Social media, including input from use databases and influencer marketing, is essential in today’s marketing landscape. We often discussed what is known as a retailer’s marketing channel: social media. We will review the decades of transitions and alterations in Brand Awareness through social media.
Social media strategies that accentuate brand identities.
The Shift from Macro to Micro and Nano-Influencers
The era of celebrity and macro-influencers dominating the marketing space is over. Today, micro and nano-influencers with smaller but highly engaged followings are increasingly influential.
Fresh young influencers can be the new faces presenting your brand.
Why Smaller Influencers Are Often Better
Higher Engagement Rates
Micro-influencers typically have higher engagement rates than prominent influencers. Their niche audience is more genuinely interested in their content.
Authenticity
These influencers maintain a personal connection with their audience, translating to greater trust and authenticity.
Cost-Effectiveness
Collaborating with micro and nano-influencers is often more budget-friendly, allowing brands to work with multiple influencers for the price of one macro-influencer.
Authenticity and Transparency
Today’s consumers demand authenticity and transparency from both brands and influencers. Opaque-sponsored content is a thing of the past. Influencers must be genuine in their endorsements to build trust and credibility, and brands must be transparent about their partnerships.
Building Trust
Authentic Content: Influencers should disclose sponsorships clearly and ensure their endorsements align with their brand.
Transparent Practices: Brands should support influencers’ authenticity by encouraging honest reviews and genuine storytelling.
The Role of Data in Influencer Selection
Choosing the right influencer for a campaign is no longer a guessing game. Data is crucial for identifying influencers who can deliver the best results.
Understanding Target Audience In and Out
You wouldn’t launch a product without understanding your target market, right? The same goes for your social media strategy. To start, leverage social listening tools within your MarTech stack to monitor conversations about your brand and industry. What are people saying? What problems are they trying to solve? Analyze your competitors’ social presence to understand where they are winning — and losing — in the market.
Different platforms attract different audiences. Your target audience’s age, gender, estimated purchasing power, and market segment will often determine where on social media to reach them.
Use platform-specific metrics to understand where to find your audience and how they behave. You may discover your Facebook followers crave detailed product information, but your TikTok followers love behind-the-scenes product videos.
This research, combined with accurate zero-, first-, and third-party customer data and your CDP, will help you create Customer 360s beyond demographics. They help gather general insights into your users’ online behavior, preferred social networks, and additional context on their interests and preferences. In aggregate, you can quickly understand whether short video content on TikTok or a solid visual brand aesthetic for Instagram will attract your customers and plan work accordingly.
Once this information is in place, you can create segments accordingly and personalize messaging to each segment. Rather than guess which segments will be interested in your products demographically, you can leverage psychographic information to demonstrate precisely how well you know your customers and serve them only what they are interested in.
Contrariwise, you may already know where your customers spend their time online but are curious how to message across those channels to create an omnichannel experience. A CDP can help you tailor your messaging for each platform, and the specific audience you know interacts with your brand on that platform.
Understand audience persona based on age, gender, and interests when purchasing.
Refined Audience Personas
As you use your initial content strategy to build rapport with your target audience, your CDP will gather additional data points on their interests.
There is a difference between people interested in fast and sustainable fashion, also known as “slow fashion.”
You can use this information to create better-targeted ads. To generalize, someone who shops fast fashion may not be swayed by an ethically sourced and handmade quilt coat like someone interested in slow fashion might be.
If you’re using a Cloud Data Warehouse and CDP together, your customer data will help showcase customer preferences. They can also offer insights into which factors in a user’s life may determine their purchasing habits, buying power, and when they tend to purchase more frequently.
You can use this information to craft personalized content that helps your audience better understand their alignment with your brand. For example, you could emphasize the cyclical nature of your clothing business to a slow-fashion audience or your commitment to stylish clothing made by workers who are paid a living wage.
You can also offer discounts timed for specific moments in an audience’s purchasing cycle to incentivize purchases before particular events, such as weddings, school seasons, or seasonal changes.
Harnessing The Strength of Influencer Partnerships
There’s plenty of buzz around influencers—and for good reason. Influencer marketing on social media is a powerful tool when used right. First, look for innovative influencers who align with your brand values and have an engaged audience that matches your target demographic.
Influencer marketing is where you can get creative. Consider product seeding, co-created content, affiliate programs, and account takeovers.
For example, you can partner with a skincare influencer to create a 30-day skin transformation challenge using your products.
Here’s where you can get creative. Consider product seeding and co-created content to test your messaging and channels continuously. For example, you can partner with a skincare influencer to create a 30-day skin transformation challenge using your products.
Social Media Marketing: Construct Captivating Content
Whether you have a strong following on one platform or customers are split across platforms, a CDP can help you determine how to prioritize your channels, when and whether to repurpose content and how to tailor your approach to each platform.
If you market to Gen Z audiences and have aligned your brand strongly with modern aesthetics, it makes sense to grow an audience on TikTok, where trends most frequently arise, and you can capitalize on them quickly.
Once you’ve created videos, you can also identify secondary markets that fit your persona’s behavior: an effective strategy many retailers have chosen is repurposing TikTok videos to Instagram Reels to reach younger millennials.
This works primarily because of commonalities among users of both TikTok and Instagram. Similar content should perform well on both platforms because both platforms prioritize fashion content. The purchasing habits of both groups indicate that social media plays a large part in influencing purchasing decisions, using a fashion retailer as an example.
Another strategy some use is offering special discounts to social media followers in exchange for a deeper connection with them, offering 10% off first orders when you sign up for an email newsletter or survey.
Paid Social Advertising Optimization
Organic channels are essential to any marketing strategy, but to move the needle, consider paid advertising strategies. Every social media platform offers ads as another way of reaching people who fit your target audience but may not necessarily follow you or be aware of your business.
Some successful paid strategies include retargeting users who have shown interest in your products but haven’t converted or recently abandoned their carts or using interest-based targeting to reach users who follow competitors or relevant influencers.
Once you know where your ideal audience lives, you can choose ad formats that showcase your products best on each channel. Video ads can demonstrate product use and results, whereas Instagram Story ads can offer immersive experiences.
Next, get innovative with targeting. Using your MarTech stack and CDP, you can identify anonymous and unknown users on your sites, create lookalike audiences based on your best customers, and segment accordingly. Some successful strategies include retargeting users who have shown interest in your products but haven’t converted or recently abandoned their carts or using interest-based targeting to reach users who follow competitors or relevant influencers.
The key is to test your messaging and channels continuously. Compare different ad copy, visuals, CTAs, and landing pages, then let the data guide your decisions. With the right strategies in place, you can track ROAS, take advantage of the boost in visibility from a successful initial campaign, and iterate.
To conclude, social media marketing using small influencers can be fruitful, and growth will take a step-by-step process. Depending on your investments in promoting your brand or brands, you can jumpstart on appealing to your clients by partnering with well-known influencers. Of course, the quality of your service soon after the promotional campaigns can feed into higher customer expectations.