Not to mention that the higher you are in Google pages, the more people will click on the link.
Idea #5 – Reddit and Quora
Reddit and Quora are two specific platforms that are worth mentioning. The former is one of the most popular websites on the internet, and its users could turn into customers if you take the necessary steps and market to them.
Quora is similar. It is important to build some reputation there first, though. If you start posting links the moment you join, people will take you for a spammer with the intent of promoting a business rather than providing useful answers to questions.
Idea #6 – Forums
Forums have been replaced by social media, but you should still be able to find some that are relevant to your niche and could drive traffic to the website.
Similar to Quora, you need to take your time before posting any promotional threads or answers on another person’s thread. Create an account and become part of the community. Once other members recognize your worth, you can look to post some promotional stuff. But again, do not go overboard and spam every thread you can find.
Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are some of the best options when it comes to promoting a business. You can reach millions of people by running ad campaigns and organizing contests and giveaways. This type of content tends to go viral.
Finding influencers on social media is also a bit part of the whole picture. You can ask for a promotional post from someone with thousands of followers. Sending them free stuff is usually more than enough as far as the necessary payment goes.
In 2020, Facebook will be the leading social media platform. An enormous audience of 1.7 billion people uses it daily, according to Oberlo. Facebook connects to more people than any social media platform ever. Brands are rethinking their marketing strategies and the way of dealing as well. They find more ways to use Facebook marketing.
Creating a Facebook-based marketing strategy can be a game-changer for your business. Almost two-thirds of the populations are interacting with businesses through Facebook regularly. A customer-focused marketing strategy can boost your business to the top.
Knowing how Facebook for business works and to use it to its fullest potential is essential.
Set-Up Guide for Facebook for Business
A personal Facebook profile is a must to create a Facebook business page. Follow the specified guidelines on the screen and answer the question to create your page.
Naming the page as your company or brand name is the best way to promote it. Always use relevant Profile pictures and cover photos that display your company. Setting the Brand logo as a profile picture and brand name as the cover photo is the most effective way.
Give enough info about your business and keep updating information as you go. Continuously review and fix your page settings whenever it is relevant.
The real challenge begins once you have created your Facebook page. Daily content and engagement with followers would make a positive effect on your brand. Your products and services will be actively promoted.
Focus on The Content
It is essential to figure out the content you would like to share. You can use Facebook ad campaigns instantly.
Ideally, 33% of your content is ideal for sharing ideas and stories. About 33% includes personal interactions with individuals so they can support your brand. Whenever you make content for Facebook, you want to remain special and exclusive.
Whenever you create Facebook content, you would like to stay unique and different. Make it exciting to have extensive reach.
Using videos, photos, and text to produce an entertaining variety of content that appeals to viewers. If you get good results most of the time you might want to use that to your benefit.
Questions and Polls
Getting feedback from customers can help you in the long run. The efficient and beneficial ways of getting feedback are to ask relevant questions and to take full advantage of the polls. Your marketing strategy for Facebook depends on how people consider your products and services. Through frequent interaction with your followers and by asking questions, you can gather unique and better ideas.
Use Facebook Insight
Facebook Insights is an analytical tool. It is free of cost and displays activity data, page views, number of users you also reached, the number of interactions, and more. This information can help the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. And it can also give a boost to your posts.
Target Proper Audience
Facebook has exceptional targeting tools. If you promote a post, you will also be able to target personal interests. Gender, relationship status, age, location, education, language, and interests are some in-built options you can use to target your audience.
To own successful ads, you should first understand the group that you’re trying to sell. If you understand your market, use the targeting tools provided by Facebook.
Highlight Milestones
When celebrating anniversaries and sharing milestones on Facebook engage your audience. If you offer a special promotion for particular events or holidays, promote them on your page.
Facebook Ads
Facebook advertisements are the perfect way to engage your targeted audience. It costs money but is highly effective for targeting the audience. You will be able to choose an audience according to the demands of your service.
You can even have the options for choosing the ads daily, monthly, or for a set budget according to your requirements. Facebook tracks the interactions of each promotion that helps you to develop highly successful campaigns in the future.
Facebook ads can compensate for a drop in your natural reach until you create an extensive but targeted audience and boost your reach naturally.
Be Persistent
Consistency is important if you want to make the most out of your Facebook marketing. People do like quality over quantity, so you must keep it in mind. Only posting relevant ads is not enough for business. Consistently
show your dedication, passion, and awareness to have a widespread reach. Compatible content can bring a positive result.
The frequency of your posts is a major issue for the audience. If your content (video/text/live) is posted frequently, people will lose interest in it.
Post Videos, Go Live
Videos are more appealing and easy to understand. The audience remembers the video content better than any other form. At least 500 million Facebook users watch videos daily.
People watch live videos 3 times more than regular videos. Live videos are not only shown during a live session but also can be replayed afterward.
Interactions with the audience during a live session is a must to establish a positive impact. Viewers enjoy communicating directly with management to establish a proper understanding and loyalty.
Enhance Marketing Options
To enhance your digital marketing, you can also contact online marketing agencies. They will provide services and solutions to improve and increase your business vastly. Agencies like Digitrio.com.sg optimize your tasks and provide better marketing strategies.
Optimize Your Policy
Before you consider using online advertising for your business, it is important to set out a social media policy for your consumers and suppliers. Working without any plan can cause inescapable mistakes that can cause a business to fail miserably.
Promotions
Besides promoting ads, you can also promote your post, it will reach the targeted audience even more. But users who do not know about your page can not engage in your business.
You need to promote your business outside of Facebook too. You can easily do that by adding it to your email, visiting cards, and shareable blog posts.
Social influencers can bring a huge audience, so contacting them to promote your business can be a favorable scheme for your business.
