Introduction
For ordinary people, social media is just a tool for communication and getting information from other parts of the world. However, for the business owner, social media is more than that. In fact, for some of them, social media is a way to generate money, sales, and to promote their product.
In the early stages and days of social media, we mostly saw it as a platform for communication, to meet up with your friends or to create chatroom’s, but now we can consider social media platforms as a beneficial tool for marketing, for both small and large businesses.
Not only it is cheap, but social media can also give your brand more recognition by a larger audience. This was something that traditional marketing forms may be hard to achieve.
What is Social Media?
In simple words, social media is a platform where people communicate, share their thoughts, or express themselves online.
Social media can be accessed through any device that can be connected to the internet.
However, recent studies have shown that many users access their social media accounts through smartphone or tablet with the main reason being that it is more convenient.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is to promote your company, product and service, through means such as public relations, sales promotions, advertising, social media, pricing, distributions, and many other functions.
The cumulative functions of marketing are to communicate, deliver and create value to the consumers.
Additionally, companies must take into consideration the employees, stakeholders and the community.
The most successful companies engage in very consumer-oriented marketing and will spend an enormous amount of time, money, and resources, examining the everyday lives of their customers and potential consumers.
From that point, the company will create a product to fill a need. Examples of companies that are known for producing leading-edge creative marketing are Disney, Pepsi, Apple, and Procter and Gamble (P&G).
Marketing – The Four Elements
Product, Place, Promotion and Price are what make the elements of marketing and they are used in a cohesive plan to target the consumer effectively.
- A product can be either a physical product or service.
- The place is where the product is purchased.
- Promotion consists of the communication tools used to get the company’s message out effectively.
- Price is the amount of consumer pays for the product.
The Official Definition
Other official definitions may list marketing as:
- A philosophy, the primary focus is providing customer satisfaction.
- The activity, set of the institution, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.
- Activities that help businesses reach their target market effectively.
- The outcome for marketing is when a successful exchange occurs.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing or also known as Internet marketing is a type of marketing strategy used by the businesses to promote their product using the internet or any digital channels.
Digital marketing can be divided into two categories – offline digital marketing and online digital marketing.
Offline digital marketing is to implement the use of electronic billboards, TV advertisements or radio advertising.
Online digital marketing is to market using the likes of content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or Social Media Marketing (SMM).
The difference between those two is one is marketing without internet and the other one to market with internet in order to broadcast, or post the advertisements on the social media or websites.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the combination of both digital marketing and social media to promote a product.
A company will usually fully utilize social media platforms to promote their brand, products or services in the hope to gain some business growth.
In Malaysia, the most popular platform used for advertising is Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.
Most of the sites have millions of users in Malaysia, especially Facebook, which has been the top platform for years in Malaysia, with around 78 percent of Malaysians using it, that is about 23 million users.
So it is no surprise that a business will choose to promote the product or business on Facebook.
Who Uses Social Media Marketing The Most?
Since social media marketing is cheap and mostly free as well, most people might think that only small businesses or startup companies will use it.
However, that is not the case, as many of the large corporations have turned their heads towards this type of marketing as well.
This is because, social media has a larger reach of the audience which is essential to all business owners.
As you know, all business owners have their target market to reach. Some may want to target young people, others might target based on gender market, and some may targeting other business owners as well.
By using social media marketing, business owners can reach the target market they desired most reasonably.
Advantages of Social Media Marketing
There are countless advantages you can get from social media marketing.
From the fact that it is cheap, easy to access, improves search engine ranking, increases sales, and increases traffic to your official websites. Below we list in detail the many advantages social media marketing has to offer.
#1. Social media marketing is low cost
Social media marketing is the most cost-effective platform to promote a product or business.
For startup businesses or small companies, social media is the answer to their marketing dilemma. Not only it is cheap, but it could serve as free advertising as well!
Social media marketing as a whole is not technically free, but, when compared to traditional marketing, it is less expensive when doing an online marketing campaign.
For example, in Malaysia, social media marketing starts at around RM 1,200 a month and could go up to RM10,000 a month. The charges can vary depending on the service business owners are getting and the length of said service.
Because of this, social media marketing has been the most favoured form of marketing for small startup businesses.
By simply spending some time working on your brand’s social media presence for a few minutes a day, you can see great benefits of increased exposure and sales and develop good relationships with your customers.
Business owners will also be able to track the details about the consumer’s behaviour through the use of Google analytics.
#2. Increased reachable of consumers
Promoting a product using traditional advertising can reach many and different types of consumers. But there is a high chance that you will not be able to promote your product to your target market. It is because traditional marketing is limited inside the country only and unnecessary people who are not interested in the product or services you are offering will not watch the advertisement.
However, in social media, you can utilize it by reaching the target market you wanted to the full extent. The reason is, social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are consumed by global consumers. Besides, by doing social media marketing, business owners can focus on who they wanted to reach without spending a lot of money on the advertisement.
#3. Gain marketplace insight
The market insight or consumer insight is a way for the business owner to determine, or gain an understanding of their audience attitude towards their products. It also one of the tools used to know what is the consumer feels and think about the products. In other words, marketplace insight means – a study of human behaviour to allow the companies to understand the consumers want, need, and feel.
