To be successful on Social Media like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, business professionals must know their audience and develop a plan.
How data analysis helps companies and customers to make contact on social media
Digital transformation requires a shift in traditional marketing. Karen Roby interviews the founder of a company that successfully uses data analysis to reach specific customers on social media.
While social media are invaluable for sharing photos of pets, these platforms also lead the way in business marketing. Over the past six years, more and more American companies have used social media for marketing purposes, from 86% in 2013 to 91% in 2019, according to Statista.
An estimated 2.65 billion people used social media worldwide in 2018, which is expected to reach 3.1 billion by 2021, another Statista report found. Companies can capitalize on this reach by using social media platforms to attract new customers, maintain existing relationships and make themselves known to the public.
Large social media platforms offer companies opportunities for paid ads through promoted content and sidebar ads, as well as built-in statistics to track the reach of an organization, according to Lily Stern, social media director of the real estate strategy site TheClose.com.
“Social media make it easier than ever to reach your target audience,” Stern said. “These platforms have a breakdown of the demographics of your followers and people you reach. It is crucial to understand your audience, know what they like and dislike, and what you can offer them.”
While 63% of B2B companies cited social media as their primary way to attract new customers, according to Walker Sands’ Future of B2B Content 2019 report, knowing where to start can be a challenge.
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Choose a Social Media Platform
You first need a real company – no idea – to put a company on the market. Once the company is up and running, the people responsible for marketing and PR should determine the most useful social media platform for the company, said Wesley Pestana, co-founder of First Checkpoint, an online resource for car enthusiasts.
The effectiveness of a social media marketing platform depends on the goals of the company and the target audience, Pestana said.
“It is essential to check the demographics and behavioral characteristics of your target audience before you choose to be on a particular platform on social media,” Pestana said. “You don’t have to be on every social media platform if it doesn’t serve your purpose and purpose.”
For example, the most popular social media platforms vary greatly by age. YouTube (91%), Facebook (79%) and Instagram (67%) are the most popular social media platforms among young people aged 18 to 29. Facebook remains popular among adults aged 30 to 49 with 87% and between the ages of 50 and 64 with 70%; but Instagram falls out of those age groups, 47% and 23% respectively, according to the Pew Research Center.
Pestana recommended taking a look at what the company has to offer and determining which demographics would likely use the service.
Lara Housser, vice president of brand and strategy for KiwiCo said that Facebook and Instagram played an important role in the growth of her business, given her clientele of children and young adults. KiwiCo sends out subscriptions with a STEM theme and an art theme for people of all ages, but many are aimed at younger generations, which makes Facebook and Instagram the most convenient.
“Facebook and Instagram are the two most important to us as a direct-to-consumer brand,” Housser said.
Stern, on the other hand, pointed to Pinterest, which has a visitor base of mainly young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 (38%) as the best platform for its real estate strategy company. While Facebook helped her build an organic audience and target that audience again through paid advertisements on social media, Pinterest was ultimately the most beneficial, Stern said.
“Pinterest has played an important role in growing website traffic,” Stern said. “Pinterest users are generally not that loyal to specific brands – most interest-based searches are unbranded – and therefore this is the ideal time to get your business or product for these users. If you offer a source or product that they want, they have ‘Click, even if they don’t know your company.
“Unlike Instagram and Facebook, the niche of our company is not oversaturated on the Pinterest platform. That means we stand out for other companies,” Stern continued. “Pinterest also ranks us higher in the search results when people use our pins, so we ensure that we create high-quality content for our viewers.”
Once your company chooses the right platform, the next step is to use it.
How to promote your Business on Social Media Platforms
Paid promotion
Almost all major social media platforms have a special site where companies can create accounts with the mission to do marketing themselves; these include Facebook for business, Instagram for business, Twitter for business and Pinterest for business.
With these business accounts you can often view the distribution of the audience and how certain content performed. Users can also use the accounts to promote messages, with the aim of reaching more people; however, all of these strategies require financial investments, Housser said.
“We have learned by trial and error the types of content we share with our community and the way we use social media,” Housser said, and these platforms can serve as a guide to content delivery.
Housser saw, for example, that her followers really enjoyed seeing KiwiCo’s boxes in action, where children experimented with the STEM projects or played with the art projects. She started sharing more of that content and more videos behind the scenes.
“We discovered that authentic content is really appealing to the community. In many cases (the content) is in a messy kitchen, and the lighting is terrible. It’s not something you would put on your Christmas card,” Housser said. “But any way you can show a consumer how your product could fit into someone’s life will actually be just as attractive, if not more attractive, than a beautiful photo from the studio.”
Organic followers
Building on this idea, Housser said she saw that about half of the KiwiCo acquisition came from organic followers rather than through paid advertising. These organic followers often jump on board because of user-generated content (UGC), or content from users promoted by KiwiCo, Housser said.
“We’ll share a part of that really great UGC again, and it’s a great way to get a look at how families use KiwiCo,” Housser said. “You get those word of mouth testimonials, and they are further strengthened on social channels.”
Seeing other people on KiwiCo’s Instagram stories or Facebook pages inspires other consumers to do the same. KiwiCo also encourages consumers to post about their projects by offering a hashtag, Housser said.
“We encourage consumers to have us at all contact points that we carry.
We print it in the collateral that we include in our boxes and we show photos of UGC on the collateral, “Housser said.
Housser also used social media to promote her business by hosting competitions or giveaways. Everything with an incentive is attractive to consumers, she said.
Housser recommended working together with other major brands in your industry to perform freebies. A partnership not only gives your company more prominence by being placed on the social media page of another brand, but it also creates valuable industry contacts, she added.
Pestana used the same tactic when building First Checkpoint. “I have been scaled up to build an active organic community of more than 5,000 followers and influencers by holding motor-related quizzes and competitions where participants can tag their friends,” he said.
Pestana gave the following examples of the tag functions he used to increase his audience with these contests:
- Share a photo of a friend who is proud of his motorcycle
- Tag your friend who loves his bike
- Tag a friend who is a bike enthusiast
- Share a photo with your bike
- Tag your crazy bike friend
Guide for marketing process on Social Media
Housser, Stern and Pestana all agreed on two important recommendations: be authentic and know your audience.
“Be authentic when you socialize,” said Pestana. “People want to build personal, authentic and valuable connections online. They want to connect with someone they can identify with and with whom they can identify strongly. I focus on compelling content and use a consistent schedule, which offers an exceptional, consumer experience I make sure to communicate back with my fans, followers and prospects, so it helps to forge stronger relationships with them. ”
To do that, however, business leaders must know their audience. “You have to keep in mind that their time matters and offer them value. You can only do this if you know not only your product or service, but also your audience from the inside,” Pestana said.
Getting to know the audience of a company is a process, so coming up with a plan is crucial; These plans can be formulated using insights generated through statistics on social media, Stern said.
“Instead of throwing away content and seeing what lingers, you need to come up with a plan in advance,” Stern said. “That plan can involve many different tests, where you see what your audience likes best. With a plan you can replicate the process as soon as you are successful. Once you know your demographics, you look at the average demographics of these social media platforms and choose what works best for your company. ”
“I have found that Social Media Marketing is much more effective and relatively much cheaper than traditional marketing,” Pestana said. “Some of the extra benefits are that it is real-time, flexible and can be scaled up according to your business needs.”
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