Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

Why is social media marketing considered important? | LSBF Blog – London School of Business and Finance

An interesting finding stated by Forbes magazine, mentions that over 78% of salespeople using social media marketing outsell their competitors in promoting their brand.

But the implementation of social media marketing for a business requires not just creativity but well-curated strategies.

Whether you are someone who engages in the creation of digital content to advance their career or a business owner looking to cross the million-dollar mark, effective social media marketing is probably the best solution out there to expand your organisation in the virtual space!

Keep reading to learn how social media marketing can boost your leads in todays digitally-driven international business market.

Importance of social media marketing

Grow the brand awareness

Social media marketing is all about spreading the word about your products and services to your target audience. Marketing through social media can help you showcase your brand to the right customers, by providing accurate information.

Gaining brand recognition can eventually make room for effective brand building, and generate conversation among the audience about your products and partners. It is very important for you to learn social media marketing and leverage its applications to make your customers feel special, as well as solicit feedback on your service by asking open-ended questions.

Having an online presence to share your brands story will let you interact with your audience on a more personal level, thereby allowing your company to obtain a larger exposure when it comes to perceiving the realities of business. Social media marketing can also help you transform your brand to impress audiences from different cultures. Effective social media marketing allows you to adjust your tone and style based on different audiences, while maintaining a simple and impactful brand image.

Increase brand traffic

Practising social media marketing strategies will also allow you to take a deep dive inside gathering data from consumer research, to improve your relationship with your customers, allowing immediate interaction and maintenance of a strong line of communication with them. This also includes focusing on strengthening customer loyalty, assisting them on how to go about with your website and associated social media channels.

Social media marketing can help you with creating an impression on the minds of potential buyers, as well as understand your competitors better. Building custom audiences is yet another venture that you can learn when handling strategy marketing tools, enabling you to grab opportunities of creating customer satisfaction and adjusting with the diverse perspective associated with online purchasing.

Promote your products and services efficiently

This will allow you to build links relevant to trending topics and establish your brand as a topical authority while-engaging your audience with targeted advertisements. Social media marketing is the best way to exude a ton of positive publicity pushing your brand to go viral! When you learn social media marketing, driving conversions will become easier, allowing you to attract more customers and increase your sales. Grab the chance to analyse the buying patterns of your ideal customers by developing better marketing strategies and creating content relatable to not only your audience but those located at different demographics. This is how you increase your overall ROI and showcase your products via different branches of creative advertisement and niche topics.

Benefits of social media marketing in the digital world

Demonstrate authenticity

If you want to let your brands personality shine, then it is crucial that you find a voice of your own and stand by it throughout the business journey, so that your audience can get a glimpse of the real mind behind such a wonderful business.

Completing a social media course in marketing can help you connect with potential customers by using social proof of your existing audience. Be it memes, GIFs, Facebook lives or Pinterest stories, having a good grounding of professional level social media marketing allows you to identify specific social media channels that are a perfect fit for your style of business.

Expand your brand affordably

It is vital that you figure out inexpensive ways to market your business digitally, right at the start of your business journey. This is why social media marketing academic programmes help students learn to be consistent while posting an advertisement, aiming for the highest Google ranking.

Are you feeling nervous about taking the first step towards creating a digital brand and weaving it into the daily patterns of your audiences life? Well then, you must check out the wide range of executive education courses on marketing that the London School of business and finance (LSBF) has in store for you!

Turn that dream of having a strong social media presence into reality by enrolling yourself on our Marketing Planning and Strategy programme today.

This article was written by Deblina Dam

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Why is social media marketing considered important? | LSBF Blog - London School of Business and Finance

What happens to confidence in influencer marketing when fraud goes viral? – The Drum

The Drums social media executive Amy Houston explores the murky world of influencer fraud in the wake of recent BBC Panorama documentary Hunting the Social Media Fraudsters, and assesses the ripple effect it may have on the wider influencer marketing sector.

An investigation by BBC journalist Kafui Okpattah for its Panorama series uncovered a seedy side of social media that may take some users by surprise fraud being touted as a lifestyle. Similarly to fashion or make-up gurus, these online stars brazenly boast flashy lifestyles and materialistic goals with one person even self-identifying as the Kim Kardashian of fraud. The anonymous con artists steal private details and sell them on apps like Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram, with some amassing audiences of up to 150,000 followers. The marketing may be modern, but the crime is old hat.

Influencer partnerships can be extremely profitable, with many brands putting their faith (and ad spend) into the social celebs of today to promote a wide range of products, but do reports such as the Panorama doc harm relationships?