In recent years, social media has been used as the tools for a company to gain marketplace insight. In Malaysia, business owners use social media for market research is because most of the social media platform is providing various ways to analyze trends and conduct market research. Tools like YouTube Analytics, Google’s Audience Retention, Google Analytics, and Facebook Audience Insights can help you to know the demographics of your consumers.
#4. Improved brand loyalty
Brand loyalty refers to the relationship between the brand and consumers. A consumer who is loyal to a certain brand will keep purchasing products from that brand over time. Loyal customers will not purchase a product from different brands and willing to search multiple stores for their preferred brands if it is not available in their area.
The business owner needs brand loyalty to build a strong consumer base to keep them competitive and relevant in the market. Companies that have strong brand loyalty will be able to keep their customers even though there is price change in the product. It is because their customers are satisfied with the brand’s services, product, and quality. Thus, they will indirectly become the brand ambassadors and will spread brand awareness – providing business costless marketing.
Through social media marketing, it will be easy to spread the word about your product, brand, mission, and thus, it will improve brand loyalty. However, to achieve this, you must create a smart social media strategy, share valuable content, and be consistent on social media.
#5. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing term refers to the familiarity of your target consumers with your brand. It is the tools to measure how well they know about your product, services, or company. Brand awareness is important to the company in the early stage of marketing and promoting the company’s brand or products.
Many business owners use social media to increase brand awareness and this certainly proves to boost the brand name. It also increases the engagement with the consumers through things like comments, likes, shares, and re-posts. Social media also helps business owner increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to the sites, using direct links to your website in their social media profile or post.
#6. Direct communication with the audience
How to do it? It can be done through the comment section in social media posts. Consumers usually take this opportunity to ask many questions and your job is to provide a detailed answer, information, and help they may need.
Direct communication can benefit your business in many ways, such as;
- Direct communication between you and the consumer or audience will help you to build a lasting relationship.
- Direct communication will help you to know and understand your consumers much better. From this point, you will be able to create worthy content for them and gain valuable marketplace insight about your consumers.
- Direct communication will help business owners to improve the marketing campaign of the business.
- Direct communication will help you to provide better customer service. By dealing with the consumer’s problem personally, it allows you to resolve issues easier.
- Direct communication will enable you to know the opinion of the people regarding your business. You can do this by asking your followers about your products, the problem they faced when using your product, or maybe you could create giveaways to build customer relationship trust in your brand. It also one of the ways to show your gratitude towards your consumer’s input and support.
#7. It allows you to learn from the competitors
Social media marketing is a good place to study marketing strategy from other competitors. You are not technically stealing from them but what you can do is learn what and how they manage the business. You may also learn how they keep relevant in the industry and the most important is how they keep their existing customers and attracting new customers as well.
You may also learn what’s your competitor social media tactics, strategy, campaigns they are currently doing, or their newly released products. In other words, social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition. It helps you to decide what are the dos and don’ts change in terms of your company’s approach.
Strategies of Marketing
There are two basic strategies for engaging social media as marketing tools:
#1. Active approach marketing
- Active approach marketing is a two-way conversation in which you are getting responses. You’re in the community making things happen, and there’s a lot of valuable things you can get out of that.
- Active marketing is very targeted to individuals, and it’s a short term goal.
Pros:
- You get a lot of valuable feedback
- You can talk to the people on an individual level
- Save a lot of money because it’s using social media as the platform to market the product, which is inexpensive and free to use.
#2. Passive approach marketing
- Passive marketing is about smart positioning and having a clear message with little to no engagement with individuals. It includes your websites, press release, and paid advertising. In other words, passive marketing is just the same as traditional marketing.
- Passive marketing is a one-way conversation. You’re just blasting out, and you have a purpose you want people to and customers to reach out to you.
- Unlike active approach marketing, a passive approach is a need a long time before you could see the outcome from the marketing plan.
Pros:
As for passive marketing, it takes less time but needs a lot of money invested in the marketing project. However, the outcome from the marketing is not for short term purpose.
How business should use the two marketing strategies?
- On social media, businesses should use active approach marketing, but at the same time, you also can use a passive approach.
- Businesses that use passive marketing, they have to use in moderation, and the whole marketing plan should include both active and passive marketing.
How to create a social media strategy?
Social media marketing strategy is your summary and guide to everything you have planned to do. The plan will guide your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.
Every post, reply, like, and comment should serve a purpose. Social media marketing must be specific but not lofty and broad that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure. Keep it concise!
There are a few steps you could follow when creating a social media strategy;
Step 1: Set social media marketing goals in line with business objectives
The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success or return on investment (ROI). That is why a business owner should follow, implement and set the S.M.A.R.T goals. Each of your goals should be:
- Specific: Well defined, clear, and unambiguous
- Measurable: With specific criteria that measure your progress towards the accomplishment of the goal
- Achievable: Attainable and not impossible to achieve
- Realistic: Within reach, realistic, and relevant to your life purpose
- Timely: With a clearly defined timeline, including a starting date and a target date. The purpose is to create urgency.
Another thing you could do to set marketing goals in line with business objectives is to track meaningful metrics. You may track metrics like retweets and likes because it is easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead of focusing on retweets and likes, you may focus on targets such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rate.
