Choosing A Social Media Platform

As we all know social media is a powerful and effective way to engage with customers. It is practicality mandatory to have some presence in social media for many businesses, big or small. The tricky part of creating a social media presence is choosing which platform(s) are best are best suited for your company, and more importantly your target customers. The first thing you need to consider is the number of users in of each platform. Facebook dominates this category but networks such as Google+, Twitter and Instagram all have a large presence as well with over 200 million users each. Size is important, but should not be the sole factor in making your decision. Often times larger networks equals more competition. The next factor you need to consider when picking a social media outlet is the demographics of a particular network’s users. If millions of users are engaged in your social media marketing campaign but don’t care about your product, you will essentially have wasted your time and money. For example if you were trying to sell mortgages, twitter would not be an ideal platform despite its size, because the majority of its users are young and not looking to buy a house. Another factor you should consider is the type of content the each social media platform uses. For instance, YouTube is mainly uploaded videos, where twitter is focused around short typed messages, and Instagram is based around images. It is important to align your business with a platform that supports the industry you are in, as well as the content you want to deliver.

 For example, if your target demographic is females aged 18-24 from a suburban back ground attending a university and pursuing a degree in Merchandising Management who eats at Chipotle every day, Pinterest is the obvious first choice. Pinterest is dominated by females with 84 percent of users being women. For businesses that fit the Pinterest demographic, ROI is extraordinary high. 70 percent of users get inspiration about what to buy from Pinterest, compared to 17 percent from Facebook. Although Pinterest may not be nearly as big as other social media platforms, it can be very effective if you are going after the right demographic.

Using ads with strong verbal or visual images would be a good strategy for advertising on Pinterest. These ads are focused around strong imagery, similar to Pinterest.     

On the other hand, if your target demographic is males aged 40-50 from an urban background with an annual income greater than $80,000 and putting 2 kids through college, Pinterest would be a poor choice of social platform. LinkedIn on the other hand would be a great choice. 79 percent of LinkedIn users are over the age of 35, which makes it by far the oldest social network. Over a third of its users make more than 75 thousand a year as well.  The downside to LinkedIn is that only 13 percent of users sign in daily. Although the web traffic is low, your demographics are so specific and narrow that using it as a social network platform is still valuable.

Using a cognitive message strategy would be a great choice for advertising on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a more professional environment and often times showcasing your product’s value propositions can change attitudes or behavior and be more than enough to persuade a buyer.   

    

          

Blog 1-Email Marketing Campaign

 

Email Marketing Campaigns

 

When developing an email marketing campaign it is important to stay away from the tempting strategy of sending out mass emails to just anyone. These emails are often sorted as spam and have very low response rates. It is important to reach a targeted list of consumers who are possibly interested in your product at the time it is presented to them. Making these emails as personal as possible helps to increase response rates. You also want to align the information shared in your email with that of the company’s website and marketing vision. It is also important to focus on all the details when developing a successful email marketing campaign. These details include the subject line of your email. According to research by Adestra, there is a “dead zone” of the numbers of charters in a subject line of an email. This dead zone occurs in subject lines that have 60-70 charters. In a study including 900 million emails, significantly higher click through rates occurred in emails that included subject lines with 49 or fewer charters, as well in subject lines that contained 70+ charters.

https://blog.bufferapp.com/8-effective-email-strategies-backed-by-research

To maximize an email marketing campaign it is important to build a landing page that demonstrates all the benefits of your product to consumers. Your email marketing campaign should draw the consumer’s interest, and your landing page should sell them on your product. Integrating subscription forms to your email newsletters into your social media pages is another way to target customers that are interested in your products.   

https://blog.bufferapp.com/8-effective-email-strategies-backed-by-research

When making an email campaign it is important to monitor your response rates. Measuring your response rates allows you to see how successful your campaign is, and notifies you if you need to make major adjustments. One of the most basic ways of measuring this is by how many impressions are made during an email campaign. Impressions are how often an ad is presented to a customer. Another way to measure response rates are click through rates. This measures the amount of clicks per impression. One very important way of measuring your email campaign’s reach is your return on ad spent (ROAS). This measures revenue realized from every dollar spent on a specific ad.  Response rates differ quite a bit by industry. Nonprofits and educational services have relatively high click-through rates with both industries averaging over a 4% click through rate. On the other hand, travel and leisure and consumer product services have a low click-trough rates with a mean of about 2% success.

https://econsultancy.com/blog/65034-what-is-a-decent-email-marketing-response-rate/

Although email marketing my seem out dated or even a dying technique, I think it will continue to be a very important factor in the marketing mix in years to come. Email marketing is one of the most cost effective methods of reaching consumers and is especially effective in the business-to-business market. It seems like everyone is now focused social media marketing and likes to forget about email marketing, when in reality 7 percent of all customer acquisitions is created from email marketing. Facebook and twitter together are a very insignificant customer channel. Although organic search is by far the most powerful consumer channel which accounts for almost 16 percent of all purchases, consumers who acquire goods and services through email marketing tend to spend and buy more.