3 Key Components to Use to Influence Social Media
Have you ever considered that your social media routine might be bringing your business down? That, or it doesn’t exist at all? Today we present you with crucial considerations that will make your social media platforms more useful to your company.
“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs
What is your core message? Your customers want to know who you are and what you stand for. Your core message will incorporate your target market’s troubles or needs, your solution and the reason it works. Without this, it becomes much more difficult for your company to answer the question “so what does your company do?”
So how do you craft your core message?
- Consider the platform. A few questions to ponder when creating a core message to make your company memorable:
– What is your company’s ideal audience? Target prospective clients, which might differ platform to platform.
– What problem do you hope to solve? Evaluate your audience’s fundamental troubles.
– How do you produce results? Explain how you plan to resolve these problems successfully.
- Be true to who you are. When you put on a mask to your audience, your message may come across as fictitious. When your audience sees through your phony attitude, it may drive them away from your business altogether.
- Make your message personable. Do you know your audience? The most critical component on social media is knowing the pain points of your audience. Can you think of one famous company that stands out to you in the social media world? How about Taco Bell?
Taco Bell knows their audience. Scroll through their Instagram or Twitter profile and you can gain an understanding of exactly who they are trying to target. This fast food company is a prime example of knowing how to attract their young demographic and even personalize their conversation to have relatable humor.
“The main difference in strategy now vs. before is that what we are doing today in social media is real-time, and we listen and engage all the time.” -Nick Tran, VP Brand Marketing and Culture
Instead of automated robot responses or tapping a button to like a comment, Taco Bell has developed a humanistic way of communication that attracts engagement and attention. Many of their outstanding social media exchanges have gone viral, which has resulted in many media outlets on the web talking about the company’s tactics: a marketing favor for them.
Dedication to the customers ideas and opinions is the most important face you should show on your social media sites. Truly listening to what the customers have to say gives you the most useful feedback you can get and allows your customers to feel some sense of comfort as well, leaving everyone satisfied.
Case Study
Where it may go wrong: let’s take a look at IHOP (International House of Pancakes), a multinational pancake chain specializing in breakfast foods. In 2018, IHOP publicly announced a name change, becoming IHOb (International House of Burgers) instead of the world famous IHOP. What ended up being a publicity stunt to let consumers know they had burgers, not just pancakes, actually took over social media for days.
Social media was buzzing after IHOP introduced an extreme revision to their company, the brand name. Although some fans were calling the name change “bizarre,” IHOP still achieved their primary goal: consumers were talking about their brand!
IHOP played along with the humorous jokes fans were creating, and stayed relevant in the twitter-sphere throughout the entire stunt. Though the stunt was just an attempt to market their newest line of burgers, it sparked a great deal of conversation about the company overall. IHOP felt as if they successfully marketed their “burger business.”
Although IHOb stirred a variety of emotions on social media, we can also learn from IHOP when it goes too far. In June, IHOP had announced another name change, urging fans to guess what the new ‘P’ stands for in IHOP. Consumers began to get annoyed with the inconsistency the company was offering and it created a bit of backlash to IHOP on social media.
So, what is too far? What IHOP didn’t know was that customers on social media were actually laughing at them, not with them. From a marketing standpoint, it’s easy to see their stunt as a success because it got people talking about the business, but it was not quite as successful as they planned. The purpose of the stunt was to raise awareness and promote their newest line of burgers, but many people didn’t follow their strategies. In reality, how would you completely change a brand from pancakes to burgers without creating some confusion?
The best thing to do when you’ve made a bad move is to listen to your customers. In IHOP’s case, they weren’t doing quite that. They began to draw more confusion this past June when they hinted at yet another name change, causing the customers to roll their eyes…again. Creating conversation with your customers is critical, because it allows you to learn about what they’re doing, what they want, their habits, their input, and they also gain trust as well. Making assumptions is a dangerous game for marketers, so know your audience on all platforms.
So, are you wondering how to be successful on social media? Well, now that we have hinted at a few successes and failures, let’s break it down. First, you must know your audience. To understand the message you need to create, you need to find the demographics of your audience, what platforms they are using, what kind of people they connect with online, what pain point they need resolved, and what impact they have on your business.
- Each platform has different target markets, so approach them differently! Maybe there are more young people on Instagram, or Snapchat, so take that into consideration! Not all age groups will need to be addressed the same way, as Nick Tran mentioned about the Taco Bell consumers.
- Create your brand message. This will be different depending on your target audience, but it must encourage engagement through to sales and bring attention to your brand. Your message should allow customers to know what your company gets done, so knowing your audience’s needs for this message is critical.
- Make your message personable and put yourselves in the shoes of the audience. If they are coming from a place full of problems, know how to meet them halfway and guide them along the journey of your solution. A useful way to do this would be through video, effective messaging, and engaging images. Most importantly, follow up with conversations that your media produces and be part of the larger conversation.
Breaking down your solution in the form of a series is an incredibly successful tool that has worked for our very own clients. Create a campaign that solves their problem over the course of two or three individual posts and follow the story as a guide along the way, so they can watch your resolution unfold.
Are you ready for your social media success story? If you are eager to hear more specifics about our tools for success, let’s talk.
