Mediaboss Marketing

Social marketing is an approach used to develop activities aimed at changing or maintaining peoples behaviour for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole.

Combining ideas from commercial marketing and the social sciences, social marketing is a proven tool for influencing behaviour in a sustainable and cost-effective way.

It helps you to decide:

Social marketing is not the same as social media marketing. Find out more.

Social marketing is a systematic and planned process. It follows six steps

The goal of social marketing is always to change or maintain how people behave not what they think or how aware they are about an issue. If your goal is only to increase awareness or knowledge, or change attitudes, you are not doing social marketing.

This is the value perceived or actual as it is defined by the people who are targeted by a social marketing intervention. It is not what is assumed to benefit them by the organisation that is trying to encourage the behaviour change.

Even if you dont take social marketing any further, just considering these four questions will add value to your projects and policies.

How social marketing helps

Policy: social marketing helps to ensure policy is based on an understanding of peoples lives, making policy goals realistic and achievable. Policy example: water rationing in Jordan

Strategy: social marketing enables you to target your resources cost-effectively, and select interventions that have the best impact over time. Strategy example: lung disease strategy in England

Implementation and delivery: social marketing enables you to develop products, services and communications that fit peoples needs and motivations. Delivery example: child car seats in Texas

Visit our Social Marketing Planning Guide

Social marketing vs social media marketing

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What is Social Marketing? | The NSMC

Dominik AngererContributor

Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. Its little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.

The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startups best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.

Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.

I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.

Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.

As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasnt made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were learning in public. Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.

Retelling this story isnt to blow my own trumpet, its to make clear that you dont have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?

Although theres no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startups marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the top digital customer experience challenges for businesses:

Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.

With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.

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Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact - TechCrunch

As marketers look for new ways to reach out to their target audience, many of them are turning to social media marketing. However, new research suggests that this remains a difficult tactic to measure in terms of return-on-investment.

Nielsen recently published its Annual Marketing Report, and statistics showed that over the next 12 months, the majority of marketers (more than 70%) said that they intend to increase their budget for social media. This was followed by search (approximately 70%) and online and mobile video (nearly 60%).

However, among those who said they were going to increase their budget for social media, more than 70% said they were not very confident in their ability to measure ROI, while just about 30% said they were very confident. This indicates that there is still work to do in this area before marketers can reap the benefits of initiatives in this area.

This is not the first batch of research to suggest that marketers have had problems in terms of measuring the impact of their work with social media. Previous data indicates that revenue is also difficult to attribute to this channel.

DemandLab conducted its Revenue Attribution Outlook Survey, and the statistics showed that out of all top digital channels, social media marketing (44%) is the most challenging to analyze in terms of how it contributes to sales revenue.

Content marketing (39%), display advertising (38%) and email marketing (33%) were also considered challenging. SEO (18%) topped the list of least difficult channels to analyze.

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More than 70% of Marketers to Boost Social Media Marketing Budgets - KoMarketing Associates

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Social media platforms have become some of the most powerful marketing tools in this day and age. Its almost impossible for any modern-day brand to survive, let alone thrive, without capitalizing on the reach and impact of social networks. No matter what your industry is, you cant afford to dismiss social networks hoping to move away from what some might consider too mainstream. Customers today across different demographics are shifting their focus towards brands that are relevant and can speak their own language.

If you want your new brand to launch with a bang or even if you want to breathe life into your existing business, the answer is the same: you have to nail social media marketing. Since marketing on social networks has never been more important, here are some tips and tricks that you can try.

While this might sound like an obvious suggestion, few businesses actually do it right. When it comes to marketing on social media, even though consistent posting is key, more is not always better. Flooding your customers feeds with random posts that lack coherence and structure can definitely do more harm than good. If you want your business to come across as professional and reliable, you must define what you hope to accomplish from marketing on social networks early on. However, not just any goals will do; they have to be SMART and align with your overall marketing strategy. To make sure youre headed in the right direction, including, numbers and timelines when setting your social media marketing goals.

For example, you can aim to grow your Facebook page subscribers by 20% over the next three months. Following this approach, youll be able to set a clear path for your marketing plan and evaluate its effectiveness. Later this information will help you to enhance and fine-tune your plan.

Treating your customers as if theyre mere segments wont get you far. Instead, try to really get to know your audience. Study and analyze your audiences likes, dislikes, and interests so that you can speak their language. A social media teams job should focus on following its target audiences every move online and identifying the trends in their behavior. However, especially if your business is still in the launching phase, it might be a good idea to entrust your social media management to a professional marketing agency that has experience in this area. Professional agencies have the necessary resources and expertise to uncover meaningful data about your audience that you can use to provide better products and an improved level of service. Knowing your audience will save you a lot of time and money that youd otherwise be wasting by focusing on the wrong platforms or posting the wrong content.

Your social media calendar will help you stay on top of your social media marketing. Your calendar should highlight important dates and events that your target audience would deem relevant. Plan campaigns for holidays and special events as sales usually tend to peak during these times. Furthermore, using a calendar to organize your social media marketing will improve your teams collaboration and help them manage their daily tasks more efficiently. If you dont know how to create your own calendar, the internet is full of ready-to-use scheduling tools that you can download. Most of them come with helpful features like the ability to queue your posts in the order you prefer across different platforms.

More than the quality of the product or service youre selling, the stories you create on your social networks can have an enormous impact on your sales volume. Customers love stories, and they want to believe that by buying your product, they are part of something bigger. When promoting your clothing brand, you can focus on showcasing the premium materials you use and the unique designs, and these things are certainly important. However, if you really want to increase sales, you can take your customers on a journey where you tell the story of how your brand came into existence and the idea behind the name you chose.