Conclusion
Everything does not happen overnight. It takes time to get to a favorable position. Keep working hard without quitting will eventually bring success.
Make a strategy, implement them accordingly, and wait. It takes time to reach a certain amount of people and make them believe in you. Once your business takes the momentum, it will continue towards success.
No, you are right; Steve Jobs did not write content for social media web sites. But the Steve Jobs methods were absolutely brilliant with his media presentations on Apple’s new product announcements.
Steve Jobs methods.
In this blog, I will apply the lessons learned from Steve Jobs’s presentations on how to be more engaging with your social media content.
Consider these eight Steve jobs’ lessons and how you should use their application in your content marketing:
Create ‘Holy Smokes’ moments
… grab immediate attention with your title and lead paragraph sentences
We love to focus on local small businesses in our area, as 60% or so of our business comes from this group. To accomplish this objective, every month or two we select one of our favorites to write about. We describe all the things we like about the business and select several things we might change if we were the owners. We hope the owners consider these ideas prime customer insights on which to build their improvements. Today our selection is the Inns of Aurora social media branding case study to improve their marketing effectiveness.
Is your social media marketing doing very well, but you are still wondering whether you should be making changes for continuous improvement? Like improving the Inns of Aurora social media marketing?
Consequently, we are good customers and advocates of the Inns of Aurora business and Wells College, the owners. And since this is a frequent question we receive from clients, we decided to use the Inns of Aurora as a case study on this subject.
First, a word about the Inns of Aurora, for those of you not familiar with the Finger Lakes, Cayuga Lake, and the town of Aurora.
The Inns of Aurora.
Originally named Aurora House, the Aurora Inn was built in 1833 by Colonel E. B. Morgan, a native of Aurora and an original investor in The New York Times.
By the mid-19th century, Aurora became a major stop on the Erie Canal for boats carrying agricultural products from area farmers to New York City. Henry Wells, of Wells Fargo Stagecoach fame and the founder of American Express, established Wells College there in 1868.
During its colorful past, the Aurora Inn was a favored overnight destination for travelers borne by coach, canal boat, and rail. It has long been a popular gathering spot for students from Wells, Cornell University, and other nearby colleges.
In the early 1840s, William D. Eagles purchased the Inn and engaged his uncle John Eagles, a former sea captain, to manage it for him.
When a fire destroyed the main building at Wells College in 1888, many students lived temporarily at the Aurora Inn, which they renamed the Wayside Inn. Fire struck again on February 18, 1919, destroying Aurora’s tiny business district between the old post office and the Aurora Inn.
In 1943, the Inn was deeded to Wells College. Despite a series of additions, renovations, and new managers, from the 1970s, the Inn faced financial struggles. A drain on the college’s resources, it was closed several times during the last three decades, most recently in October 2000.
Let me point out that the Inns of Aurora is not a client of ours. We are simply taking a look at their on-line social media marketing and using it to recommend ideas for continuous improvement.
It is such a pertinent topic to many businesses, isn’t it? I will do this task by simply studying their online presence, with no discussion with them.
If you examine their current state of social media marketing and compare it to their competitors, you will probably conclude like we did, that they are doing a good job.
But the point is about how to achieve continuous improvement, which is very critical in this type of ever-changing marketing.
So let’s examine some ideas for the Inns of Aurora to consider:
Social media marketing effectiveness … creative ideas
There are several thoughts on the top of our creative ideas list. The first one we suggest is for the Inns to go local with their social media marketing.
Perhaps not every Inn mind you, but certainly several Inns from this town going together in the effort. In this way, they can do a much better job of personalizing customer engagement.
The second idea for consideration is to pick an issue to stand for. For example, we have all read about the issue of supporting small businesses in small-town America.
Valuing their focus on regional small businesses (say, within a 100-mile radius, would go a long way to supporting their marketing in the region. They could do this with their content marketing on their website and social media channels.
Their leadership and every customer-facing employee could be part of this engagement strategy.
Picking several employee examples for publicizing would be a good place to start. Certainly, but there is a chance they can create a local or maybe even a regional collaboration movement.
Bake failure and taking risks in actions
It is always good to have a culture of innovation and experimentation. Another excellent core value is “aim higher.” Encourage your staff to think big, set audacious goals, and push limits.
And it’s OK to fail. Within the marketing org, we recommend sharing “fast fails” on a weekly basis to help everyone learn from mistakes.
Educating customers
The Inns of Aurora are doing a very good job in this area already. But they can do more with special topics such as the history of the region, the Cayuga wine trail, and point out future tourism trends, just to name three examples.
Customer engagement
Customer engagement is an area where most businesses could always use fresh ideas. One suggestion we have used with other clients is to have employees doing other jobs give an hour or two a day to participate in social media.
Let customers know who they are and that way customers can engage with people they recognize from the Inns. Remember the recommendation to go local with their effort? Here is a great place for it to come in very handy.
Effectiveness of social media advertising.
Social media branding … lots of experimentation
Most businesses take the conservative route of experimenting with new ideas. Not a good idea if you are looking to get ahead with new tourists as well as returning regulars.
The best innovative companies know that to do new things well, they must be good at trying new ideas in many areas as experiments. These experiments, they realize, will not all work as planned, and a high percentage will fail.
They know and accept this without worry. But they know that they learn a great deal from failures and small successes. And this often leads to great successes down the line.
Social media branding case study examples … continuous discrimination
A business can never be done by finding ways to discriminate themselves with their customers. This is an area that absolutely must be done well.
A great way to find discriminating ideas, both big and small, is to pay attention to what customers are telling you. And remember, not all customer insights come from verbal inputs. Get all employees involved in closely observing what customers are doing. What can you learn about improving your operations from these observations?
Customer service and experience
One of the most rapidly growing areas of marketing these days is coming from customer service and a strong customer experience. By going the extra mile in these two areas, customers take notice. The more little things you can do, the stronger the customer advocacy becomes.
