Anton Ruin, CEO of Epom
The evolution of social marketing has already gone through many stages of development and has now become one of the most effective channels for business promotion on the Web. However, digital marketing realities and trends are changing so fast, that even the most innovative social practices can lose their effectiveness rather quickly. Thus, it is crucial for businesses to keep up with changes and be ready to modify their social marketing tactics whenever it becomes necessary.
As for the first quarter of 2014, perhaps the best social practices that can help increase audience engagement via Facebook, Twitter, etc. include:
Despite what one would expect, social media marketing happens to be equally essential for brand promotion and demand generation. With that in mind, it is now vital to include social channels in complex digital marketing/advertising frameworks and to find ways to invest a sufficient amount of time, effort and money in the development of these frameworks.
This means that companies should be willing to give away a part of their overall marketing budgets for social media purposes in order to achieve visible results.
No matter how qualified and creative a marketing team is, it is entirely possible that its members simply can't handle the overall amount of daily, routine work.
In this respect, it is important to know that the involvement of external specialists will be beneficial for furthering business development, as it will lower the staff workload and add new objective perspectives in terms of marketing visions and strategies.
Each social channel represents different audience segments or at least demonstrates the versatility of people's interests. Thus, it is paramount to develop channel-specific social marketing tactics in order to maximize audience engagement.
Additionally, it is essential to segregate social marketing activities concerning each company's brand, especially if the products offered are targeting different customer groups (e.g. different geographical and demographic segments).
Technology plays a fundamental role in today's online marketing world. Therefore, social media marketing activities can and should involve various technological solutions if a company is interested in maximizing audience reach and engagement via all available social channels.
Specifically, experts recommend working with specialized external services aimed at measuring KPIs as well as using a permanent in-house management solution.
No marketing practice will be successful, if a company does not carefully measure and analyze its real impact. Firstly, it is important to distinguish a range of KPIs and further measure the ongoing and the final impact.
Additionally, the received data should be analyzed to implement appropriate changes and improve future results.
Anton Ruin is the CEO of Epom - ad serving & management company.