Different channel has different goals to track. It is important to align your social media goals with your overall marketing strategy. This will make it easier for you to show the value of your work. Start developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.
Step 2: Learn everything you can about your audience
The key to an amazing and organized marketing strategy is by learning everything about your audience. This is what’s called create audience personas, which describes your typical or target customer, based on detailed audience research.
Technically you are creating who is your ideal customer. You must know what they wanted to see on social media to help you create content that they will like, comment, and share.
To create audience personas, you have to think that your potential fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs. And that will allow you to think more clearly about what to offer them.
Social media provide tons of valuable information about your follower’s demographics. Gather real-world data is another method to learn many things about your potential customers. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your social ads.
Step 3: Research the competition
To know what your competitor is doing right now, first, you have to conduct a competitive analysis. The analysis will allow you to understand and know who is your competitor and what are the things they are doing well and not so well.
This analysis will also help you spot opportunities. Once you know the strength and weaknesses of your competitors, it will be easy for you to set social media targets of your own.
Engage in social listening is another way to keep an eye on the competition. It allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It is important to engage in social listening so that you will not miss out on valuable insight.
Step 4: Conduct a social media audit
If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already done and accomplished. What you have to do is examine your current efforts. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Who is connecting with you on social?
- Which networks does your target audience use?
- How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
Once you gather all this information in one place, you’ll have a good starting point for planning how to improve your results.
Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of social media account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping or not.
To help you decide, you may ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my audience here?
- If so, how are they using this platform?
- Can I use this account to help achieve meaningful business goals
- Asking these tough questions will help keep your strategy on track and focused.
During the audit, you may stumble upon a fraudulent account that uses your business name or products. This is the right time to look for imposters accounts since they can be harmful to your brand. Do not hesitate to capture or report them to the authorities.
Step 5: Set up accounts and improve existing profiles
After you determine which channels to use for your social media marketing, you will also need to define your strategy for each network. Some may use a single social media platform to promote the products or brand. While other brands may be using different types of social media platform for different purpose of marketing.
Once you’ve set up and optimized your accounts on the networks you want to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles. Or if you have one, just improve the existing profiles so they align with your strategic plan.
- Make sure you fill out all profile fields
- Use keywords people will use to search for your business
- Use images that are correctly sized for each network
Here’s a quick overview of how to get your social media profiles into tip-top shape:
Step 6: Find inspiration
Saying ‘to find an inspiration’ easier than to get one. Am I right? Inspirations came from your daily life, who you talk to, what you see or things you have experience in a day will inspire you to write.
In social media marketing, where everyone wanted to be different and unique, we found some of the posts would be fascinating, full of passion, and speak from the heart. Take an example from AirAsia Instagram post, rather than telling us to use the airline, they instead post pictures about their business stories. Who is the cabin crew, how they are dealing with the customers, many interesting things that we as passenger did not know.
The business owner sometimes stuck at ‘what kind of content I should post on my social media?.’ Of course your content must be related to your business. Am I wrong? Definitely no!
How do you convey your content message to your audience is based on your creativity. Some companies may use an inspirational story, others might post content based on fact. For example, AirAsia, they use an inspirational story to deliver the message to the audience.
If you take a look into their Instagram account, you will realize, almost all of their photos emphasize their staff, crew, passenger, and important event happened before, after or during the flight. I found photos like this is inspirational because everything is full of fun, smiles, and laugh.
Even though I am saying a lot of things, I believe many are still struggling to find inspirations for their social media content. So, to help you overcome the problem, I have listed a few things for you to get inspiration from:
Inspiration #1. Social network success stories
Find your inspiration from the campaign, advertisement to get insights on what you can apply to your own goals for each social network.
There are a lot of campaign you can find on social media that could give you inspiration. Such as Pepsi Presents: Your Name, Your Story or maybe Our Rakyat, the Netizen Journalists KL2017.
Inspiration #2. Award-winning accounts and campaigns
You could also check out the winners of Marketing Excellence Awards 2018 Malaysia. Here you will know which brands that are at the top of their social media game.
Inspiration #3. Your favourite brands on social media.
I believe we, the millennials have at least one or two people or brand we follow on social media. It could be a fashion brand, technology brand, or any famous person who’d you think is inspirational. Take the opportunity to get inspiration from the people you follow on social media to generate an idea for your content.
National Geographic, for example, is one of the best on Instagram, combining stunning visuals with compelling captions.
Then there’s Shopify. The e-commerce brand uses Facebook to sell things by showcasing customer stories and case studies.
And IKEA is a great example of superior customer service on Twitter. They use their 280 characters to solve problems and answer questions—often with a bit of humour.
Notice that each of these accounts has a consistent voice, tone, and style. Consistency is key to helping your followers understand what to expect from your brand. They’ll know why they should continue to follow you and what value they will get from doing so. It also helps keep your branding consistent even when you have multiple people working on your social team.
Inspiration #4. Ask your followers
If you are unsure of what you are going to post on social media, you may ask your follower what kind of content they enjoy to read and watch. From that point, you can get the inspirations too. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.
You may also study what are the things that consumers interested to see. What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs?
Step 7: Create a social media content calendar
In social media, you can manage your framework by using content calendar tools like Hootsuite to share your content to get the maximum impact.