For example, when you save your customer time, deliver quality service, stand tall on customer issues, and always show your value, you build trust. And trust is the basis of great customer relationships and follow-on business. A definite win-win. Lots of additional ways the Inns of Aurora could improve their performance in this critical area.
Social media branding strategy … new channels
The Inns of Aurora have a very well designed website and participates on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter social media platforms. Well represented on these most important channels.
Our recommendation is they add Pinterest and Youtube to their list of social media sites. These are very fast-growing social media channels that attract tourists looking for new places to visit for weekend getaways. Both channels would provide customers the opportunity to share their experiences with pictures and videos while visiting the Inns picturesque environment.
I have lots of vendors reaching out to me on a regular basis, and I think that’ll only increase. I’m hoping to see more creativity in how these companies market interactive content, insights-driven storytelling, and more granular targeting.
Extraordinary content
Look for compelling stories that are relevant and relatable to your target audience. Knowing your audience is key— analyze user data, conduct surveys and focus groups, purchase analyst research, and more.
Storytelling is a little less formulaic, and there are lots to learn from customers
The bottom line
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement in social media marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. If you are looking to take your success to a new level, this continuous improvement is required.
This is an excellent time to make a statement with social media marketing. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.
Would you like to participate in a free evaluation of your business marketing where our output is published in our blog like this case study article? If you are interested, please send us an email to Mike@digitalsparkmarketing.com.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
There is little doubt that the internet is changing learning in very interesting yet significant ways. Would you agree? For more than several decades, educators have strived to customize education to the learner. Enter connected learning concepts. Connected learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream much more of a reality. It is about creative social media for learning as one component of the internet age learning toolset.
But let’s step back for a moment to elaborate on connected learning and its relationship to the internet and social media.
Related: Why Questioning is Critical to Learning and Problem Solving
Let’s start by establishing a common definition of connected learning. Connected learning is a type of learning that integrates personal interest, peer relationships, and achievement in academic, civic, or career-relevant areas. In addition, connected learning is an approach to educational reform keyed to the abundance of information and social connection brought about by networked and digital media.
Advocates of connected learning point out that this approach leverages the internet to broaden access to opportunity and meaningful learning experiences. The connected learning model suggests that people learn best when: they are interested in what they are learning; they have peers and mentors who share these interests; their learning is directed toward opportunity and recognition.
What do you think … so far, so good?
A set of principles for connected learning were developed by a group of researchers, technology makers, philanthropists, and educational practitioners seeking to come together around a common approach for how to expand educational opportunity in the digital age.
At the core of connected learning are three values: equity, full participation, and social connection.
Connected learning is further defined by the following three learning principles and three design principles. Let me discuss these six principles of connected learning that allow everyone to experience learning that is social, participatory, interest-driven, and relevant to the opportunities of the internet and social media:
Creative social media … interest powered
Interests foster the drive to gain knowledge and expertise. Research has repeatedly shown that when the topic is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes. Connected learning views interests and passions that are developed in a social context as essential elements.
Peer-supported.
Peer-supported
Connected learning thrives in a socially meaningful and knowledge-rich ecology of ongoing participation, self-expression, and recognition.
In their everyday exchanges with peers and friends, young people fluidly contribute, share and give feedback. Powered with possibilities made available by today’s social media, this peer culture can produce learning that’s engaging and powerful.
Academically oriented
Educational institutions are centered on the principle that intellectual growth thrives when learning is directed towards intellectual growth, achievement, and excellence. Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth and as an avenue towards economic and political opportunity.
Social media list for learning with shared purpose
Connected learning environments are populated with adults and peers who share interests and are contributing to a common purpose. Cross-generational learning and connection thrive when centered on common interests and goals.
About social media … production centered
Connected learning prizes the learning that comes from actively producing, creating, experimenting, and designing because it promotes skills and dispositions for lifelong learning and for making meaningful contributions to today’s rapidly changing work and social conditions.
Always be openly networked.
Openly networked
Connected learning environments link learning in school, home and community because learners achieve best when their learning is reinforced and supported in multiple settings.
Online platforms can make learning resources abundant, accessible and visible across all learner settings.”
One of my favorites in this field is John Seely Brown. Brown or as he is often called—JSB—is the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge and a visiting scholar and advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California(USC). A master integrator and instigator of productive friction, JSB explores the whitespace between disciplines and builds bridges between disparate organizations and ideas.
His life before that was equally interesting. In this life, he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of itsPalo Alto Research Center(PARC)—a position he held until June 2000. In his more than two decades at PARC, Brown transformed PARC into a truly multidisciplinary research center at the creative edge of applied technology and design.
It was known for integrating social sciences and arts into the traditional physics and computer science research and expanding the role of corporate research to include topics such as the management of radical innovation, organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, and nano-technologies. He was also a co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). His personal research interests include digital youth culture, digital media, and the application of technology to fundamentally rethink the nature of work.
– See more at: http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/john-seely-brown-beyond-creativity-cultivate-imagination/#sthash.sHmAOuAf.dpuf
Taking his past interests and infusing new interests, Brown has done some very valuable work with connected learning. He has shared lessons those interested in improving learning can take away from surfers, gamers, and artists on how passion and competitive hunger can drive intrinsic motivation.
Brown believes connected learning honors the desire to have curiosity and imagination. That’s why creating environments to help learners find their interests is such an important step. Interest-driven learning honors curiosity and imagination. Those are 21-st century skills. Notice, though, that enhanced curiosity and the ability to tinker and play with systems is rarely mentioned as a critical 21st-century skill. Very odd, don’t you think?
