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Social media is ingrained in modern society. There’s practically no avoiding it, especially if you want to grow your business. It’s a tool that can be an incredible tool for growth. After all, online marketing has swept the industry, and it’s proven itself an effective strategy for enhancing businesses.
But that’s easier said than done. It’s one thing to know the potential power of social media marketing. It’s another thing entirely to understand its nuances. Today, we’ll be delving deeper into the nature of social media as a tool for brand growth.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is how a business keeps customers invested in its products and services through brand relationships. In layman’s terms, this is how the business fosters long-term relationships with its customers. Throughout history, businesses have always been looking for new ways to rope customers in.
While the term “customer engagement” wasn’t formally coined yet, it did exist. Everything from conventions to sales calls was a form of customer engagement before the internet even existed. The term would finally be defined in March 2006, by the Advertising Research Foundation.
Nowadays, when people think of “customer engagement”, the obvious conclusion is online engagement. Forbes pointed out the importance of online space and noted that it has completely shifted the dynamics of customers and businesses. Email and business websites have added so many ways to engage with customers. But even those pale in comparison to the effects of social media.
The Advent of Social Media
For how young social media is, it’s incredible how much it disrupted what was known about marketing. Social media offered businesses a level of global reach that would only have been available to the largest corporations a few years ago. Now, even the smallest businesses can open a social media account, and get a chance at virality like any other business.
Nowadays, businesses can quite literally just ask their customers what they want. It’s a whole new way of marketing, and to this day, it’s still being innovated by the best marketers out there. Of course, while social media is powerful, understanding how to best use it is another matter.
Mastering the Art of Social Media
To take advantage of social media to the fullest, you need to have a core set of strategies for maximizing social media engagement. The following are some tried-and-true strategies for making your social media accounts engage with customers on a larger scale.
1. Crafting Quality Content
When people find your content valuable, entertaining, or informative, they are more likely to engage with it. It helps you connect with your followers on a deeper level and foster relationships you couldn’t otherwise. This is done by choosing the right SEO tools and analyzing keywords. These are the ingredients for optimized web content.
2. Precision Targeting
Social media platforms are goldmines of user insights. Businesses must harness this treasure trove of data to craft laser-focused ad campaigns. Everything from how many likes a post gets to the comments that your customer leaves are valuable tidbits for future growth.
3. Creating a Sense of Belonging
For businesses, the path to success involves nurturing a dedicated fanbase around their brand or product. Whether your brand develops a reputation of eco-friendliness or witty banter on social media, you need a hook that’s uniquely for your business.
4. Partnering with Social Media Influencers
Occasionally, businesses can collaborate with influential figures on social media. These individuals have already earned the trust of their followers, which removes a step for your business. The right influencer can expand your brand to new heights that you wouldn’t have reached organically.
5. Deciphering the Data
Social media data analysis provides valuable insights into your audience’s demographics and preferences. This understanding allows you to tailor your business to better meet their needs and preferences. Of course, handling customer data means your security credentials need to be vouched for. Make sure you keep customer data secure and stay compliant with local laws.
The benefits of social media for business
Here are the tangible rewards of utilizing social media for your business.
Bolstering Your Brand Presence
By consistently engaging with their audience on social media, businesses expand their reach and visibility. The more individuals interact with and encounter a brand, the more indelible it becomes in their memory.
Cultivating Trust and Loyalty
Engaging with customers on social media serves as the bedrock of trust and loyalty. Swiftly addressing inquiries or concerns underscores a business’s commitment to its customers.
Cost-Effective Marketing
In contrast to traditional advertising methods, social media marketing often proves more budget-friendly. It enables businesses to reach a vast audience without incurring substantial costs.
Real-Time Interaction
Social media facilitates instantaneous communication. Businesses can swiftly respond to emerging trends and customer feedback, ensuring their agility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Standing Out from the Crowd
Remaining actively engaged on social media sets a business apart from its competitors. It showcases the unique qualities that make them the preferred choice for customers.
Real-world use cases of social media for businesses
Here are some of the most successful examples of a marketing push done through social media.
Spotify — #YearWrapped and User Data
As far as data-driven marketing goes, this is one of the most blatant yet most successful. Spotify directly uses the data provided by users to give a fun overview of their musical year. Not only that, it’s an overview of their musical journey on Spotify’s platform. The campaign transformed music streaming into a social experience.
A community was fostered among listeners, comparing their musical tastes and jokingly dissing others. It also encourages music enthusiasts to listen to Spotify, because they provide a unique novelty that other businesses don’t. It just so happens that the prerequisite for that novelty is primarily using Spotify for your music-listening experience.
Buzzfeed — Tasty and Quality Content
Buzzfeed’s Tasty is a food lover’s dream come true. In a world where attention spans are shrinking, Tasty serves up quick, visually appealing recipe videos that are impossible to scroll past. These videos are engineered for shareability, and they’ve gone viral countless times.
Through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, Tasty has mastered the art of mouthwatering food content. They understand that people love to watch and share cooking inspiration, and they’ve tapped into this brilliantly. It’s a response to those long-winded recipe pages online, the ones that share life stories before a recipe. Countering that phenomenon with high-quality production led to Tasty’s massive viral success.
Planters — Remembering Mr. Peanut and Customer-Driven Campaigns
When Planters decided to retire their iconic mascot, Mr. Peanut, they did it in a way that became a trending topic across social media platforms. In a Super Bowl ad, Mr. Peanut met his demise while saving friends. This emotional farewell was followed by the hashtag #RIPeanut, which took social media by storm.
Planters created an engaging narrative around the demise of Mr. Peanut that organically stirred conversation. On one side, you had the people playing along with the campaign, mourning the loss of the salty good samaritan. On the other, you had people inexplicably sharing Mr. Peanut’s demise because of how comically absurd the premise was. It was a marketing campaign that banked on customers sharing it with their own takes, and it worked out wonderfully.
Final Thoughts
Social media is the newest frontier in marketing, and it’s still being explored. Social media has a tendency to absorb everything that its users put into it. This makes the platform an ever-shifting place, with new strategies born every day. That said, the fundamentals in this article are evergreen ways to stay relevant online.
The post Driving engagement with data: Strategies for enhancing social media performance appeared first on The Crowdfire blog.