One of the advantages of using a social media content calendar is, it can visualize the social media content strategy from time to time. Another benefit is, it helps you to stay organized on all social networks and help you to plan social marketing efforts around important opportunities in your industry.
#1. Create a posting schedule
Posting schedule will help you to stay organized. Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns. Your calendar ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the optimal times.
#2. Plot your content mix
Make sure your calendar reflects the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile so that everything you post is working to support your business goals. If you want to place different post types in your content calendar make sure you maintain the ratio you have planned.
You can try this ratio of different post types;
- 80 per cent of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
- 20 per cent can directly promote your brand.
You could also try the social media rule of thirds:
- One-third of your social content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit.
- One-third of your social content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
- One-third of your social content involves personal interactions with your audience.
Step 8: Test, evaluate, and adjust your strategy
This is the stage where you have to test, evaluate, and adjust whether your strategy is working or not. This is the stage where you are going to find that some strategies don’t work as you expected, while others are working even better than expected.
To effectively measure your visual marketing efforts, follow these steps:
#1. Get an Analytics Program in Place
- Analytics tools help you gather key measurements that show how well your marketing efforts are working.
- It will also track new customers coming in through various channels and campaigns.
#2. Track your data, re-evaluate, test, and do it all again
After using the analytics tool, you can use UTM parameters to track social visitors as they move through your website, so you can see exactly which social posts drive the most traffic to your website. All the data you receive will be used to re-evaluate your strategy regularly.
You can use the information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. It will allow you to understand what is working and what doesn’t, so you can refine your strategy in real-time.
Another way to know whether your strategy is working or not is by doing surveys. What you can do is asking your followers, email list, and website visitors whether the marketing strategy meeting their needs and expectations or not.
Social Media Marketing Strategy for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube
Facebook is the most used social media platform in the world, and it has retained its position as the number one social media platform in many countries. As of 2019, Facebook has 2.2 billion active users in the world, and in Malaysia, around 22 million of the people are using this platform to interact with people or doing online business. So, it is not surprising if this platform has been the first choice of every business owners to promote their product. There are a few things the business owner need to do to promote their brand on Facebook, and that should be;
#1. Create appropriate Facebook business page details
Most of the business owner made mistakes by not putting relevant and detailed information about their business on the Facebook page. The mistakes could be, not putting the photos that represent the business, or there are no details about the service or product they are selling.
You need to remember, people who visit your Facebook page will not spend a long time to take a look into your page. Remember, when you are using Facebook as the tool to promote your business, people wanted to find more in-depth of your products. Thus, putting the right and appropriate description of your product on the page could help you gain a new customer or increase brand loyalty.
When you are using Facebook to promote or sell your product, the first thing the business owner has to do is creating the appropriate Facebook business page. In this matter, the page must include a relevant photo and detailed description of the business. Not only it will make the page looks professional, but it will build trust between the company and the consumers. It also one of the ways to increase brand awareness.
#2. Create and post engaging content
To build lasting relationships between your business and customers, you must create and post engaging content on your Facebook page. It is because, if your audience finds the Facebook content is appealing, there is likely high chance that they will become loyal to your brand.
To do this, you must continuously post something on your Facebook page to stay top on the mind with your audience. Shares content that matters the most to your audience. You may also share or post a different kind of content so that your audience will not get bored.
Another thing you could do is analyzing your recent posts. The aim is to see which of your post received the most engagement by looking at the comment section and shares received. It is because these interactions will impact your Facebook algorithm and marketing results the most.
#3. Use various forms of media to promote your business
One of the best features of Facebook – the platform is supporting multiple types of media forms. You can post and share content in terms of videos, photos, audio or maybe the simplest is text.
#4. Use Facebook apps to ease your marketing task
Facebook apps are essential for any business. It is because Facebook apps will help to reduce your burden in marketing. There are many apps you can use to improve your marketing and posting task. Below are the Facebook apps that you can use:
a. Woobox
b. Wildfire Interactive
c. LeadPages
d. Wishpond
e. MailChimp
f. Social RSS
g. Post Planner
h. Shopify
i. Facebook Causes
j. Shortstack
k. Pholiofy
l. Pagemodo
m. IFTTT
n. iFrames
o. Involver
p. Band profile
#5. Use Facebook ads to increase the market reach
Facebook ads contain an advertisement created by business owners on Facebook for the Facebook audience. Facebook ads work based on demographics, profile information, user activities, device use information and off-Facebook activity.
Ads usually appear in the News Feed on desktop (in the right column of Facebook) and mobile. Sometimes ads content is paired with news about social actions that your friends have taken, like liking a Page. Your friend will experience the same thing if you have done the same thing.
Facebook advertising is an crucial way to connect with your audience on the world’s largest social network. If you are planning to boost visibility 100 times more than your competitors or to reach a specific category of the audience in a short amount of time, Facebook ads are the best options. However, Facebook ads did not come free of charge, and it could be time-consuming as well.
Aside from Facebook, Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms to promote business and products. It is because Instagram provides the best social media platform to form engagement between the business owner and the consumers due to the visual attractiveness and easy to use applications. Because of this, most of the Instagram users, usually the younger generations.