Let’s examine Brown’s intriguing results from his studies of surfers in Hawaii to illustrate the concepts of connected learning. He found that these surfers create their own cohorts and engage in almost everything we talk about in connected learning. They are constantly learning from one another. If you figure out a new move on a surfboard and win a competition because of it, you can’t patent it. That move will be copied within almost 48 hours around the entire world because of things like YouTube.
As Brown notes, they are global learners. And they’re engaging in some deep innovation. What are their strategies for innovation? They don’t just look at other surfers. They look at all kinds of adjacent activities, such as windsurfing, skateboarding, motor cross racing, and mountain biking. Their curiosity is radically extended. This brings the subject back to imagination. His belief is that we’re way too focused on creativity. It’s misguided. He believes the more important focus goal should be on imagination.
See more at http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/john-seely-brown-beyond-creativity-cultivate-imagination/#sthash.sHmAOuAf.dpuf
Would you like to learn more about Brown and connected learning? See his bookA New Culture of Learning, where he and Douglas Thomas pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic. Our understanding of what constitutes “a new culture of learning” is based on several basic assumptions about the world and how learning occurs:
The world is changing more rapidly than ever
Our skill sets have an ever shorting life
An understanding play is critical to understanding learning
The connected world is an awesome resource if we take advantage
In this connected world, mentorship takes on new importance and meaning
Challenges we face are multi-faceted requiring true systems thinking & perspectives
Skills are important but so are mindsets and dispositions
Innovation is more important than ever – but turns on our ability to cultivate imagination
The culture of learning needs to leverage social & technical infrastructures in new ways
The play is the basis for cultivating imagination and innovation
By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it.
A result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving. The ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination.
Key takeaways
Social media, the internet, and connected learning offer a great deal to let people customize their own learning. Connected learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream much more of a reality. Social media for learning is one of the best components of the internet age learning toolset.
Lots to look forward to, isn’t there?
Lots of ideas here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business?
How could you improve the Starbucks Coffee Social Media campaign concept for your business?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media platforms from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
About Social Media … Ways to Use Social Media for Learning
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Never be done with things as life is a perpetual prototype. To create small business social commerce goes a long way. We receive many questions on whether to use being social in business is a ‘new age’ type of commerce.
In our opinion, it clearly is not. Why may you be wondering? Well, in our opinion good business has had an element of being social since the beginning.
The only thing new in small business social commerce is the expanded reach that a business has in our new age of the internet, digital happenings.
I love finding brilliant social advertising creative that makes me wish I thought of it. And I especially love it, when it’s for a client that’s trying to make the world a better place. That’s what social marketing is all about.
The truth is that ideas need ecosystems to support them and that doesn’t happen overnight. To make an idea viable in the real world it needs to continually connect outward, gaining adherents and widening its original context.
That takes more than an initial epiphany. It takes the will to make the idea subservient to its purpose. What we have to learn to accept is that what makes an idea powerful is its ability to solve problems.
And because it’s only “sell” is to try to get us to change our behaviors or attitudes about something, it can be powerful when done well.
What is social commerce?
Social commerce seeks to develop and integrate business and social concepts with other approaches to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater good.
Although “social marketing” is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an oversimplification.
The primary aim of social marketing is “social good”; while in “commercial marketing” the aim is primarily “financial”.
This does not mean that commercial marketers cannot contribute to the achievement of social good.
Why social commerce?
So what makes the concept of social commerce particularly important? Perhaps you’ve been doing your work quite effectively for years without ever even hearing the phrase.
That’s actually pretty likely; the phrase was only coined about 25 years ago, though the concept is ageless.
There are three major advantages which suggest that social commerce is worthy of your consideration:
It helps you reach the target audiences you want to reach.
It helps you customize your message to those targeted audiences, and by doing so,
It helps you create greater and longer-lasting behavior change in those audiences.
What then is the bottom line? Social commerce is a good idea because it is effective.
Social commerce.
Social commerce … it’s all about building relationships
Like making new friends? It is becoming the most important element of social commerce.
Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the little things you can do to build customer relationships. Such as what you may ask?
Simple ideas on consumer engagement start with a foundation of little things that, when not done well, can make the more complex customer experience design actions a moot point.
Let’s examine a simple list of items for the best ways of being social that Digital Spark Marketing recommends to its clients:
Acknowledge that I am there
You should do this as soon as you possibly can. Don’t make your customers frustrated by making them wait.
If you are busy with another customer, inform them you will be with them shortly.
Be friendly
Smile and introduce yourself. Wear a nametag and personalize it to help create a meaningful conversation.
Be knowledgeable
Know all about your products and services. Always assume they have done their own homework and product research. If you don’t know, DON’T BLUFF, but do offer to do some research.
If you don’t have a product or service that can solve their problem, recommend someone else’s product if you can. You should always be looking to solve their problems.
Don’t sell
Use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide. Help them in their search. Pushy sales pitches turn customers off. But personally relevant and interactive conversations switch them on.
Listen well
Make sure you understand their question(s). Then answer their questions as simply as possible.
Help them save time
Time is the customer’s most valued passion. Help them save it. Avoid seeking other help, or ‘handing them off’.
Be easy to work with
Exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including other businesses.
Be honest
If you don’t know say so. But use that question to research so as to be prepared next time. You don’t want to be saying you don’t know often.
Alwaysdo what you say
Do what you say and keep your promises. It is not an option to ignore follow up.
Prompt follow through
Keep them informed until you can close. Remember time is of the essence.
These are not things that we do not already know, of course.
Yet these little things list simply reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten. Then it is up to us to put these lessons of building customer relationships into daily use through persistence and practice.
These days more and more companies are turning their attention to the social commerce business. Meaning? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships and trust.
From customer relationships comes to trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.
Conducting social commerce
So how do we propose conducting social commerce? Here are 10 tips I recommend to our clients:
It starts with great employees
Employees are your service. Hire for their friendly, caring attitude and train for skills and knowledge.
