If you have a business you need to market, you might need a refresher in marketing. There last two years have caused a lot of changes, and even social media was affected. Users’ habits are changing, and the old means of grabbing their attention aren’t doing their job anymore.
If your marketing campaign can be summed up in “post a graphic of your latest sale with a caption across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram”, you need to shake things up. If that sounds like you, take a look at our guide to how social media marketing is changing and what you can do to change with it.
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The push to retail
More and more users are finding their items on social media, and the platforms have noticed. A number of them have come out with their own takes on turning social media into online stores, making it easier for users to spend money straight from the platform.
The most obvious push to retail comes from Instagram, which was already looking like a virtual shopping mall. Now they have added tags to items that allow users to discover a product, click the tag, and be transported to the brand’s site where they can buy the item.
Elsewhere, Snapchat is offering augmented reality fitting rooms, which allow potential customers to capture themselves in the camera, trying on the latest jacket or shoes to see if they fancy buying it. And TikTok, being a fairly new platform, is stretching its legs trying to encourage marketing. Their features are more of what you’ve seen before, like influencer funds and a feature that allows affiliate marketers to better get in touch with influencers.
You can take advantage of this migration of shoppers into retail by either keeping your social media as up to date as possible with all your products and services and using it as its own online shop, or by using all the features offered by the platforms to send more customers to your website.
Users are doing their research
More and more customers are looking to social media for more than just a customer service number. They are in fact researching the brands and products they are buying from before they buy.
People are feeling very hoodwinked by celebrities they trusted that they no longer trust, for one reason or another. And chances are they had problems trusting brands to begin with. With the protests and activism that is going on around the world, more users expect brands to take a stand.
Your stand doesn’t necessarily need to be political. You just have to determine what you stand for. It can be inherent in your business, like standing up for small businesses, minority businesses, gender equality, etc. For example, if you are selling makeup for men, your stance is baked into your product. It can also be something as simple and uncontroversial as making your products cruelty free or sustainable or eco-friendly.
From there, it’s just a matter of making sure your visitors know who you are and what’s important to you. Put it in social media bios, graphics, videos, etc. You can use this keyword tool to put your priorities out there in your content and determine the response from your audience.
Users are becoming aware
An issue that marketers are hitting nowadays is that users are becoming more aware of ads. They know they’re listening, they know from a glance that they are an ad, and they know to swipe past without giving it any attention.
Going hand in hand with this is the customer’s increasing expectation of quality content. Quality content doesn’t mean hiring the best editor or buying the best camera but offering the user something that they want to give their attention to.
These problems can be solved by themselves. With quality content, you will gain the attention of users again. It isn’t a matter of tricking the user with a skit that says at the end “Aha! Sponsored by Subway. You thought you were just enjoying yourself!” but instead giving the customer something worth paying attention to so they remember you.
Take the language learning app, Duolingo. It is currently going viral for releasing a series of TikToks that showcase its cutesy mascot taking part in lots of TikTok trends. The idea is to showcase your products and brand in a way that is entertaining. Ideas like a day in the life of someone on your team, demonstrations on how to use your product, showing how the product is made, reviews from users, etc. are all ways you can show your brand has some personality and that you are worth your audience’s attention.
Another problem is that users are becoming more distrusting of big influencers. Too many of them have been “exposed” as per the nature of internet culture.
The next option here is to look into micro-influencers. Smaller influencers who have a voice in a more niche but more dedicated community. They have more of a command because they come across as more humble.