Trust takes time to build and seconds to destroy. Its easy to forget that influencer marketing is still a new industry thats constantly evolving and developing, says Mary Keane-Dawson, group chief executive of Takumi.

The volume of brand-influencer posts on social media has inclined in recent years, but it could be argued that consumer trust has declined. Takumis 2020 research found that 25% of all consumers are more likely to source news updates and opinions from influencers than journalists and established news outlets, but a more recent 2021 survey carried out by Clear Channel and JCDecaux found that 60% of Brits are more likely to trust a brand if its recommended by someone they know, while just one in five say the same for those used by influencers/public figures.

Without trust, influencer content loses its efficacy, with potentially negative knock-on effects for achieving brands marketing objectives. And creator output can even cause reputational damage to brands if they are seen to mislead audiences or act fraudulently, adds Keane-Dawson.

Its the age-old question and one that lawmakers and social networks like to bat to and from each other: whose responsibility is it to protect social media users from being duped? With so many parties involved, there is a growing blame game between the industry trade bodies, government, social media platforms, brands and influencers themselves, Keane-Dawson says.

Earlier this year the UK government introduced the Online Safety Bill, which aims to tackle harmful content online, but some people have voiced concern that it wont address the problem. In the BBC documentary Arun Chauhan, a solicitor specializing in fraud, says he thinks the bill is not fit for purpose in the fight against fraud.

Establishing a trusting relationship is something that takes time and needs to be nurtured. Brands that have close partnerships with their ambassadors will reap the rewards and feel more confident in achieving campaign targets. The measure of true value is finding an influencer who has the right fit with your brand, someone who shares your values, who consumers trust, and who genuinely endorses your product over your competitors, notes Hannah Walley, head of media and digital, Kantar.

Within the influencer marketing sector, many organizations make the mistake of working with online personalities that have the most followers but, at its core, social medias heart lies in the community. Stories like these can be damaging to trust in the industry, Keane-Dawson says. Thats why its so important that all parties involved take a strong stance against it and unite in fighting it. Doing so can help contribute toward repairing and recovering any damaged trust.

Earlier this year the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) named and shamed prominent influencers on a new non-disclosure website whose content had breached rules regarding promotional posts. The Influencer Marketing Report found that there was a disappointing overall rate of compliance with rules regarding paid-for ads.

Regarding the new site, ASA chief executive Guy Parker said: We prefer to work with influencers and brands to help them stick to the rules, but the first influencers to be named on this list have been given every opportunity to treat people fairly about their ads. Its not difficult: be upfront and clear when posts and Stories are ads. If this doesnt bring about the changes we expect, we wont hesitate to consider further sanctions.

In essence, trust means a firm belief in the reliability, truth or ability of whatever or whoever you place it in. Shocking revelations, such as the ones featured in the Panorama doc, will quite rightly cast a negative light on the industry, but I believe it is a wake-up call for brands to invest more care and time into having established and well thought-out campaigns based on ethics and community.

You can catch up with previous The Drum Social articles here, and remember to use #TheDrumSocial to join in the conversation online.

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What happens to confidence in influencer marketing when fraud goes viral? - The Drum

Instagram is Removing Swipe-Up Links for Stories, Replacing the Function with Link Stickers – Social Media Today

As part of its ongoing effort to improve Stories interaction, Instagram is making a change to the way that external links are shared within Stories frames, with the current 'Swipe up' links to be removed from the process entirely, and replaced by its new 'Link'sticker option instead.

Instagram has confirmed to SMT that all users who can currently access the swipe-up link for Stories will be able to access the new link sticker, with swipe-up links to Stories going away from the end of this month.

As per the prompt (shared by social media expert Matt Navarra), those who can currently access swipe-up links will revert to the link sticker instead, which Instagram says provides a range of benefits:

The update could well be an improvement. For one, it will enable more prominent placement of links within your Stories frames, which could give you more ways to entice click-throughs, and put more focus on driving that action within your Story.

Right now,the 'Swipe-up for more' prompt is displayed right down the bottom of the screen, so maybe, by adding a Link sticker, which you can place wherever you like on top of your visual, that'll give creators more presentation options to help drive traffic, by featuring them more prominently within the frame (you can see this in the top example above).

Then again, the swipe-up prompt has become habitual, so it may take some time to change user behaviors around link sharing in Stories. Still, it seems like a potential opportunity, and initial results of Instagram's testing must have shown a positive response, at least to some degree.

The next question, then, is whether the new Stories link option will eventually be made available to all users, or if link stickers will remain limited to verified profiles and/or those with more than 10k followers, as per the current 'Swipe-up'option.

