Everyone is busy. You’ve surely felt it; we’ve all had that feeling of being under the pressure of a time crunch, whether we’re responding to dozens of emails or trying to fit our working hours around that tennis class we meant to go to. There are just so many hours in the day.
That haste has a direct impact on our consumer preferences. It’s simple enough, but it bears saying. We don’t have the time to sit down and research a new brand or a new product, when we need something. Are you more likely to buy the tennis shoes you’ve seen advertised, the white ones with the red label, or will you seek out another brand you’ve never heard of?
It doesn’t matter whether that other brand has more grippy soles and more robust arch support — the plain fact is that if you haven’t heard of them, and your match is this weekend, you aren’t about to go looking for something off the beaten path.
Exposure is everything, and a social media marketing company can help your brand be seen.
Social Media Marketing and Your Brand
People use social media for just about everything. It is a way to connect with friends, sure, but social media has rapidly evolved into a one-stop content delivery platform. People learn about current events on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter. People look up local businesses on Facebook to find hours of operation or to read reviews from the community.
The need for a strong social media presence is a foregone conclusion for any business, but even a very robust profile isn’t going to do the job alone. A social media marketing company can leverage that profile to drive engagement with your brand to grow your audience and foster a dialogue between you and your customer base.
Brand Identity
Your brand identity is communicated by your logo in the same sense that the presidency is branded with flags, seals, and bunting, but there’s more to it. In the digital era, a brand requires more personality and interactivity. Wendy’s’ Twitter profile is famous for its playful insults and witty comebacks, for instance. Vargo (makers of ultralight backpacking gear) peppers their Instagram page with images of hikers and backpackers sitting beside campfires, with their products being used ‘out in the wild’ so to speak. The pictures look like pictures you took, on your last backpacking trip. It’s almost as if you’re holding a titanium mug beside a campfire of your own.
There’s an old sales trick that capitalizes on a bias in the human psyche. Once we hold something in our hands, we feel as if it’s ours. If we’ve taken a product off the shelf, we have a twinge of “ownership” or “possession” about that item. A person is vastly more likely to purchase an item once they’ve added it even to a virtual cart.
Brands can leverage that sense of almost tactile ownership through engagement and participation with their audience. That positions your brand first and foremost in the minds of your consumers, when they find themselves in need of your services.
Mobile Marketing and Micro-Moments
A majority of brand engagements and conversions come from mobile devices. As a culture, we’re more likely to take out our phones to solve an immediate problem than to wait until we’re back to our desktops. These spontaneous or reactionary engagements are what Google has started referring to as “micro-moments.”
Returning to our tennis shoe example, imagine that your friend has invited you to a doubles match, this weekend. Completely spur of the moment. You played in high school, but you haven’t so much as held a racket in years. You’re going to need a pair of shoes, right?
It’s not the sort of purchase you’re going to put a lot of time into, you’re just going to order the first pair that pops into your mind. What a happy coincidence, then, that your friend shared a post from a brand you have been following lately.
Brand Reach
An important function of social media marketing is brand reach. I used to scoff at the idea of impressions as a metric for social media marketing success, but I know longer do. Simply getting your name out there, over and over again, is a way to extend your brand reach and create that all-important sense of familiarity.
The good news is that consistently generating impressions is much less expensive than trying to get engagements. So don’t be shy. Run low-cost ads on a regular basis as part of your long-term strategy, especially if you are selling higher-cost items or services.
What a Social Media Marketing Company Can Do for You
A social media marketing company can position your brand to capitalize on those spur-of-the-moment needs-based purchasing behaviors. By fostering engagement, creating comprehensive marketing imagery that reinforces that tactile connection between your brand and your audience, your brand can be placed within arm’s reach, at the ready when your customers find themselves in need of your services.
And we can help you be known.
Could your brand benefit from a social media marketing boost? Find us on Facebook or Twitter, or click here to book a free digital marketing strategy session.
