On a kind of busman’s holiday, one of the NAMA team found themselves watching reruns of Mad Men the other day, and they thought how amazing it must have been to have worked in marketing in the 1960s. We aren’t talking about being able to drink whiskey in the office at lunchtime by the way, we’re talking about the limited number of platforms that you could hit your audience with. Back then, there was simply TV, Radio, and Print. That was it! Choose the right demographic audience with the right message, and you get your message across (and could then enjoy a lunchtime whiskey in the office).
Marketing and advertising these days is a totally different beast. Alongside traditional marketing, you also have social media, and each of those platforms has its own intricacies, which require different skill sets. So, reeling this off from memory, there’s Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and Google My BusinessGoogle Profile, to name the largest players, each with a different set of rules and algorithms designed to provide an exciting and interesting user experience.
Alongside this, you then have to consider that each platform has a different demographic, so Instagram and TikTok users are traditionally under 30 (although that is starting to change), Facebook users are usually over 30 and LinkedIn users are more likely to have studied in Higher Education. So, with each platform you have to have a different target, a different way of measuring whether a marketing campaign has been a success.
With effective social media management, you need to learn about the platforms that like hashtags and the ones that don’t, discover that each platform’s optimum image/header/profile image size is different, and learn when your target audience will be looking at their phones; when they wake up/on their commute/in their lunchbreak/on the sofa after work, and then the social media platform releases an update that changes everything.
Running social media campaigns isn’t a walk in the park.
Social media marketing should always be based on a cleverly constructed marketing strategy that is directly linked to a business strategy. It should be regular without being spammy but not as irregular as being forgettable. It’s a fine balance. Alongside this, any business using social media for its marketing should also ensure that it can provide the service it offers. There is no point in advertising a service or product if you are already at capacity and would be unable to fulfil any new orders or requests.
Alongside this, there should also be a running theme, something that connects the posts, be that graphics, content, or both. It shouldn’t appear disjointed. And it needs to be responsive. One of our team regularly tells the story of how they received a reply from a restaurant about a booking request for 30 people three years after they had sent the initial message! Not checking their messages and replying to them probably cost the restaurant in the region of £900!
It’s all about engagement and growth.
The whole reason that a business takes to social media is to engage more potential customers and grow. You could have the most amazing product and message, but shouting into a well isn’t going to get you heard. A decent social media marketing strategy will pinpoint how to achieve healthy and sustainable growth (and by that, we mean not being followed by Bots). In many cases, the content will be wholesome, picking up numerous threads, including things like corporate social responsibility. People don’t want to be sold at; they want to learn about the business they’re buying from and build a connection to them.
And with that in mind, the message should always be sincere. The NAMA team are not lovers of Multi-Level Marketing (that’s a whole other blog), and one of the major reasons is the almost constant sales focus and complete lack of sincerity of pretty much every MLM scheme.
Creating great content
Creating great content is what gets you seen, heard, and shared. Whether that is an amazing Facebook post, an informative and well-made YouTube video, or a perfectly written blog, marketing on social media is reliant on you being in the palm of your potential customer’s hand. That’s a massive responsibility. You’re stepping into their free time with your message, so that message has to be perfect. If it isn’t, you’ve potentially lost that customer. As we said, it’s a massive responsibility.
Talk to some people who know about social media management.
And this is the point where we tell you that you need to speak to some experts. We live and breathe marketing strategies, we understand the intricacies of scheduling gifs on Facebook (trust us, it’s intricate), we know when and where your target demographic will be online because we do our research, and we can find the perfect hashtags to get you seen. So, if you’d like to have a chat about social media management and how it can help your business, get in touch.
