Social Marketing is a form of communication that receives much attention these days. What is Social Marketing? Refer to this article by Viindoo to learn the concept and how to deploy an effective social media marketing campaign!
What is Social Marketing?
Recently, with the strong development of technology, Social Marketing is considered to be popular and highly effective. This way of communication helps increase brand awareness and achieve marketing goals through the development of marketing channels on social networks, especially Fanpage.
To create interactions and receive more followers, marketers will post articles, videos, images, run ads, etc. These activities are to deliver the brand image and information about products and services to more people, including the target customers. This will drive consumer buying behavior through social networks.
Social Marketing
What are Social Marketing’s benefits? Usually, all forms of Marketing have the ultimate goal of increasing awareness and sales. Social media marketing also aims towards this goal. This form of marketing brings many benefits such as:
- Increase the level of brand awareness of social network users and get closer to the potential audience.
- Guide potential customers by building trust from content, images, buyer reviews, etc.
- Maintain relationships with existing customers by creating content that aligns with customer insights.
- Increase the effectiveness of remarketing campaigns to old customer groups, thereby optimizing the marketing effectiveness of new products and services.
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Popular types of Social Marketing
Social Marketing is a form of marketing that includes many types with different measurement methods. Here are details on the most popular types of social media marketing.
Social News
Social News is a form of online marketing on social networking sites specializing in news and entertainment. This social marketing type evaluates user interaction based on the number of reads, votes, comments, views, reach, etc. Social News is commonly used on applications such as Sphinn, Digg, Newsvine, etc.
Social News is a form of online marketing, aimed at content related to news and entertainment
In addition, applications for Social News have a feature that allows users to exchange or ask questions about issues in society. Users can conveniently share their thoughts and feelings about the news.
Social Network
Social Network is a form of online marketing on social networks and websites. Marketers evaluate the effectiveness of these marketing campaigns based on the ability to connect and engage with the community. Some social networking platforms that support this form are Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Twitter, etc.
Social Network - Marketing applying the development of social networks and websites
Social Blogs and Forums
Blogs and forums are two concepts that are no longer strange to Internet users in Vietnam. These are online forums that provide conversation via messaging to users who are members or non-members of the forum.
Forums allow users to message and discuss issues
Although blogs and forums are no longer popular with young people, they are still two of the popular means of social networking. In fact, millions of people interact with blogs or forums daily in many ways.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Marketing with Social Bookmarking Sites is a type of online marketing that depends entirely on the website. Here, users can store, organize, manage, and share data and information. Because of the ability to effectively reach many customers, this form is very popular with businesses. In addition, this is an ideal information-sharing, cooperation, and promotion channel for businesses.
Social Microblogging
Microblogging is a marketing method in the form of a blog. However, microblogging will be much smaller in size than a normal website. Here, users can exchange short texts, videos, and their sharings with people who have registered their accounts.
Microblogging is much smaller in size than a Website
Social Media Sharing
Social Media Sharing is known as a type of online marketing through sharing information (images, videos) on websites such as Youtube, Snapfish, Flickr, etc. These websites must be equipped with features such as creating an account, commenting on shared content, etc. The effectiveness will be assessed through views, share rate, virality, etc.
Social Media Sharing usually takes place on Youtube, Snapfish, etc.
Social Marketing implementation process
What is Social Marketing’s implementation process? Here are 8 steps to implement an effective social media marketing strategy.
Determine the goal of the Social Marketing Campaign
Before starting a campaign, businesses need to determine the specific goals of that campaign. Typically, a social media marketing campaign will be implemented with goals such as:
- Increase user engagement.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Reach, interact, and engage with potential customers.
- Increase sales revenue.
Define social marketing strategic goals
Specific goals will lead to easier formulation and evaluation of the strategy. Managers can use the SMART model consisting of 5 factors, namely S (Specific), M (Measurable), A (Attainable), R (Relevant), and T (Time-bound) for goal setting.
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Determine the target audience
After having a specific goal, the marketer needs to identify the main audience of the campaign. This is the core element of a successful campaign, helping to keep your social media marketing content on track.
Define in detail the target audiences
To identify target audiences, marketers need to focus on clarifying the audiences’ gender, age, place of residence, occupation, income, interests, pain points, commonly used social channels, etc. More details of the customer's portrait result in a higher chance of success of the campaign.
Do research on Competitors
Marketers should also pay attention to existing competitors. Competitor research helps marketers identify competitors' content, practices, and ideas. This is not about copying the idea, but indirectly learning about the customer for proper adjustment to satisfy them.
Competitor research and analysis
Businesses should learn about competitors before building content and strategies. At this point, the marketer can analyze the audience by monitoring the externally displayed metrics of the competitor.
Select the appropriate communication channel
Choosing the right channel is an essential step before spreading a campaign on social media platforms. To identify the correct channel category, marketers can ask customers through surveys. Chosen channels must be the platform used frequently by customers or the fastest information search support platform.
Businesses will now have a basis to determine the appropriate channels. However, businesses should only focus on the most important channel to save costs and achieve adequate access. These channels can be identified and selected through communication channels based on the results of previous campaigns.