Empower them to be customer advocates.
Make social the centerpiece
Socialize your business. People do business with people, so make it personal. Customers should want to do business with you because of you and your employees.
Make your customers ‘feel at home’. May you have a great location, cool displays, great value, etc.?
That’s all great, but if your people can’t make your customers feel welcome and appreciated, all of the other doesn’t matter so much.
Share all great service stories
Share them as soon as possible with all of your team and celebrate even the smallest of successes.
Show common courtesy
Show courtesies all the time. This leads to customer respect, which leads to conversation and the building of relationships and mutual trust.
Assume you are the company owner. Not all owners or executives make great leaders, but the ones that are should be emulated.
Watch how they take pride in how they deal with customers and employees, and then follow their lead.
Analyze when things go right
When a company receives a complaint people usually have discussions to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
Next time you receive a letter of praise, meet to find out what went right and how it can be repeated. This action is equally needed for learning.
Create small business social commerce … all the time
Amazing companies don’t always deliver ‘Wow!’ type experiences, they are just a better than average all of the time. All of the time is the secret sauce.
Attention to details
Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. Figure out the details that your customers enjoy and make them a routine part of doing business with you. Be vigilant … always listening and learning.
Try and remember things customers tell you and then show them you listened. Always be experimenting and trying new ideas. Put your social marketing in motion by being adaptable.
Consistency
One sure way to build loyalty and social commerce is to deliver consistent customer service.
Consistency creates certainty and builds customer confidence and trust. Confidence and trust lead to giving customers a reason to consider you.
Create a customer service culture
It starts by practicing what we call, ‘The Employee Golden Rule’: Treat your employees the way you want the customer treated … maybe even better.
Focused listening is the lynchpin
These days more and more companies are turning their attention to focused listening for the social commerce business.
Meaning? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.
From customer relationships comes to trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business.
The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.
What is focused listening?
Focused listening is the art of discovering valuable customer insights. Remember that the real value is what we hear, not what we say.
A very important concept for marketers is often difficult to learn.
The bottom line
In this article, we’ve explored a multitude of creative ways to use social commerce to increase engagement and build customer relationships. The key takeaway is to know your audience and what they’re most likely to respond to. Give them more of that.
It’s OK to promote your company and products, but do it in a way that capitalizes on your audience’s deepest interests and connects with them on a personal level. Avoid selling.
Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s really a new way of running a business. Social companies certainly have figured this out and are using social commerce to rapidly grow their business.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your social media better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Brands are verbs, what they do matters more than they say. It is an amazing fact … social media has been with us for over a decade now. So there are many social media celebrity marketing ideas and lessons to be learned.
And many new ones are being created every day. Celebrity brands certainly are putting emphasis or doing more than saying. Recent social media celebrity marketing ideas from our research illustrate this point.
Are you one that believes that marketing creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost marketing creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Businesses have seized upon this trend as it matured and according to a CMO survey by Duke University social media represents 6.6% of marketing budgets (about $4.6 billion in dollar terms) and is expected to climb to nearly 16% over the next 5 years.
So social media is still a small part of digital and marketing budgets. But the fastest-growing and in reality, it has just begun.
Celebrities from all stripes are now continually testing the limits of online engagement and transparency. Their brands are developing a true online voice and seeing positive, bottom-line results. Let’s examine some of their ideas:
Employing influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing
One thing Taylor Swift understands and consistently delivers on is maintaining the magic and the mystery in her brand. She knows that audiences today are motivated by the surprise in the relationship, as she puts it.
Swift says: “In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out on stage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online.
My generation was raised being able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe.”
But she also doesn’t show too much. She still keeps an air of mystery about her and maintains aspects of her strategy, career, and personal life behind locked doors, achieving a balance for her brand.
Another recent awesome example of influencer marketing is from Adele, who announced her new album with a music video. The singer’s video for the song Hello, which premiered online, has already been watched more than 88 million times on YouTube, reports the BBC.
It’s one of the first music videos to be shot with large-format IMAX cameras. A fantastically entertaining video.
Related post: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Celebrity marketing examples … stay visible
If anybody knows anything about the dark arts of social media, it’s Kim Kardashian West. With 48.8 million followers on Instagram, Ms. Kardashian West has built her career and empire on social media. Her appeal online boils down to one major thing, social-media experts say: showing up and being visible.
Since she joined Instagram in early 2012, Kim has posted more than 3,180 images and counting. That’s a little more than two images a day on average. Many sources say celebrities tend to post three times more than the average brand.
Like Adele, Beyoncé released a surprise album with a 10-second video on Instagram and a nearly four-minute video on Facebook.
Last fall, Harvard Business School published a case study about her eschewal of the traditional music-industry practice of releasing singles and doing an array of press appearances to promote an album.
Beyoncé now takes to social media to directly respond to rumors and unfavorable news. When rumors swelled about marital problems, for instance, she went onto Instagram to post photos of her happy family.
Celebrity marketing strategy … engagement and dialog
In July 2014, a young Taylor Swift fan wrote a missive about unrequited love on Instagram. Then the singer wrote back.
This kind of thing has become so common, there is an Instagram account dedicated to Ms. Swift’s fan interactions called @taylornoticed. The account, which tracks Ms. Swift’s likes and comments, has about 47,000 followers.
The big lesson here: Validate your followers with likes, comments, and retweets. It builds goodwill. Companies should search for tweets and posts mentioning their brand, and respond, retweet or repost generously.
Social media celebrity marketing ideas … partnering with celebrities
Partnering with a celebrity and tapping into the celebrity social media influence is one of the best ways for a brand to reach an already engaged and targeted audience; and a strategy that highly influences future purchase decisions based on that association.
