Friday, 24 January 2014

Social Media Marketing: Building the Strategy

For a long time companies used to pay lots of money for advertising in order to be noticed by their customers and to have a respectable position in the market (Black, 2013), but the success of this advertising was unknown or it took long time to be recognized. For many decades marketing worked that way and small entrepreneurs did not have many options to use it, but then something changed.

The arrival of what is known as “Social Media Marketing”, has revolutionized the way of doing marketing, these (Social Media), allowed not only direct but also public communication between businesses and their clients, and none or very few money is needed to use it (Kenny, 2013). This has given a complete revolution on the communication’s strategies used by companies (Hlavac and Schaefer 2013). The way a company uses Social Media as a tool of communication with their customers, can benefit the position of that company or on the contrary, damage its reputation completely.

However, using social media as a marketing tool for a company that has just started or that has been in the market for many years is not as easy as many will think it is. When starting to build a Social Media Communication Strategy, Chris Brogan has quoted: “be human first before being the company” (Black, 2013):

ü  Who is your audience?
ü  What is important for them?
ü  How can you reach them?

These types of questions can help to understand the needs and wants of customers and so narrow the company’s audience. In many cases the target audience can be more than just one (Scott, 2013), and then different social media platforms are needed to communicate effectively as well as a specific type of content (Baier, 2011).

Identify the Audience (Who is your audience)
Identifying the audience is very important when building a Social Media Strategy. Understanding who the audience really is will help to develop an effective way to communicate with the customers.  Smith and Taylor (2006) have guided us with four different steps for segmenting the market, each of them will help to identify the real target:

ü  Geographic Segmentation: Understanding where the customers are located: Is it a state in a particular country? Is it a whole continent or specific countries within that continent? Try to be as specific as possible, this will help to build a specific strategy for those particular locations, even the language of communication is a plus when building a communication strategy.
ü  Demographic Segmentation: Things as age, gender, education, occupation and race to name just a few, should be identified (Gunelius, 2013). It is not the same to communicate to young adults in their 30s with a stable job, with high education than to communicate with young adults in their 20s, that are still in college and that still do not have a stable job. The more you narrow your target, the closer you are to find the perfect communication strategy.
ü  Psychographic Segmentation: This is a very important step when identifying the target market. In this part the company can analyze the audience’s lifestyle, things such as their beliefs and perceptions are a key for everyone when getting a specific service or product. This step helps to understand the real attributes of the customers (Gunelius, 2013). In here an analysis of people’s personality, hobbies, motivations and lifestyle (Smith and Taylor, 2006) need to be made.
ü  Behavioral Segmentation: An evaluation of people’s attitude towards a service or product needs to be carefully analyzed. The benefits people see towards the service or product, the usage that they give, the loyalty towards that specific brand, etc. are very important factors to be taken into account (Smith and Taylor, 2006) when identifying your target.
Finally, Li and Bernoff (2008) have come with a very important step when establishing the final communication strategy for Social Media:
ü  Technographic Segmentation: When putting together the communication strategy for the segmented market, is very important to understand how people use internet in order to acquire services or products. Not all people use the same platforms to buy or to research about a product or service. Understanding this, then a business can use one or different social media platforms to communicate with their customers and in addition, can picked what kind of technographic segmentation to choose to develop the communication strategy.

Value Proposition (What is important for them)
It is also very important to understand the significance that customers give to a specific product or service, what value they give to it. The value proposition will lead to customers to buy if they think is important (Laja, 2012) to have it or to experience it.

When developing the value proposition, Laja (2012) recommends having three things in mind:

ü  Relevancy:  Why should people get that product? In this aspect is important to think how is this product or service helping my customer or how is improving his/her lifestyle. 
ü  Quantified Value: Providing particular benefits in the product or service that is being sold to customers.
ü  Unique Differentiation: Letting customers know why this product is different from the rest and why they should buy it instead of going to the competition.
The value proposition should be very clear in the Social Media Platform for all visitors to see it.

The Communication Strategy (How can you reach them?)
After having analyzed the target audience and understand their needs and wants, a communication strategy needs to be built in order to reach the expected audience.

Larry Kim (2013) has given some tips that are helpful when using Social Media Marketing as part of the company strategy:

ü  Content: content is the key for attracting the audience and to keep then interested. It is very important that the information has value and is interesting for the people that are being targeted. The content needs to have variety: videos, images, relevant information for the audience.
ü  Links: Linking to the audience outside sources gives trust and reliability when posting any content, and also can help to get some links in return and reach more people.
ü  Track Competitors: It is very important to see what the competitors are doing with their platform in order to see what is not working or that it seems to work very well.
ü  Measure Success: Measuring the strategies that are being used with the content of the platform, the ones that have worked well, keep implementing them, the one that did not work the way was expected, should be abandoned. Keep monitoring the platform that is being used.

However, the content and the way this is managed vary according to the platform used. Different techniques are different for each (Kim, 2013) so to develop a strategy that goes with each platform, is something businesses needs to have in mind before starting to post.

REFERENCES



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