#1. Fill-up your biography section with essential information
To appeal on the Instagram user, which also could be your potential future client, it is vital to give full details about your business in the biography section with essential information. The general information would be the brand name, type of business, address (if there is a physical store), and link to the official website.
#2. Instagram community
Do you believe Instagram can form a fantastic relationship with other users? When it comes to the building community and develop a relationship with the audience, Instagram works the best.
How can you participate in the Instagram community? You can use the platform to post pictures that are not related to yourself to forms community around photos.
There are many ways to build or be part of a community on Instagram;
- Using hashtags allows you to connect with users you may never meet.
- Liking and commenting on other people’s photos gets you engaged with the greater community (and often helps you grow your followers as people reciprocate).
- Participating in Instagram campaigns intended to further a worthy cause can help you contribute to a greater good.
- Sharing images and videos from events can help your followers feel like they’re in on the action and are a real part of your community.
#3. What is your optimal posting frequency?
How often do you have to make a posting in a day? The answer is, post as many as you can!
According to the research by Union Metrics, the major brand usually make posting 1.5 times a day. The reason for the many posts is to increase engagement and to gain more followers on Instagram.
Another benefit from posting frequently and consistently, you will be able to keep your audience engaged with great content and keep your brand front of mind.
Posting more in a day will not result in a decrease of engagement, but, if you decrease your posting, there are possibilities the engagement with the consumers will reduce.
The best amount of posts for your account is the number that you can keep up with consistently. Don’t be afraid to push the envelope when it comes to your posting frequency. Start with once a day, and gradually try increasing the rate. When you hit a point where engagement starts dropping, scale back a bit until you reach your optimal level.
#4. Instagram images must be equal to your business types
Some of the most successful brands on Instagram pay careful attention to how their pictures contribute to their brand’s identity. They seem to have an overarching theme to their images – and this theme is also closely related to their overall company image.
Take Starbucks, for instance, whose company mission statement is as follows: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.” Their Instagram posts support this statement nicely, offering up inspirational and heart-warming images. Rather than merely posting promotions and random shots of coffee, they use their images to further their mission and story.
#5. Use Instagram management tools to stream your work
Using Instagram tools can save you time and give you better insight into how well your posts are doing on the platform. Most of the tools allow you to access your account via the web browser, track people who are following and unfollowing you, and finding the post, photos, or videos that get a lot of engagement (comment, shares, likes).
Below is the list of Instagram tools that you can use;
a. Magic Social
b. Grum
c. Owlmetrics
d. VSCO
e. Later
f. Woobox
g. Canva
h. Linktree
i. Ink361
j. Juicer
#6. Grow your followers
The key to growing your followers is relatively simple! You can do it by having good engagement with the other Instagram users. The users who found your Instagram post, content or photo will naturally become your followers because they think your engagement is informative and pleasing to their eyes.
For many people, they believe that the more the post on Instagram to more follower they will get. However, for many successful business owners on Instagram who have a solid fan base, most of their content contains a high definition (HD) pictures or high quality (HQ) videos.
Most people found that high-quality content is attractive than just Instagram, who posted a lot of posts only. Pay details to what you are going to post and if possible, choose the best images and includes the best captions before posting it on Instagram.
Because no one wanted to read lengthy but useless and not informative Instagram quotes, same goes to the picture; no one wants to follow someone with thousands of pointless images.
Another method to grow following is by;
- Be consistent – know who you’re posting for and why you’re posting.
- Engage in your photo as well the other people’s – people who see that you’re regularly interacting, they’ll be more likely to follow you.
- Promote your Instagram account everywhere: to your email subscribers, on your physical marketing materials and to your other social media fans and followers.
#7. Follow other people; celebrities, social media influencers, or other business owners
One method to boost your Instagram appearance, followers, or engagement is by following the Instagram account of famous people – celebrities, social media influencers, or public figures and other business owners. Aside from that, you should follow your followers back and be actively finding new users to follow.
There are several strategies you can use for finding people worth following.
- Find people you already know – it could be your friends or family, facebook friends list, contact list, and suggested users list.
- Search for people or companies you know using Instagram’s search bar or the search and explore the feature.
- Follow influencers in your industry.
- Follow users who are following influencers in your industry.
- Google search for influential users in your industry
- Search for industry-related hashtags.
#8. Post engaging photos and videos
How to post appealing images and videos on Instagram? Well, it is easy! All you have to do is;
Posting user-submitted photos
- Content produced (usually photos or videos) by users and featured by other people on their page (with proper credit).
- Very popular among brands, the powerful strategy is one of the most dominating sources on the web, and it seems to be amazingly effective on Instagram.
- Was done when someone is tagging the Instagram account of the other people.
Posting behind-the-scenes photos of your workspace or employees
Post sneak peeks of new products
Post simple image quotes created using a tool like Canva
Post short product demos or tutorials
Post’ Day in the life’ shots to show your side
Posting holiday-themed photos and videos
Posting close-up human faces
Post photos with light colours instead of dark colours to get likes.
Post videos too!
Post images with high background space – tend to get more engagement than those with low background space.
#9. Use Instagram ads
Instagram advertising refers to the method of paying sponsored post content on Instagram to reach a larger and more targeted audience. Instagram ads are used to help grow the brand exposure, websites traffic, generate new leads and move current leads down the funnel.
