Social media marketing is fairly a new type of marketing that has paved its way into main stream media and is probably the most dominant and effective mode of marketing at the moment.
Marketing is a major part of fund allocation for startups. No one knows who you are and what business you are doing. Marketing on social media is one of the cheapest modes of marketing one can opt for, also there is no limit to the outreach of the marketing, think; the whole world!
There is a large pool of applications to choose from when it comes to marketing on social media, but the most effective mode of marketing is the one your business will get the most fruit out of.
The first and foremost is to develop a strategy that sits with your business objectives, and the kind of people you want to attract to your social media profile. Believe it or not each social media application has a dominant age bracket that prefers using that application, studying these statistics can make it easier for you to process the applications you will need and filter out the ones which don’t fit your mission and objectives.
For example Facebook is a great way to market your business because of the large number of people who visit it daily, also the post sharing culture will help you get the message out there, however because so many startups are taking their business to Facebook, you can be a tiny fish in the ocean. The best way to stay in the news feed is to devote yourself or for this matter hire an assistant who will manage the account daily. There is nothing worse than an inactive Facebook page. Also Facebook is great if you have highly visual content. You want to build trust in the minds of the users by leveraging their friends’ networks.
Twitter is a great place to start for brands who have an active marketing strategy, because twitter does require you to be quite active, the only way to build up an audience on twitter is to be interactive, and if you aren’t a social butterfly, then hire one and get on it because the outreach the application brings to the business is quite extraordinary.
Linkedin is a great way to market yourself and your business, however it is a very tailored approach to marketing. With that being said, it is great if you are a business to business company, or you wish to establish connections with similar business. It is not a great place to market visual content but having a linked in can be a front for back links because the search results rank quite high on google
Google+ helps with SEO, which is again very helpful in setting up a front for other social media profiles you choose to make your business profile active on.
Pinterest is a great way to market your brand if your target audience are women, or someone who has an eye for creative things. If you have sell-product-at-profit approach then having a flashy pinterest is a viable option for marketing.
Instagram comes in the same league as Pinterest with the advantage of a larger pool of audience. Instagram is a great way to interact through visual content, which enables to make your business discoverable to people with similar taste and preferences.
No matter which application you choose for special media marketing, the key is to be an interactive business. Customer service has to be a strong suit if you wish for your brand to grow. Customer response lead time is an important key performance indicator to consider when it comes to getting back to clients.
It would make sense to appoint individuals to run a social media marketing campaign for your business, primarily because there is only so much you can do on your own, and secondly because the more creative individuals you hire the better ideas you get which will help you in formulating a number of social media marketing strategies.
The only way to ensure that social media marketing will set off is to get a league of brand ambassadors. Reaching out to users who are interested in products and services similar to what you are offering and allowing them to make use of the products or services for free will not only create awareness but will benefit you in getting first hand feedback. Brand ambassadors help in enhancing the magnitude of market outreach, which helps in targeting the right group of people.
There is no publicity as bad publicity especially if it’s in the form of gifs. Gifs are a great way of spreading the word through pop culture to which a lot of people relate to. Now we know that not every startups business plan and objectives will suit the gifs culture but don’t be afraid to experiment with humor. Take the example of when “Hello” came out by Adele. The main reason why the song became viral overnight was because of the enormous amounts of gifs and memes that were posted online following it release. Now we don’t know if all the efforts were made by fans or by Adele’s management company, if it is the latter then we have to give them credit for making the single a massive hit overnight.
Evaluate your social media strategy regularly, it is important to stay up to date with the latest pop culture. Promotions are a great way of starting out, especially if you are in retail. Offering promotions will drive in a large amount of traffic and even if 100% of the traffic doesn’t translate to sales it will help in creating awareness.
A very important step to marketing is knowing your audience and analyzing their changes in taste and their preferences. Having a website will help in analyzing how many people are interested, in exactly what they are interested in and how much time they spend searching for something on your site. This can help you in forecasting future sales and production levels.
Best of luck!