When brands brought their famous friends to social media, they were able to add something they never had before: interactivity. With most celebs being active on social media, brands gained the opportunity to be endorsed in a highly personal way across highly personal media.
As an example, H& M announced its partnership with Miranda Kerr on Twitter. The tweet received over 3000 favorites and is the most engaging tweet of 2014 for the brand.
In Nike Basketball’s partnership with LeBron James, the brand created the hashtag#witnesshistory. Nike Basketball asked followers to use the hashtag to congratulate the player on his back-to-back championship wins.
This gave followers the ability to personally convey wishes to the star himself, thereby giving them a compelling reason to tweet using it.
The hashtag stands as the most used and most engaging hashtag of all time for the brand. Nike Basketball only had to use it 3 times before followers used it 21,000 times
Light on direct promotion
Vin Diesel, star of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, enjoys one of the most popular accounts on Facebook, with more than 95 million likes. Another Facebook favorite: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, boasting about 52 million.
While both use Facebook to promote movies, they also share personal stories. Mr. Diesel regularly posts photographs of his friend and former co-star, the late actor Paul Walker, and frequently mentions how much he is missed. Mr. Johnson recently posted about the painful decision to put down his dog Brutus.
Celebrities also take part in other cultural moments on social media, such as “Throwback Thursday” on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, where users post old photos.
As an example, a company like Ford Motor Co., for instance, could use the occasion to post ads from the 1940s.
Crowdsourcing ideas
Jason Mraz is a crowdsourcing genius. He has actually run two social media crowdsourcing campaigns: he asked fans to capture his irresistible; swoon-worthy (my words) single “I Won’t Give Up” in one Instagram photograph.
He then picked the top 25 images, put them on canvas, and organized a gallery-type event for the public.
Currently, Jason Mraz is running a campaign in which he’s giving Twitter users the chance to create plotlines for his “The Woman I Love” music video.
People tweeted ideas to Jason Mraz with the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo (I think this hashtag might be subpar considering Mraz’s gifted lyricism but to each his own).
The director of the music video takes the best ideas and creates a storyboard for the video.
Mraz’s campaign is innovative and ground-breaking, but it also interactive: it lets fans take a direct part in the creation of one of their favorite musician’s music videos.
It strengthens that celebrity-fan connection. And it can certainly be replicated by regular businesses.
Special interest messaging
Jesse Williams has amassed a social media following of close to 2 million fans between Twitter and Instagram, but where many celebrities primarily use their platforms for self-promotion, he has decided to take things in a different direction.
A former high school teacher, Williams sees social media as a means to encourage dialogue and personal growth in his community of followers and illustrates how he is doing those activities.
Leading their own campaigns
But there are still more new avenues being explored. Some events that seem small but will be significant social media marketing lessons for us all.
Normally millions are spent on traditional media. Lady Gaga hyped her latest album by spending millions on bus advertising, billboards, 2 pop up stores and performed countless interviews. The result. She sold 305,000 copies in 2 weeks.
But Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are also known for focusing on building long-term personal connections with her fans over the short-term revenue.
Even though they could have played bigger venues early in her career (after all, the demand was there), they wanted to play small venues so that she could really connect with the audience.
Beyoncé, who has 8 million Instagram followers and over 53 million fans on Facebook decided to go a different route, going straight to her fans. It was launched directly to iTunes and social media. She invoked the power of “Word of Mouth” … the best marketing approach.
Her results:
It sold 828,000 copies in 3 days.
Twitter reported 1.2 million Tweets in 12 hours.
It was the largest single week ever in the Apple iTunes store.
It was iTunes fastest selling album worldwide.
A sign of things to come in social media?
So what is the significance for the average small businessman you may ask? The implications for marketers and small businesses go beyond a celebrity with millions of social media followers.
The bottom line
Remember this: the future of marketing belongs to brands that not only understand their customer advocates but go the extra mile to build personal connections with their biggest fans and nurture authentic, long-term relationships with them.
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
Do you have an idea that will change the world? Well, it’s not worth anything unless you can turn that idea into a reality. So take the plunge and see just how far that idea can take you. Or, you can sit around trading advice over the internet.
The choice is yours.
Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.
Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.
Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Best Instagram videos are the second most downloaded social app behind YouTube. This makes it a hot spot for marketers to reach a digitally active audience.
By developing brand loyalty on Instagram, businesses secure a steady customer base going into the future. And the Instagram audience is much younger than Facebook.
Videos are now the best way to engage audiences on Instagram, and there is a lot to be learned by watching some of the best Instagram videos.
Are you interested in learning how to produce videos that drive results?
Keep reading to hear what’s happening with videos on Instagram, what content is most frequently viewed, tips for optimizing your account, and how to download Instagram videos.
Instagram Video Engagement vs. Regular Picture Posts
There is a huge demand for video on Instagram. While the platform was originally designed with photographs in mind, videos on Instagram get two times the engagement of videos on other social media platforms.
The amount of time users spend watching videos has also skyrocketed. Marketers are beginning to take notice. They are making Instagram videos themselves or hiring production companies to create polished video ads.
What’s particularly interesting on Instagram is the way users interact with brands. They follow brands that align with their interests and beliefs.
They may avoid connecting with businesses on other platforms to not feel they’re being “sold” something.
The brand and customer relationship on Instagram needs to be authentic and value-based.
Instagram is a popular shopping destination. Over 70% of users said they purchased something they saw in a post, and retailers are now adding highly-engaging videos to market their products.
With over 1 billion active users on Instagram across the world, now is the best time for you to start harnessing the marketing power of this platform.
What Content Makes the Best Instagram Videos?
Now you understand how engaging video can be on Instagram, but what type of content should you include in your videos? What resonates with your followers?