Not only do more than one billion people use Instagram every month, but engagement numbers for the app are higher than both Facebook and Twitter.
That’s why we want to walk you through the science of Instagram advertising, which gives you the chance to hyper-target your content to the Instagram users who count.
How to use Twitter to promote your business? In Malaysia, Twitter is still relevant, and one of the most used social media platform after Facebook. Twitter is the perfect platform if your target audience is the young generations. Same like Facebook and Instagram, the goal of Twitter marketing is to increase brand awareness, to reach a more specific targeted audience, and to improve brand loyalty!
Below are the few things you can do to market your business on Twitter;
#1. Twitter cards
A Twitter card is content designed to give users a rich media experience whenever tweets contain links to a site’s content. Previously, the Twitter card could post content up to 160 characters only, but today Twitter has increased it to 280 characters.
One of the best things about the Twitter card is, it helps you to stand out from an avalanche of wordy updates.
Using Twitter cards;
1. Gives you more visibility on Twitter
2. Helps you to earn followers through immersive interactions
3. Makes your Tweets more attractive and “clickable.”
4. Increases traffic to your website
5. Encourages conversions from customers
There are currently four card types available;
1. Summary Card
2. Summary Card with Large Image
3. App Card
4. Player Card
#2. Build Twitter followers
Building followers to get more recognition! There are a few things you can do to gain new followers and retain the existing one!
#3. Tweet frequently
- To maximize engagement, some brands tweet as often as 15 or 20 times per day.
- Fresh content on Twitter will let potential followers know that you’re active, engaging, and worth following.
#4. Optimize your posting time
- Many brands or business owners said the best time to post on social media is in the early and late afternoons during weekdays.
- Schedule tweeting time at the times where users are more active and tweet in real-time at intervals throughout the day as well.
#5. Post visual content
- Tweets containing visual content receive more likes, shares and retweets than those without them.
- Accompany your tweet with an image or photo to encourage the audience to take a look into your Tweets.
#6. Utilize hashtags
- Tweets with at least one hashtag receive 12.6% more engagement than those without them.
- Hashtags are a quick way to increase followers on your account.
- You can use industry hashtags that ideal for your professional content or maybe use the popular community hashtags.
#7. Engage with replies, retweets and tags
- Engage with your audience by regularly tagging, retweeting and replying immediately to them. This will let new followers know that you’re human and get more eyes on your brand.
#8. Create an inviting profile
- Make your profile looks friendly!
- Optimizing your profile involves three straightforward steps:
- A clean profile photo.
- Your profile must be describing what you do, your companies, your position, and where you operate.
- A taste of your personality. Giving your followers a sense of who you are is always a plus.
#9. Identify followers within your network
- Syncing your contact list to Twitter can help you tap into your existing network of people most likely to follow you.
#10. Draw in followers outside of Twitter
- Promote your account on the other social media platform as well, such as Facebook, Instagram, and many more.
#11. Identify and engage with social media influencers in Twitter
Engaging with social media influencers will create the opportunity to gain more followers, more engagement and more traffic to your website.
How to do it? In Twitter, users arranged in order of their follower numbers. You can use the controls on the left of the screen to narrow your search down.
#12. Use Twitter tools to manage your contacts
As your followers increased, there is a high chance that your timeline might feel overwhelming. To keep track of people you don’t want to miss any tweets, you may add them to a Twitter list of your main timeline.
Tools like Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to set up columns to follow tweets from your lists easily. You can make these lists public (so the people on the list know they are on it) or private (so they don’t know). Or you can subscribe to public lists that other users have created.
#13. Use Twitter ads
- Twitter ads is a tool to market your brand on Twitter.
- Three types of Twitter ads;
o Promoted tweets
o Promoted Accounts
o Promoted Trends
#14. Research competitor audience
- To know who is following your competitors.
- To know the demographics of your audience and also the competitors.
- To ensure campaigns resonate, content sees high engagement, and ads perform brilliantly in the moments that matter most.
#15. Use pinned tweet
- Pinned tweets are a great way to draw attention to your current promotion or most recent content.
- Pinned tweets usually showed first at the top of your tweet list if someone goes to your profile page. The remainder of your tweets will show after that in reverse chronological order.
- A pinned tweet is used to highlight a specific tweet you want to make sure everyone that goes to your profile page sees.
- It could be the announcement of your future business product, planning, and new ventures.
#16. Use amazing headlines
- To attract the attention of the readers, the audience, you must put the fantastic headlines.
- The headline is essential to increase your conversion rate.
- Your headline angle could be about fears, history, fictions, truth, lies, and many more. You may even experiment with it based on your business types.
#17. Use Twitter analytics
- Twitter Analytics can let you see how many views and how much engagement your tweets get.
- From Twitter analytics, you can learn about what your audience responds to the best in your post. From that point, you will be able to know which type of tweet (image posts? Videos? Links? Hashtags?) you should do more.
- You need to work on building your engagement levels steadily. Studying your analytics will help you do this.
YouTube
Marketing your business, brand, or product on YouTube is different than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Marketing on YouTube means you will have to create or produce a video about what you are selling. In youtube, aside from marketing it through YouTube ads, brands usually hire a social media influencers to do a review for their products.