Back in June, then Instagram Head of Product Vishal Shah told The Verge that link stickers for all users was the eventual goal, enabling more functionality within the Stories process.

That's the sort of future system we would like to get to, and thats what we hope to roll out, if were able to make this work.

But it's not going that far just yet.

With this new roll-out, Instagram says that integrity and safety will be a key focus, and it'll be keeping a watchful eyeover the links that people share via the option, in order to ensure that it doesn't become another surface for spreading misinformation and spam.

Because of this,Instagram will need to introduce link stickers in stages, but it is assessing whether to expand link access to more accounts in the future.

So, a new way to share links in Stories, which, really, had been on the cards for a while. Will that help you drive more referral traffic from your Stories efforts?

It certainly opens up a lot of new doors for your Stories approach.

Time to start experimenting with optimal link sticker placement.

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Instagram is Removing Swipe-Up Links for Stories, Replacing the Function with Link Stickers - Social Media Today

Conversations That Matter: How social media has upended food marketing – Vancouver Sun

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Social media gives food consumers direct access to producers

Author of the article:

According to Sylvain Charlebois, one of the most important changes in the food supply network is social media.

Consumers finally have a voice and theyre using it, he said. Theyre talking a lot about food and where to buy it.

In the past, the food relationship was a push from manufacturer to grocer and then to consumer.

Now its a pull in the other direction. And this, in essence, is putting tremendous pressure on the food industry in Canada.

Charlebois says its democratizing the supply chain and its giving everyone a chance to establish direct relationships between producers and consumers. A

Big-name producers like PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Gordon Food Services, and Sysco to name but a few are now selling directly to consumers.

This shift in the relationship is also introducing food choices that didnt exist before, and thats because small or specialized producers couldnt access the market. Charlebois, who consults with food startup companies, says, You will now see more and more small specialized producers connecting online with consumers and offering them a wider range of products.

Stuart McNish invited food specialist Sylvain Charlebois of Dalhousie University to join him for a Conversation That Matters, Food For Thought episode, about the dramatic changes underway in food production and supply thanks to consumer empowerment.

Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge here.

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Conversations That Matter: How social media has upended food marketing - Vancouver Sun

TheDrop.com Announces First NIL Endorsement Deal with Brenden Rice, a Star Wide Receiver at the University of Colorado – PRNewswire

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --TheDrop.com is the largest online streetwear marketplace in the U.S. - synchronizing 300+ brands and retail boutiques to give consumers access to exclusive access when a Brand or Boutique drops a new collab or entirecollection, it hits TheDrop.comwithin10 seconds.

The Drop focuses its marketing and merchandising on the 60-100 new apparel and sneaker drops hitting their site every day. TheDrop.com is excited to welcome its first premier athlete to their NIL Athlete Ambassador Program - Brenden Rice, the star Wide Receiver for the University of Colorado and son of NFL legendary Hall of Famer, Jerry Rice. TheDrop.com selected him for his passion for football and his entrepreneurial interest in building his own personal brand.

TheDrop.com is one of the first Fashion/Streetwear companies to complete an endorsement deal with an NCAA athlete, following the landmark June 29th US Supreme Court ruling that permits college athletes to earn income from their Names Images and Likenesses (NIL).

"Success is not inherited, it is earned. It is an exciting time for us as young athletes. I am grateful to partner with TheDrop.com as my first endorsement deal as a NCAA athlete." said Rice "My passion for streetwear combined with mentoring from the leadership team at TheDrop.com on the strategic use of social marketing and the role analytics plays to understand my fan base is invaluable. I look forward to supporting so many diverse creators and designers to strengthen their brands."

"Having Brenden Rice join us as our first NIL endorsement partnership is groundbreaking," said Matt Falcinelli, CEO and co-founder of TheDrop.com. " We are excited to welcome him to TheDrop.com Family and to be able to give him the opportunity to further build his personal brand while benefiting financially, all while rocking the hottest Streetwear brands in the market today."

TheDrop.com recognizes that ALL young athletes and parents give up a lot to compete; and the past practice of limiting athletes at any level from benefiting from their investment is an outdated way of thinking. Other young people in the entertainment field are utilizing social media to benefit financially and there is no reason to exclude athletes.

TheDrop.com - NIL Athlete Ambassador Program

The Drop's Give Back

Athlete Ambassador Program https://thedrop.com/nil-athlete-ambassador-program

Media Conatct Michael Glovaski Glo [emailprotected]- Ph - 917 -213-4473

SOURCE The Drop

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TheDrop.com Announces First NIL Endorsement Deal with Brenden Rice, a Star Wide Receiver at the University of Colorado - PRNewswire