Learn how to leverage social media marketing to increase leads and sales.
Why Is Advertising on Social Media Important?
Social media has advanced from simply providing a platform for individuals to stay in touch with their family and friends. Instead, it is a place where consumers can learn more about their favorite companies and the products or services they sell. Marketers and businesses utilize these sites as another way to reach consumers and provide a new way to shop. Technology-related developments such as the rise of powerful search engines, advanced mobile devices and interfaces, peer-to-peer communication vehicles, and online social networks have extended marketers' ability to reach consumers through new touchpoints. Consumer marketing is a new concept that has emerged, creating a unique touchpoint for the interactions between businesses and consumers. Consumer marketing is the planning and execution of all marketing activities that influence a consumer along and beyond the entire purchase path, from the point at which the motivation to shop first emerges through purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation. Perceived fit is an essential factor for businesses to consider for consumer marketing; perceived fit is the similarity between an extension product or service category and existing products or services affiliated with the brand.
Providing products or services on social networks can provide business growth due to the diversity of consumers who use social media sites. The wide range of consumers utilizing social networks means that most target markets can be reached. This provides an effective platform for businesses to promote their brand and products to potential consumers. Consumer marketing can join forces with consumers to improve products or services, create clear messages, identify promoters, and connect to in-store activities, thus demonstrating the importance of social media within a business's marketing plan. Advancements within social media sites have created consumer communities that define new ways in which companies and customers can interact to share information on brand products. For example, virtual brand communities create a computer-generated space for consumers and businesses to connect via marketing.
Consumer Attitudes/Motives
Businesses and marketers need to be aware of the factors that affect consumer attitudes and motives because consumers are increasingly creating content about brands, something previously controlled solely by companies. As a result, current research has examined what aspects of social media sites affect consumer attitudes and motives. A link was discovered between Facebook brand-related group participation, advertising responses, and the psychological factors of self-disclosure and attitudes among members and non-members of Facebook groups. The study determined that users of groups on Facebook are more likely to disclose their data than non-members are. It explains group participation and engagement with online ads, which require a higher level of personal information. Users openly reveal their connections with Facebook groups and promote brands or products when passing on advertisements to their friends. Facebook groups provide channels that consumers deem helpful when seeking self-status in a product or service category, passing on viral content about brands to their social contacts. Users who are Facebook group members maintain a more favorable attitude toward social media and advertising. Users who have more positive attitudes toward advertising are more likely to join a brand or a business's Facebook group to receive promotional messages.
A link exists between consumers' use of and engagement in group applications on social media sites. The relationship between consumers' use of and engagement with group applications influences the rate and effectiveness of advertising on social media, particularly Facebook. Generally, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter's college-aged users have the most favorable attitudes toward social media advertising and are the largest growing demographic. Thus, social media sites are a potentially rich platform for online advertising campaigns, especially for companies with a younger target market. Also, the correlation between age and attitude shows that social network user attitudes toward online advertising formats (i.e., blogs, video, and brand channel or page) differed to some extent across age groups. Users who fall in the 18-28 age brackets have strong positive attitudes towards blogs, video, and brand channel ad formats. Users find these ad formats to be eye-catching, informative, and amusing. The 35-54 age groups prefer ad formats on video and brand channels because they find them to be more eye-catching, informative and have a better placement within the online 11-page layout. Overall, online advertising formats with positive attributes are welcomed by users; however, ads that are intrusive or interfere with online social networking activities, such as pop-up, expandable, or floating formatted ads, are disliked by network users. Users perceive advertising differently depending on the social network, which suggests user motivations for online social networking may play a vital role in defining consumers' responses to social media marketing.
Viral Advertising
Businesses realize they need to create their brand presences on social media to control some of its brand marketing and stay informed and keep track of the consumer-generated content surrounding their brand. Although companies cannot directly control consumer-to-consumer messages, they can influence the conversations consumers partake in surrounding their brand.
Viral advertising is a way in which brands are becoming a vital part of social media. As more and more consumers look to social media groups as trusted sources of information and opinions, new opportunities arise to build consumer-brand relationships and viral advertising platforms. As a result, viral advertising has become a way for businesses to market and provide more details of their brands or products. A viral approach to online advertising has a significant advantage because communication targets a brand's intended consumer. This attributes to the fact that viral communication affords the marketer a greater degree of creative license through a message delivery medium that is more intimate and personalized, thereby increasing the likelihood of reaching hard-to-get audience members. Viral advertising is an unpaid peer-to-peer communication of provocative content originating from an identified sponsor using the Internet to persuade or influence an audience to pass along the content to others. Humor and sexuality are the leading advertising factors used to attract consumers to viral ads. If the ads entertain consumers, they are more likely to share or pass on the ads to friends and family. In addition, ads placed in the right location could produce word of mouth that can sometimes last for years.
