Social Media Marketing requires a whole different mindset from traditional marketing.
The average person will spend 2.47hrs a day on social media a day. 81% of consumers’ purchasing decisions are influenced by their friends’ social media posts. If you want your business to be in the space where consumer decisions are made, social media marketing is a must.
So how has it changed?
The marketing you have probably been engaged in is what we refer to as interruptive marketing.
Interruptive Marketing
In the traditional product promotion model, people have to stop what they’re doing to pay attention to the marketing message or deal with it in another way.
- Telemarketing calls.
- Mail campaigns.
- Email campaigns.
- Television and radio ads.
- interstitial and transitional online ads interrupt or delay the user’s selected content.
- Pre-roll ads that play before video content.
The process has been to:
- Interrupt.
- Grab attention
- Create a desire or a sense of loss
- Pressure prompt into a close.
To save some time, we won’t look into why this method doesn’t work anymore; I think the icky feeling we had during that conversation speaks volumes about why this does not work.
When it comes to social media marketing, businesses need to think about Market Engagement.
So what is Social Media Engagement?
The engagement has been the number one buzzword in marketing for some time, but how does it relate to Social Media Marketing? In the digital marketing context, the term refers to how consumers interact directly with the brand through different actions, such as clicks, likes, comments, and shares. Traditional interruptive marketing is no longer viable as consumers look to connect with brands around lifestyle trust and relationships.
“Engagement has little to do with the actual transaction and more with interactions before and after an actual purchase.”
We break the way people engage with your brand into four types
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Contextual Engagement
“Without context, “engagement” is just noise.
Social media platforms allow us to understand individual consumers’ current preferences and
Innovative marketers focus on the goals and values of their customers to provide a more individual and relational experience.
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Engagement of Convenience
Social media platforms eliminate the need for consumers to be interrupted by enabling them to simply say yes (to a new order of a particular product) and move on.
Consumers will engage if it’s easy. So innovative brands create and tweak interactions that increase convenience.
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Emotional engagement
Humans are emotional creatures, so delivering contextual relevance and convenience to consumers goes a long way in reinforcing the emotional value they unconsciously invest in a brand.
“Ninety-nine per cent of consumers’ brand buying decisions stem from some other unconscious emotional space.”
Social media gives us this understanding on a 1:1 basis at scale because it tracks millions of data points that together paint a precise picture of an individual’s ideal environment for making decisions on what to buy, when and how often.
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Social engagement
If I have a good experience with a brand, it’s so easy for me to share it via my social channels, which in turn influences others to seek out the experience.
Every Social Media Marketing Project starts with identifying where a client is in their social media Journey,
First, we assess the current engagement and identify the most effective content and touchpoints.
Secondly, we look at the “Call to Action” and “Landing Environments” to ensure that any engagement has the best potential to connect.
The third part of the process is to work with the client to identify the ideal customer avatar and the culture that influences their consumer decisions
From here, we build the tools and the strategies to engage the target audience with the brand, building awareness, trust and influence