#1. Create, customize the channel, produce short videos and post it to the YouTube channel
If you are creating a YouTube account for business, you should use Brand Account on Google. Brand Account allows multiple users to access the account at the same time. It is not recommended to use regular Google account if many people access YouTube. Regular Google account is more suitable for personal use instead of business.
After that, it is time to produce a short video regarding your brand, company, or products. Use the right tools to edit the videos before posting it to the YouTube channel.
#2. Organize your video by making a playlist
Build a playlist to keep it organized! Because this will keep the viewers stay on your channel for a longer time.
Make sure to create your playlists thoughtfully and chronologically. It will reduce the probability of people clicking away to another channel.
#3. Optimize your videos for search and clicks
Optimize your video for SEO to get views. You can do this by putting the right title and keyword, make an interesting thumbnail, put hashtags, and ask viewers to subscribe. You also can write a compelling video description, containing a short explanation of your video topic, as well as links to your website and social media accounts, and a list of hashtags.
#4. Use social media to promote your videos
Link your YouTube account to another social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, to get more engagement from the audience.
#5. Use YouTube Ads
Consider using YouTube Advertisement or any paid advertising to market and grow your brand. Using the platform will ensure you to reach more potential customers.
YouTube ads come in six varieties, some of which I touched on already earlier in this article:
- Skippable video ads
- Non-skippable video ads
- Bumper ads
- Overlay ads
- Display ads
- Sponsored cards
#6. Try working with an influencer
Most of the YouTube subscriber trust the opinions of their favourite influencer. So it is no surprise if many brands are choosing social media influencer to do a review for them. Because they know influencer has the power to persuade the subscriber to buy a particular product.
When reaching out the influencer, try to reach those who know and trust your brand. Let the influencer do the talking and give them more control over how they are going to market your product.
How To Attract More Customers Through Social Media Marketing?
#1. Run a contest
Like most of us, we love to win, we like receiving gifts, and most important we love being appreciated. One of the things most Malaysians can get these is by participating in any competition, whether it was a small contest or world stage championship.
In social media marketing, business owners or companies usually run a contest to promote a product and gain new customers. Through the contest, the business owner can build a community.
#2. Provide customer review or testimonials
Have you ever experienced that when you are buying a product from the seller on Facebook or Instagram, they will ask to provide testimonial or review on their page? I did have that kind of experience. Have you ever asked the reason why they ask for a review? I believe most of us haven’t done that.
The reason why many online sellers were asking review on every purchase of their product is to make them look trustworthy. From the review, a business can build significant trust and credibility from a steady stream of positive reviews.
Another reason, testimonials will have a direct impact on business sales. According to a study, online reviews can demonstrably impact your bottom line. Brands that viewed positively have better sales, but even improving your star rating can have a positive effect on your sales.
Example of customer review is when people are giving the best review about the bags they recently purchase. It could be the shoes that have just cleaned by shoe cleaning service and many more.
#3. Advertise, sales, promo, and deals
Sales, promotions, and deals will play an important role in doing online business and social media marketing. Many Malaysian prefer to do shopping during the sales season because they believe it is cheap and they could get as many stuff they wanted.
Also, don’t forget to keep promoting your brand in any social media platform!
#4. Post creative visual content
There are many ways to create a compelling visual for social media post. One may say post a standard and lengthy text on Twitter or Facebook! But does it work? For some who love to read, it may be working. But for those who doesn’t, lengthy post are failed social media marketing.
So what you actually can do to attract people attention on reading or take a look into your social media account?
#5. Combine text with image
If you look carefully on many social media platform, most of the sites provide you with the ability to post text and photos at the same time. For example, Twitter and Instagram are allowing you to posts multiple pictures associated with captions. Kudos to Facebook because not only it will enable you to post image and text at the same time. But the platform allows you to post many pictures, and multiple media form in a single post!
#6. Short Video!
Why not? These days, YouTube is not the only social media platform which uses video as its primary content. You also can posts videos to the social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and many more. Just choose which one do think works the best for your company, brands, and products.
It also must be based on your audience and target market. If your target market is more to the young generation, then platform like Instagram, and TikTok is a more suitable place to posts the video. But if your target audience is more to all ages, then use Facebook because different generations have used the platform.
Unlike YouTube, videos posted on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are much shorter. For example, if you are posting a video on Instagram, the average length is between 30 to 60 seconds. The reason is that the short-video approach is designed to offer viewers a much different viewing experience than with traditional longer-form videos.
#7. GIFs, Memes
Alright! If you don’t have the time to create, record, or produce even the shortest video, you may try to create GIFs instead. Select a GIF from Twitter’s library that will connect with your target audience. GIF is not only available on Twitter, but Instagram and Facebook as well.
However, if you are not so into Twitter marketing, you can create memes. Which mainly used and posted on Facebook! You can always share relevant memes to your page that others have created, but it is better to make your memes to elevate your content strategy even further. Don’t forget to add your logo in the corner to take full advantage of the shares you’ll surely be getting!
#8. Charts and Infographic
If you think chart and infographic only for newspaper, then think again! In social media marketing, you need to be creative to promote your brands and that’s including coming out with some crazy ideas of visual promotions. Some people may use the unconventional type of advertising for marketing their products.
The size of infographic and charts are technically large, even though they are known to be valuable resources of information. When posted on social media, these files don’t always look great in the newsfeed, as they reduced to nothing more than a thumbnail.
