How Do I Utilize Social Media for Marketing Purposes?

When you get the marketing bug, sometimes it’s tiring to feed it alone.  For this post, I got the chance to work together with a partner to and explore marketing on Social media.  

The game of telephone can be avoided...Communicate your brand on social media instead.

What's the big deal about social media?

Social media is now the fastest growing channel for a business to communicate with its customers.  According to the magazine Fast Company, 93% of marketers use social media for business. Social media is a two way channel that helps marketers not only send messages to customers, but it also enables marketers to receive immediate feedback from customers and non-customers. A successful social media campaign can increase brand awareness among a potential consumer group and may help strengthen your brand with your current consumers.

 

Company Nike tell a story of innovation through social media on YouTube.

How can I make social media work for my business?

Get specific to you.  Identify what industry that your business is in, then try to better understand your target audience which should be the same as your target consumers.  Then use the same social platforms as your target audience. Adjust your communication style to the social media platforms that you use in order to meet or exceed your target audience’s expectations. For our marketing purposes, since my partner and I both have entrepreneurial minds (and have our own small businesses) we are choosing to explore social media from a Consumer Product Goods industry (CPG) point of view.  We have some personal knowledge of this industry and we are further researching the CPG industry in regard to social media as our starting point to build a good digital marketing portfolio.  

Do you have an example of CPG marketing on social media?

The picture of Oreo Delight is an example of a CPG product placement on the social media site Pinterest.  This recipe on Pinterest could have been pinned by Kraft the company that owns Oreo or it could have been pinned by a consumer, demonstrating that social media is capable of giving a voice to the consumer.  The consumer voice could ultimately benefit or harm your company.  In this Oreo example, it's a consumer that is helping to drive sales of the Oreo product. A lot of consumer goods companies are using social media.  There are many ways to engage your target consumer audience such as launching a #hashtag contest, using social media for social good, etc.  In order to succeed as a digital marketer at your company, you need to show that you have the ability to build a successful campaign and engage the audience within your social channel.

What can you do if you've caught the online marketing bug? Explore a URL.

Once upon a time, an online marketing bug was crawling beside a university campus.  A graduate student stumbled upon it and caught the online marketing bug.  She has been figuring out what to do with it ever since.

The online marketing bug can transform better than a caterpillar.

The student thought she'd bring the bug home, but to her dismay the bug refused to go home with her until she could tell the bug her home address...Or in other words, what the bug really wanted was a URL.

What is a URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is used to specify an address on the world wide web.  A URL can be made up of 4 parts:
1. Protocol identifier - an identifier for a type of protocol, for example, HTTP
2. Subdomain - a subset of a domain
3. Domain
4. Top Level Domain

What is a top level domain name?

It's a name that can be used by humans instead of using an IP address. There are 3 types of top level domains:
1. Infrastructure
2. Country Code
3. Generic

Can someone have the same URL as me?

No. URL's are governed by domain name registrars. You must choose one that has not already been chosen or has been chosen in the past, but is now available for use.

 

Does the domain name I choose have to be in English?

No. Domain names are no longer as easy as 'ABC'. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has made domain names in other languages and scripts available for selection and registration.

ICANN, which profits from domain registrations, opened up the registrations to include complex scripts in 2009. Since then, 47 country code top-level domains have been approved. That means that instead of “.com” or “.org,” newer websites can end with a label that is specific to a country and that uses non-Latin letters.

If the online world is global, how can I make sure that I'm not picking a domain name that may be offensive or misrepresent my intentions in another language?

You can try entering in the name you wish to select on the site http://wordsafety.com/ to see if there are any adverse foreign meanings.  This method is not guaranteed, but it's worth trying and may be better than trying to use Google Translate in a hit and miss approach.

Any last tips on picking a URL?

Use common sense. Write out your URL and read it aloud to see if you still like it or if you discover you need to make some adjustments so you don't end up with a similar URL fate as the companies in the video below.