The easiest way to figure this out is by checking your page’s insights. Examine your audience. Where are they from? How old are they? What gender do they identify as? Weigh these demographics against your brand to figure out what content may work.
Under the “Content” menu in your page’s insights are the top-performing posts. See what people are liking and replicate that content.
Share user-generated content as a sort of digital testimonial
Brands have demonstrated time and again how these techniques grab people’s attention and build excitement around products.
Here are some other visual ideas to try: inspirational quotes, landscape photography, food, throwback pictures, and animals. These types of posts tend to get more engagement.
Tips on Optimizing Your Instagram Account
Did you just open an Instagram account? Congratulations, “you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”
Managing a social media account is like keeping up a garden. You don’t plant the seeds and walk away. There needs to be daily watering, pruning, and weeding to keep it healthy.
If you want to see your Instagram account flourish, you have to dedicate time to it.
Stay on top of your messaging channel and turn on notifications, so you never miss a question
As a marketer, you already understand the value of building a comprehensive content calendar. Instagram posts can be incorporated into this calendar.
Finally, always make sure your Instagram page is aligned with your current campaign and verify that it connects to mobile-friendly websites since Instagram is not used on a desktop computer.
Downloading Instagram Videos to Your Device
Have you ever struggled to download an Instagram video? Maybe it’s your video, or it’s something you loved so much you wanted to share it with your friends.
Instagram doesn’t make it as easy to download videos as Facebook. In most cases, Facebook will give you the option of downloading a video or picture in the “Options” menu. Instagram, on the other hand, only permits you to copy a link or share.
There are some apps you can find online to help with this, but many are full of viruses or malware.
Elmedia Player is a trusted and secure program to download Instagram videos. In fact, it can download any video from the web.
Once a video is downloaded, you can transfer it to other devices (Apple and Android) by using another highly-rated app called AnyTrans. These file transfers are often faster than using the Cloud.
Most marketers are probably aware of this, but here’s a word of caution. Be careful about using downloaded videos. You could face a lawsuit if you decide to use copyrighted content for commercial purposes.
Double-check everything before you use someone else’s video or get permission from them first.
Ready to Boost Your Instagram Page?
Watching the best Instagram videos can teach us a lot about how to engage audiences. There is no one “recipe” for making a highly-engaging video, rather the techniques and ideas we discussed in this article can help you get there.
Knowing what makes an engaging video and understanding your audience are the keys to Instagram’s success.
Deliver the messages with both supreme confidence and self-deprecating humor. Be a man who is unafraid.
So, be bold. There is something there. Just a small observation that meant something to me and I hope it means something to you.
Content favors the bold. Bold makes you pay attention.
Do you enjoy reading articles on new technology and entrepreneurship? Check out the rest of our website for tips on boosting your social media performance and profiles on business pioneers.
Social media has gained prominence amongst business owners, brands, and corporates. Most companies today have their profile on social media channels so that they can connect with their audience, expand the business, increase brand awareness and visibility, and make profits.
Instagram is one of the popular social media channels that brands and start-up ventures use as a part of their digital marketing strategy. These brands and business owners search for smart ways to increase their follower counts so that they can expand their reach and customer base.
Today, Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly users. Brands, organizations, social influencers, and small business owners often use hashtags to increase their follower count.
But there are other smart and useful ways to opt-in for. The crucial ones are:
Make use of the Instagram tools for maximizing engagement and followers
Advanced technologies have arrived in the market. These technologies get designed to make it easy for social media influencers and marketers to maximize their Instagram follower engagement and count. The essential tools are:
ViralRace
The tools help users to resort to real, automatic, and instant Instagram likes after a post. It is the best tool for brands and influencers waiting to leverage social proof for attracting the different brand deals and get to the discover page quicker.
Kicksta
You can use this for maximizing the Instagram brand reach along with the audience engagement. Gradually, the outreach will allow the Instagrammers to follow the business or social influencer account.
Purchasing Instagram followers
Today, brands, organizations, and social media influencers have the option to buy Instagram followers. Small and start-up business often uses this in the beginning stages of their business growth.
There are service providers that allow you to buy 50 Instagram followers and more. You can choose the package depending on your requirement, and it will add the necessary fuel to your social media marketing campaigns.
Use Instagram ads for magnifying your reach
Corporate organizations and business owners spend several dollars on Instagram Ads annually. The numbers are expected to rise in the forthcoming years.
The small, medium and large-sized organizations know that Instagram ads offer great scope to have access to a certain section of Instagram users. If you want to boost up your follower count suddenly, this is the ideal way out.
Try and experiment with content formats
Social media marketers provide a mix of content types that they can choose during posting. It comprises of the carousel, video, and photo options. And marketers need to experiment with these formats.
Different formats will help to engage different audience segments. Through experimenting with business owners and organizations can get more organic traffic and gain followers.
Opt-in for a business account
Brands and business owners can opt-in for the Instagram Business account option providing ample flexibility, which makes it simpler to get more followers. For instance, the account admins have direct access to the profile performance metrics.
The admins can also boost the post using an affordable ad package, which comprises of a button that makes things simpler for the profile viewers. They can establish contact with the brands or a start-up venture by texting, emailing, or making a call.
Get feedback from customers
Do you want to enhance your Instagram marketing strategy? If yes, then you need to get the required feedback from the present followers. You can contact the followers directly through a message and acquire the necessary feedback.
Use the feedback as an insight for optimizing the marketing strategy, which will add to the follower count.
Stay tuned with Instagram trends
Instagram trends are fluid! Using a specific filter might be the trend today. Tomorrow there will be a new story.
Business owners and brands should stay connected to all these trends and leverage the same in terms of the post. If you want to stay tuned to the trends, make sure you follow the established brands and popular social media influencers.
Highlight the Instagram profile at the live events
Live events are the best place to connect with a pool of audiences, which can be your follower and customer.