Three factors influence ad avoidance online: interruption of a task, perceived clutter on the Internet sites, and negative past experiences with Internet advertising. Most ads featured on social networking sites are not relevant to consumers, and they only notice ads when it annoys or entertains them. It has become clear that advertisements that provide entertainment are liked and accepted. Because social media offers a new stage for brand marketing and consumers are actively contributing to the communication by marketing brands, businesses have become creative when trying to gain control of their marketing. Tactics such as viral stealth marketing, described as a marketer's attempt to fly below consumer radar by recruiting brand pushers to pose as consumers, has become a new way for marketers to control social currency. When companies use viral stealth marketing, they attempt to gain currency in consumer-to-consumer recommendations, the strongest of all consumer activities. Viral stealth marketing strategies inspire consumer-to-consumer communication about a brand or product. Consumer-to-consumer communication is the dominant force for distributing messages created by advertisers; for that reason, businesses need to look at marketing in a whole new way and include social media marketing within their business plan.
Two approaches measure the effectiveness of a company's participation in interactive advertising. The first approach focuses on media choice, information search, and attention to information processing. The other method looks closely at the effects of consumers' using interactive media. Businesses can track the type of information users of interactive media seek, determining the information that consumers find most helpful when assessing a product or service. This is a crucial concept for businesses to consider when considering how responsive consumers will be to their promotional and marketing strategies placed on social media. The reciprocal communication between marketer and consumer will make it difficult to isolate the influence of anyone advertising exposure; this means that the focus of advertising evaluation will need to shift from a focus on outcomes to a focus on both process and outcome. Ultimately, the role of the consumer has changed, and it is vital to measure how consumers interact with online ads to create successful social media marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
In conclusion, businesses can increase their brand awareness by being creative when engaging customers on social media sites. As more consumers are using social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) and rely on them for marketing shopping decisions, promotion through these media has become essential. Social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram are better than other advertising avenues because it stores information on all its users thus ensuring marketing reaches a specific target market. Social media sites are an excellent stage for businesses to create an experience, and businesses can use information stored on social media sites to improve user experience with their brand. Furthermore, a firm can benefit from social networks to predict the likelihood of purchase intention. Firms can do this by considering a firm's choice of a network (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) and examining that network's data. Assessing a network's data improves a company's marketing efforts because it provides vital information on its users, which helps determine the best social media tactics for that site. Knowing which social media sites a company's target market utilizes is another crucial factor in guaranteeing that successful online marketing. A company must go beyond the advertising aspect of social networking sites and find groundbreaking ways to conduct conversations with consumers instead of a one-way communication network. Consumers' participation with a brand on social media reinforces the need for businesses to be active participants in social networking sites and the virtual brand communities they create. Social media sites can be exploited for the information, and it provides on consumer behavior regarding their purchasing intentions.
Businesses should incorporate social networking sites into their business model or promotional mix. A business model is a system of co-dependent structures, activities, and processes that serve as a firm's organizing logic and create value for customers, itself, and its partners. Social media should be an integral part of an organization's integrated marketing strategy and should not be taken lightly. Almost 1 in every 13 persons in the world is an active social media user, which points to the potential of finding a ready market for any product or service. Social networking sites are being utilized to enhance a company's brand appeal and increase its target market because new technologies allow for more personal, targeted communications and increased consumer participation in creating marketing and brand-related information. Traditional communication examples, which relied on the classic promotional mix to develop integrated marketing communications, must give way to a new paradigm that includes all forms of social media as potential tools in designing and implementing integrated marketing communication strategies.
Businesses pay attention to social media because it provides a critical component that companies have struggled to collect for years. Feedback from consumers has always been important for product, brand, and business model development. It has become clear that when marketers from large corporations present a new product or brand, they consider both traditional and non-traditional media to place advertising to make sure they reach their target market. Small businesses also need to start utilizing non-traditional marketing methods in creative and engaging ways to make sure that they attract a more significant number of consumers. Another way companies can engage customers is by selling not just products but an entire experience that – while centered on the products, adds an entirely new exciting layer to the retail setting.
Comments