So instead of posting the full infographic, the business owner usually posts a snippet and direct their audience to the website to view the full infographic or download it for their use.
As for the charts, sharing data on Facebook helps your audience learn. But before you post any charts, be sure the information is valuable, shareable and digestible. A successful data visualization can be a great type of post to share on Facebook as it gives your audience some insight into why you do what you do, as well as how it affects them personally.
#9. Be active on social media
Why would you create tons of social media account which ended unused or abandoned? Many company or businesses created social media with the purpose of ‘TO HAVE A SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT.’ Some of them don’t even see the opportunity to gain extra revenue through social media, low cost of marketing, and it is a way to increase your brand recognition.
So if you think this article is relevant, keep reading it until the end!
Why is it important to be active on social media? For anti-social media, we did not find being on social media every single day is necessary, but for brands, company and businesses, it is essential. The reason is;
- To increase engagement between business owner and consumers.
- To grow business audience
- Build brand trust
- Increase brand awareness
- Drive traffic
- Boost SEO
- Generate customers and sales
The Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
Even though social media marketing hailed as the lifesaver business owner because of the ability to reach more audience and low cost to maintain, it also came with a disadvantage as well.
According to many websites and blog, marketing, promoting on social media has increased the exposure to competitors. Even though it let you know what your competitor activity, that does not mean they did not care what is your strategy too.
What you are doing to your competitor like researching their brands, activity and so on, they are doing the same thing to your brand as well.
Another disadvantage is social media marketing need qualified personnel. Which is mean you will have to employ qualified staff to manage your company social media account and have the traffic under control. You have to do this to focus on core business issues.
Social media marketing is a long term investment, but, that platform is also giving slow returns on investment. If you have decided to pursue social media marketing, do not expect to returns in an overnight. The time to get your payback from social media marketing is depending on your strategy, what your audience wants (and where), your commitment, and your consistency.
Another thing that businesses realize from social media marketing is it will tarnish the brand name. You may be wondering why? If a piece of negative information finds its way onto the social media platform, the public will have the chance to express their dissatisfaction. This will tarnish your product name and deter potential customers from establishing relationships and doing business with the brand.
Social media marketing is time-consuming, and because of this, people may ignore your page because they may be interested in other sites. To get them to appreciate and share your posts may take time. For this reason, resources in terms of money and time must be allocated to ensure frequent publishing of aesthetic.
An Example of A Good Social Media Marketing Campaign
AirAsia Excellent Marketing
AirAsia hailed as one of the best company in Malaysia that has an excellent social media marketing strategy. AirAsia is known to have won many awards regarding social media.
What makes the company best at social media marketing? Let’s take a look into the company’s social media marketing strategy:
Strategy #1: Target Market and Solving A Problem.
AirAsia team convinced that the low-cost airline is the way forward. They believe they can change and disrupt the entire airline industry via democratising their pricing model.
They genuinely believe Asian love to travel, but one thing that prompted them from travelling is the cost of an airline. AirAsia saw this opportunity, and that’s how the idea of the marketing strategy of the company.
Strategy #2: Easy-To-Understand Branding
After identified their target markets, then they decided to name the brand as AirAsia. With this, they are indirectly announcing to the world that they are going after the Asia airline market.
Strategy #3: Tagline
The company tagline Now Everyone Can Fly is brilliant, simple, yet meaningful. The tagline clearly says to a potential customer; they can travel anywhere they want, safely, without a hassle and have to pay a reasonable amount of money for it.
Strategy #4: Direct Touch To Consumers Via Online Marketing
AirAsia is already embarking the internet and e-commerce way of doing things before any other companies. They understood early that the web and internet business is undoubtedly a distinct advantage apparatus that can’t be overlooked.
AirAsia put a lot of efforts and resources on automating standard processes online. Their website and portal are easy to navigate, excellent user experience and expectation as well as mobile-ready too.
Strategy #5: Social Media Utilisation
Why were they using social media? To establish conversations and at the same time quietly collecting feedbacks. This way, direct interactions with their community who also their fans and customers are made easy.
They want to convert online friendships into closer, trustworthy real-life friendships. When this happens, this network of new friends of their staffs will trust AirAsia and make AirAsia part of their travelling plan.
Strategy #6: Email Marketing
Why email marketing? AirAsia realises that social media channels are regularly changing algorithms from time to time, and the price to do is always increasing and getting more expensive.
In actuality, they are growing their community. Social media is a tool to make it as big as possible. Once the community is enormous, they will no longer depend on social media.
They convert social media followers into subscribers to their weekly newsletter. When these people become a subscriber, team AirAsia can quickly blast out any announcement or promotions directly to every customer.
They know that they can control only the content and community elements of it, but not social media. In the future, when social media marketing is getting ridiculously expensive, they might utilise it as a conversation channel only.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the existence of social media has created another type of marketing. If before this, marketing limited to billboard, tv, radio, and newspaper. Social media has changed the environment.
With social media, companies can do marketing because the social media platform is free and most important, it is also cheap. Many companies are using social media marketing to provide and understand their customer’s needs and want much better.
However, due to the competition and the rise in popularity of social media marketing, today, social media marketing has become more expensive.