Make sure your Instagram profile is visible in these live events. It will help your brand to get the desired visibility by raising curiosity, amongst others.
Provide discounts and special pricing to your Instagram followers
People love to get freebies! The concept of more for less always works in marketing. So, if you have a new product on the shelf, make sure you provide the same at a discounted price to your Instagram followers.
It will encourage many people to follow you on Instagram, which will help you get more online mileage through increased follower count.
Share the Instagram content on other social media channels
Ideally, progressive and ambitious brands always use two or three social media channels! The popular combination for most brands, organizations, social media influencers is either Instagram and Facebook or Instagram and Twitter. So, it is a smart decision to share your Instagram content on the other social media channel that you have.
It will help you to widen the reach and make people aware of your Instagram account. It will tweak people’s curiosity, and they might visit your Instagram profile and decide to follow you as well.
Furthermore, once you share your Instagram post on Facebook or Twitter, others might also share and retweet the same in their accounts. That might also get you more followers along with leveraging other social sharing benefits.
But make sure that your posts are engaging, and it has informative and entertaining content to interest and engage the reader. That will make increase your chances of getting more followers.
These are some of how you can add more followers to your profile! Other than the guidelines mentioned above, businesses and brands need to remain relevant. It will create a brand appeal and make your followers and other users know about your authentic brand voice, which will gain you even more followers.
What changes in the social media climate have you seen in the last couple of years? Does your business depend on social media for marketing or any other function? Are you noticing any impacts do these changes?
It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.
Frederick the Great
Can you change? Of course you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?
Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set a new speed record of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.
And pay attention to what Frederick the Great had to say, it is ok to be defeated, just not surprised. So take heed of trends ahead of you.
If you own a company or are responsible for marketing or advertising in any way, shape, or form, you need to understand the way that today’s social media world works.
What’s more, you also need to be in tune with future possibilities, and to be ready to adapt to changes in the digital realm.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was develop a marketing campaign to rebrand the ailing enterprise. Leveraging IBM’s long-running “Think” campaign, Apple urged its customers to “Think Different.” The TV spots began, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…”
The truth is that while people like the idea of being different, real change is always built on common ground. Differentiation builds devotion among adherents, but to bring new people in, you need to make an idea accessible and that means focusing on values that you share with outsiders, rather than those that stir the passions of insiders. That’s how you win
This year is expected to be, and already has been to a certain extent, a volatile year for social media.
And as someone responsible for anything to do with social media, learning new trends should always be at the top of your agenda.
Here is an excellent story highlighting a trend.
In 1960 two men made a bet. There was only $50 on the line, but millions of people would feel the impact of this little wager. The first man, Bennett Cerf, was the founder of the publishing firm, Random House.
The second man was named Theo Geisel, but you probably know him as Dr. Seuss. Cerf proposed the bet and challenged that Dr. Seuss would not be able to write an entertaining children’s book using only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss took the bet and won. The result was a little book called Green Eggs and Ham.
Since publication, Green Eggs and Ham has sold more than 200 million copies, making it the most popular of Seuss’s works and one of the best-selling children’s books in history. At first glance, you might think this was a lucky fluke. A talented author plays a fun game with 50 words and ends up producing a hit.
But there is actually more to this story and the lessons in it can help us become more creative and stick to better habits over the long-run.
Here are some more ideas we suggest how you should begin to adapt:
Social media climate: be flexible or else
While plenty of talented marketing professionals have made predictions for how the social media marketing world will look in the coming year and the future in general, no one knows which new sites will spring up and become the next Facebook or Twitter.
However, it is always wise to be constantly checking the current social media predictions as well as being aware of new trends, sites, and applications and anything and everything else that is constantly arising on the web.
Keeping a finger on the pulse of not just what’s appealing, but what large amounts of people are using, will ensure an audience for any future efforts of your own.
Keeping pace with the social and mobile web
Uses of social media.
We all know that the internet moves more quickly than any other communication medium, and this presents both unique challenges and opportunities for marketers.
Making sure that you’re not only up to speed with the latest platforms, but innovating and figuring out how to take advantage of them is integral.
After all, you need to be where your audience is–whether that is Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, or newer mobile messaging platforms like Snapchat, Kik, or WhatsApp.
That starts with actively participating yourself. If you don’t understand how a given platform works on a personal level, how can you effectively use it to market your company or brand?
Content marketing, social signals, and search engine optimization
The value of social media marketing extends beyond the actual social media sites that you have a presence on. Having a popular and positive presence on social media means much more than the size of your immediate fan base and how they connect with your content.
It can have a powerful effect on your search engine rankings.
Types of social media.
Google, Yahoo, and Bing all use social media posts, reviews, and general sentiment as a ranking factor, so having a strong presence can help improve your position in the search engine results pages for relevant keywords.
Therefore, it is important to keep in mind the fact that today’s social media climate is all-encompassing in the sense that people can not only view your content at any time or anywhere.
Content marketing and social media, in general, isn’t really about just written text anymore. Images, video, Vines, and other assorted .gifs might be the most interesting options for brands this year and going forward.
What’s more, users are starting to expect multimedia content on various sites, and that trend will only continue. You can even consider offering services not found on most other sites to attract a new or unexpected user base.
The bottom line
To succeed in social media of the future, you need to think of your brand or company as a content curator or even as a publisher. You’re creating content that your customers will enjoy and share, regardless of where you post it.
There is a reason why some change leaders succeed while others fail. At some point everybody needs to decide whether they would rather make a point or make a difference and, in the end, those that prevail choose the latter.
That said, you need to make sure they see it, so the location or platform still matters, along with any associated advertising and making sure it all of the above are optimized for mobile.
We’d love to hear how you are planning on updating and improving your company or brand’s social media in the coming year in the comment section below.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