If you think about it, its like inviting your customers into your kitchen and letting them in on your brands secrets. Instagram stories are a great place for those kinds of posts if youre not sure where to start.

Marketing on social networks is so powerful that it can make or break your brand. The above tips can help you set your marketing plan into motion. With the help of a professional team, you can monetize your posts to guarantee that your business can stand up to competitors and thrive for a long time.

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Marketing On Social Networks Has Never Been More Important: Learn New Tips And Tricks - TechBullion

Competitor analysis is a key element in any effective digital marketing approach, providing insight into how your competitors have addressed similar marketing challenges to your own, and what's worked (and what hasnt) within their process.

Analyzing your competitors can help you better position your products and services within a specific niche, or compete head-to-head with messaging that plays to your strengths. And if you want to maximize your marketing, performing a competitor analysis is essential whenever you launch a new product or enter into a new market space, industry, or vertical.

In this post, I'll go over six key elements of competitor analysis that will help your marketing efforts win out.

But first off, in order to effectively analyze your competitors'digital marketing performance, you need the right tools.

Within this, you need apps which will:

Some great, powerful tools that cover these elements are:

Here's how to use these tools within your competitor analysis process.

1. Insights from Traffic Analysis

The first element you want to look at is web traffic, and how people are discovering your competitor sites - SEMRush can help with this.

You should analyze the traffic to competitor websites to discover how many visitors they have, unique visitors, pages per visit, visit duration, and bounce rate, which tells you how much traffic your competitors are getting, if visitors are finding the site content useful enough to stay on the site, and which content is most popular.

You can also see how visitors are finding their way to your competitors'websites.

TIP: Identify source domains to inform decisions about investing in search engine and social media advertising, as well as influencer outreach based on whats working for your competitors.

One of the most important things you can learn here is which of your competitor's website pages are most popular.

Seeing which landing pages are working best for your competitor can tell you which products and services have a successful online presence, and which dont. That can inform your approach to marketing products and services, and to how to run your campaigns.

TIP: For a campaign designed to go head-to-head with a competing product or service that is popular, dissect the messaging on that page and find ways to differentiate your products and services. Consider promoting those messages using aggressive demand generation, such as search and social advertising.

Backlinks help to build your domain authority and improve your rank for topics that other sites link to. Your brands SEO efforts should include a link-building component, and tools like SEMRush and AHRefs enable you to perform a backlink gap analysis to domains linking to your competitors, but not to you.

This will inform and improve your link-building efforts.

Analyzing your competitors social media activity can tell you which channels they use for promotion, how theyre positioning their products and services, and what content and messages have received the best reception from their audience.

It can also help you find gaps in their promotion strategy which can provide an opportunity for your brand.

Tools like Fan Page Karma can provide competitive intelligence on competitors social media activity.

You can see the channels theyre using for promotion, how active they are, the growth in their presence on the channel, and how actively theyre engaging with their audience.

TIP: If youre targeting the same audience as your competitor, consider focusing your activities on channels that have worked well for them.

You can also see the content theyre publishing, the topics theyre talking about, and which of those topics is of most interest to their audience.

TIP: This information can help you identify the topics that are of greatest interest to the audience, questions they have, and issues you can discuss to position the value of your products and services. Use this information to refine your content strategy, messages, and value proposition.

One of the most important things you can learn from your competitors is what keywords theyre using, and which theyre ranking for.

Your website and campaign content should be focused around a core set of keywords that will help your target audience find your site and content when looking for the solutions youre selling.

Your competitors will also be using, and trying to rank for relevant keywords.

TIP: Examine the keywords used by your competitors to find industry-specific keywords that you might be able to rank higher for in your site and campaign content, and to formulate long-tail keyword variants that you can rank for, and that differentiate your products and services from your competitors.

Another great feature offered by SEMRush is the ability to report frequently asked questions related to keywords and domains.

TIP: Develop lists of top questions about problems you solve, and the products and services you sell and create content that answers those questions. You can also take a more interactive approach and actively participate in Q&A sites and forums like Quora and Reddit and answer questions relevant to the products and services you sell, and post links back to your website content for additional information.

Analyzing your competitors'advertising information can save you a lot of time researching and formulating critical campaign elements like keywords and ad copy, and help you position your products and services more effectively.

SEMRush can show you traffic estimates, keywords, and cost estimates for paid search traffic, display advertising, and product listing ads.

TIP: The keywords used by your competitors are a great starting point for the keywords you can use for your brand and campaign. You may be able to compete successfully for core keywords, but you can certainly use this information to choose long-tail keyword variants that work well with the value proposition of your brand, products, and services.

You can see position changes for keywords used by your competitors.

You can even see competitors ad copy.

TIP: Seeing how your competitors are promoting their products and services shows you how theyre positioning their offerings, enabling you to construct website and ad copy to position yourself differently, by going after a slightly different niche.

When analyzing your competitors'best content, you can see if similar topics are a good fit for your brand, and assess the types of content that their audience likes to consume.

You can also discover gaps in content coverage, and frequently asked questions which your brand can then address in its content campaigns.

Look at their poor performing content, too, and try and determine why it didnt resonate.

TIP: Analyze competitors content with the goal of finding the best way to differentiate your content and messages to favorably stand apart from the pack. Do deep analysis to find trends and see if the audience prefers, longer or shorter content, fundamental or deeper analysis, conceptual vs. how-to content, graphics, videos, images, etc..

Regular analysis of your competition is important, because its like looking at the other teams playbook before you go out onto the field. It enables you to develop a campaign strategy and messaging that differentiates your products and services, accentuates your strengths, and positions you to win against the competition.

If you haven't undertaken a competitor analysis, it's worth taking a look, and these tools and tips will help.

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6 Key Elements of Competitor Analysis That Will Help Your Business Win Out - Social Media Today