By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.
Integrated Marketing Communication or IMC is a multi-pronged process and philosophy that small business owners need to understand. The main IMC philosophy maintains that your target customer will receive messages from multiple channels including social media such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and traditional media such as newspapers, television and radio. A part of marketing communication, advertising and public relations is to understand your target customer and the buyer's journey. We come up with different customer personas to try to understand at which part of the buyer's journey our customer will be most engaged. This will help us understand what we need to do in order to lead that potential customer to perform the action we want them to take, for example purchasing a product or booking an appointment. In IMC we understand that the potential customer will have many different avenues of accessing our content. We cannot just rely on one form of media to reach that potential customer. We need to focus on a multi-pronged process that gets our content to our potential customers through various platforms. For example, we want to post on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and maybe even LinkedIn depending on your target audience, but also have our content on other platforms such as print, television or radio. As a small business, you can't always focus on every single avenue that your customer will interact with your content. For small businesses, marketing budgets are a lot lower. Therefore, we need to be smart and focus our resources on the avenues that will turn our potential customers into paying customers. Purchase my downloadable IMC Guide for Small Businesses below!
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By: Johana M. Caba
Valentine’s Day is that one holiday every year that you either love or hate. For some people, it depends on their relationship status while others have gone on to create their own versions of the holiday such as Galentine’s Day. The point of this holiday is to share the love with those around you. From a small business perspective, Valentine’s Day can be a big hit for many markets including the floral industry, restaurants and jewelry. Below are our top four strategies to help boost your sales:
By: Johana M. Caba
Working for any job can be stressful, especially when you wear more than one hat. Smaller businesses or family owned businesses typically have fewer employees. This means that the owners and managers must take on many hats including the social media marketing hat. We understand that social media tends to fall to the bottom of the priority list at the end of a long business day. Social media has many benefits for a small business. For example, social media can help increase awareness and attract new customers. In this article, we will be discussing what social media can do for your small business and how to begin utilizing it more strategically. First, let’s begin with a few statistics on the benefits of utilizing social media. In 2016, a SproutSocial study revealed that people are 57.5% more likely to purchase products from a brand that they follow on social media. Additionally, 71% of people are more likely to purchase a product after a positive social experience. Keep in mind that your customer service on social media and how you interact with customers can have a huge impact. According to a 2017 SproutSocial study, being responsive, offering promotions, providing educational content and sharing interesting visuals are the top four actions that prompt customers to purchase from brands on social media. At the end of your long business day, it is worth taking a look at the impact that social media can have on a small brand. We recommend you move social media higher on the priority list because it can truly help your small business grow. Second, let’s discuss what you can do to help your small business be successful on social media. The first thing that you need to do is set SMART Goals. These goals are specific to your business, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. By setting goals before beginning your social media plan, you will be able to measure and prove your success while also observing successful tactics that work for your business. This can also help you observe any failed tactics which can show you what does not work and can help you improve your overall strategy. If you don’t know where to start, create a social media audit of your competitors. You can also create a competitive analysis, but for the sake of cutting the workload let’s stick to a social media audit. With this type of audit, you can observe what social media platforms your competitors use, how often they post, their followers, their engagement and the type of content that is most successful for them. These observations can help you determine your goals, your content, your posting schedule and your key performance indicators (KPI). When you first begin testing the social media waters, make sure to observe your organic reach. This can help you determine what content is more effective with your target audience. Furthermore, this can help you determine when and how to promote posts in order to increase your reach. By promoting posts or running social media ads, the reach of your posts increases and awareness for your business also increases. These two factors can have a positive impact on your business which can result in the growth of your business.
By: Johana M. Caba
Every social media platform is different. Some work great and some don’t get the following or visibility that works for your business. Not every social media platform is necessary for you business. Instead of having everything, try having the most active platforms for you business and industry. Below are the best social media platforms to use for every business industry:
By: Marlene Urena
For businesses that are trying to establish themselves on social media, it is important for them to create a social media strategy in order to effectively reach their end goals. A social media strategy is a plan of attack that a business creates in order to reach their social media goals. This plan should be designed to manage the company’s social media presence and performance and make any changes to reach the business’s goals overall. To create an effective social media strategy, a company needs to clearly define their social media goals. Without clear goals, it will be difficult to understand what needs to be done and the employees who manage social media will not be trying to reach these goals in the same way. That is why it is important to develop SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based). After goals are defined, companies must analyze their environments and markets in order to see what approach they will take in their social media strategy design. To create an effective design, companies should understand the trends in society and associated with their consumers to understand what needs to be changed in their current strategy and how it will help them reach their goals. In order to do this, a social media market analysis and social media company SWOT analysis should be done. When the business clearly understand the trends in society and consumer behavior on these platforms, they can begin to plan relevant content for their social media profiles. Please refer to our What is content strategy? article for more information on content creation. They should also schedule their posts according to the consumer behavior on social media to reach as many people as they can at the best times. When their strategy is implemented, the last thing for businesses to do is to evaluate their performance. Any changes that seem fitting should be made to the strategy because change is inevitable in an organizational environment. Being able to adapt to these changes is what really defines how strong a company’s strategy is. A strong social media strategy is the recipe for success in marketing in today’s world. |
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