Social Media Marketing For Dummies. Shiv Singh

are now among the most trafficked websites on the Internet. In fact, marketers now recognize that you can get as much scale and often much more efficiently as TV could in the past. Some brands have moved toward a digital-only model for all their marketing efforts as a result.

      

Expert influencers are the people who are experts in a field and have large audiences.

      Here are some SMM tactics to consider for building awareness:

       Publish video advertisements to YouTube and tag them with category terms.For example, if you’re publishing advertisements for orange juice on YouTube, use the tags orange, orangejuice, beverage, vitamin, and drink in addition to the brand name. Highlight these YouTube video clips on the corporate website, too. As you do this, first consider whether your advertisement is YouTube ready: Would people enjoy viewing it, would they share it, should it be longer, does it evoke strong emotion, and is it truly enjoyable? Figure 3-2 shows whether your orange juice video would be in good company on YouTube.

       Nurture relationships with expert influencers, such as YouTube and Instagram influencers, who publish content related to the specific product category you’re marketing.Take the time to share product samples with these influencers, answer their questions, and invite them to special events. If required, sponsor a post on an influential blog. These expert influencers build awareness for your brand in ways that your customers may be more responsive to.

       Set up a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and a LinkedIn profile.Run polls, offer special discounts, publish games, promote coupons, and give members of these pages or accounts product sneak peeks. Share entertaining and educational information through them. Boost that content with paid advertising so that it reaches the right people.FIGURE 3-2: Does your orange juice video belong here?

       Provide RSS feeds for content on the corporate website.An RSS feed is a content format that easily allows anyone to pluck the content from your site and place it on their website, application, or in an RSS reader. Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader. Just visit http://feedly.com for instructions on how to set it up. Then each time you see the RSS icon on a website, you can click it and have that content fed into your RSS reader on an ongoing basis. Figure 3-3 shows how Apple has set up its RSS feeds.Also allow for the easy sharing of information from your corporate website onto the social networks. Services from companies such as AddThis (www.addthis.com) and ShareThis (www.sharethis.com) allow you to make your content sharable.

       Allow new customers to broadcast their purchases to their social networks.Each time a customer makes a purchase, you can ask her whether she would like to announce the purchase on her favorite social network. Services such as StrongView and ShareThis, along with Facebook Connect, allow you to set up this capability on your website for your customers. If you’re planning to broadcast customers’ purchases, be sure to ask the customers for permission to do this before you do.

       Leverage social ads.Because social ads are highly engaging — by virtue of the fact that they tell the customer what his friends are doing — they’re useful for building awareness and establishing consideration. For example, if a customer sees an endorsement from his friend in an ad unit for a movie, he is more likely to go for the movie. See Part 3 to find out how each social media platform approaches endorsements via ads. Also review the social ad options from Facebook at (www.Facebook.com/advertising), which give you awareness-building opportunities at scale.

       Support a cause via a social network.Promise to match the contributions of participants who encourage friends to participate in the cause as well. Companies such as Network for Good (http://www1.networkforgood.org/) help you run marketing campaigns that integrate cause marketing elements into them.

      FIGURE 3-3: One of Apple’s RSS feeds.

      SMM at the consideration stage

      The consideration stage of the marketing funnel is where you make sure that as the prospective customer goes about making a purchasing decision, she considers your product.

To be included in the consideration stage, use tactics such as product comparisons, special promotions, sales discounts, decision tools, and calculators to convince prospects.

      

The consideration stage is arguably the most important one because this is the point at which you can snag a loyal customer or forever lose one to a competitor.

      Social media marketing plays the most important role at this stage. This is because the referent, expert, and positional influencers (which we define in Chapter 1) help a prospect determine whether he should make the purchasing decision. Increasingly, while making choices between different products, prospective customers look to each other for advice and guidance.

      People ask their friends for advice, search the web for customer reviews, and read expert opinions from credible third-party sources. In fact, a study titled, “On Brands and Word of Mouth” that appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research in August 2013 showed that people spread the word on brands online for three reasons: social, functional, and emotional. No longer is it enough to know that people share product and brand opinions online; you need to pay attention to what sharing takes place in your product category and the motivations that drive it.

      Your role at this stage is primarily connecting that prospective customer with these credible third-party sources of information. Now, you may feel that connecting a prospective customer to a bad review or to another customer who may not have liked the product is a bad idea, but it isn’t necessarily so. Prospective customers are looking for the best information about a product, and they respect companies that help them research the product more thoroughly. This is important because as a Forbes 2018 study pointed out, 71 percent of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. With that in mind, don’t hesitate to use your existing customers to help you market to your prospective customers. It only helps.

      

You can’t hide bad reviews on the web, and by pointing to all the reviews and not just the good ones, you establish credibility with your prospective customer. (Besides, we would hope that the positive reviews far outweigh the negative ones.) It is critical to note that reviews do make a big difference, and it is better to have some bad reviews than none at all. In fact, the number of reviews and average rating on a product correlate closely with conversion to purchase, according to a March 2014 Bazaarvoice study on Internet Retailers.

Here are some SMM tactics that you can use at the consideration stage:

       Publish customer ratings and reviews on the corporate website.Make sure that ratings and reviews appear for all products and that you do not censor them. Even if a product gets negative reviews, publish them. In all probability, customers will choose other products from your company. You won’t lose the customer completely.

       Point to authoritative third-party reviews.It’s important to point to credible third-party reviews from recognized