Choose the suitable communication channel
Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube are popular media channels to consider. However, different types of content marketing are more appropriate for different channels. As follows:
- Channels to share information and emotions: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and MySpace. With these channels, businesses can focus on content in the form of text, sharing useful and interesting information with the public. Besides, these platforms support two-way interaction to help increase brand recognition and customer engagement.
- Channels to share images: Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr. On these channels, businesses do not need to use too many words but should invest in images. These images should have the attraction of being unique, beautiful, or trending.
- Video sharing channel: Youtube. This is a product promotion channel with a huge audience from all over the world.
- Career sharing channel: Linkedin. On LinkedIn, users can not only upload their CVs but also have the opportunity to access a lot of career information from around the world. Businesses can take advantage of this channel to promote their image and attract talent.
Develop content strategy
Quality content will help businesses achieve their campaign goals. Before building content, businesses must identify what is attracting target customers. After that, the content should highlight the product or service with a clear message and be able to "touch" the audience.
Create meaningful messages for audiences
Besides, the way the content is presented also contributes significantly to the success of the campaign. Therefore, businesses need to carefully consider how to convey the content with video, images, or text to match customer insights.
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Schedule content publishing
After having content, businesses need to build a reasonable schedule for content publishing. The chaotic posted order can make readers confused about the message. Therefore, to achieve the highest efficiency and control the entire process, marketers need to have an appropriate content-sending schedule.
Build a clear content publishing calendar
Monitor the indicators
Content delivery makes no sense if message metrics are not regularly monitored. Typically, performance testing will take place once a week. This will help businesses track the progress and level of adherence to the campaign's goals. Therefore, the marketer can come up with appropriate and quick problem-solving plans.
Regularly monitor the indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign
Marketers can use messages, customer feedback, user engagement, and the following specific metrics to measure the effectiveness of the content:
- Reach: This is an indicator of how many users have viewed your business's posts.
- Click: This metric represents the number of users clicking on the content, business name, logo, etc. When tracking this index, marketers can identify factors that promote curiosity and encourage users to interact with the business.
- Engagement: This metric shows people who have interacted with your business's post, as a ratio of total reach to display. As a result, marketers can capture the audience's perception of the brand.
- Hashtag performance: Here, marketers need to determine the most used business hashtags, the hashtags that attract the most viewers, etc.
- Like organic: This factor helps businesses determine the number of organic and paid content likes.
- Sentiment: The metric measures how users react to your business's content or hashtags. Therefore, businesses can determine how users feel about their campaigns.
Example of a successful Social Marketing campaign
The content below will share with readers some recent popular Social Marketing campaigns. All these campaigns have brought certain successes to the brand.
Dove's Campaign: #PassTheCrown
#PassTheCrown is Dove's latest social media marketing campaign. The campaign comes from a Dove finding that 70% of black women perceive a low formality presence in media and advertisement. Through #PassTheCrown, Dove wanted to convey the true story of these women.
Many states in the United States do not have laws against hair discrimination based on race, including natural hair. Therefore, black women may be denied employment or promotion opportunities, and black children may not be able to attend school due to hair problems.
Aware of this, Dove teamed up with the National Urban League, Color of Change, and Western Center to form the CROWN Coalition to end racism in the United States. According to Dove, natural hair should be respected and not subject to judgment.
CROWN Coalition was made up of 4 members
The company's "Dove 2021 CROWN Study for Women" revealed that 53% of black mothers whose daughters experienced hair discrimination said their children were not appreciated since the age of 5. In addition, about 86% of black youth have suffered discrimination since the age of 12.
Therefore, Dove's short film "As Early As Five" was released based on the real experiences of people who have been discriminated against. The video tells the story of 3 girls, one of which has had to go through this situation from elementary school to adulthood.
“As Early As Five” resonates with a true story about discrimination
#PassTheCrown of Dove obtained the following results:
- “As Early As Five” reached 146,000 views on YouTube and over 600 positive comments.
- Dove has exploited the under-reported aspect of discrimination to make a splash in 2022. Thanks to that, the brand successfully signed the CROWN Act with 19 states in the United States to end the pain that discrimination brings to women of color.
Spotify's Campaign: Spotify Wrapped 2022
Spotify Wrapped is a personalized experience for Spotify’s users that started in 2016. The platform analyzes content, individual listening time in a year, and popular artist statistics globally and in specific countries.
In 2022, the platform released the Spotify Wrapped 2022 report. Particularly, this time, the report is made more complete when allowing music listeners to interact and connect with the artist.
Spotify Wrapped 2022 lists the 5 most popular artists globally
This campaign is carried out through outdoor advertising and digital platforms such as Smart TV, online video, and especially social media.
Wired believes that Wrapped's success helps Spotify get free advertising thanks to the Wrapped report of millions of users. This also helps the platform avoid controversy over tracking and collecting user data. Wrapped's success even helped Spotify surpass Apple. “The world's largest technology corporation" then releases Replay, following Spotify’s campaign.
Here is all the important information about Social Marketing that Viindoo wants to provide to readers. It can be seen that, with the trend of technology and the explosion of social networks in the near future, social marketing will be one of the most popular forms of marketing. Viindoo hopes businesses can effectively apply it to generate great benefits.
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