Editor’s note: Bernard Perrine is co-founder and CEO of marketing tool SocialCentiv and is based in Dallas.
Social media is beginning to reach its potential as a marketing tool and businesses are finding they can use different channels to sell their products or services while maintaining the authentic voice that social media is famous for. With the second month of 2015 already underway, it’s time to pull out the crystal ball to see what’s in store for social media this year. Here are social media’s top trends for 2015:
Targeting audiences. Instead of trying to reach the masses to find a handful of customers, businesses should be specifically targeting several small, tailored groups of people via the social media channel that they are most likely to reach them on. That way, companies are reaching more people who are relevant to their business and more likely to become customers.
Companies should narrow the filter in order to target people in a specific demographic who are looking for their product or service, right now. Intent-based consumer marketing works because it is specifically targeted to a consumer’s immediate needs. When you do find a consumer looking for your product, give them an offer they can’t refuse to try your product or service. In addition to giving consumers a reason to try your wares, incentives create exclusivity and make them feel special – the starting point to cultivating a lifelong customer.
Twitter fact: Businesses are finding that the @reply is a great way to engage customers one-on-one, or tweet-to-tweet, allowing a business to tailor its message, send a direct response and create better grounds for established customer relationships.
Continuing shift to mobile. Consumers are on the go and on social media. In February of 2013, marketingland.com reported that 40 percent of Internet usage occurred on mobile devices. A year later, that percentage increased to 60 percent. Nine months after that, mobile usage made up over 70 percent of Internet traffic.
Shoppers are looking for a personal touch with dynamic and integrated campaigns that marry social and mobile. With so little screen real estate available on mobile devices, paid ads are becoming far more annoying and intrusive. Brands that rely on paid ads to reach and engage with customers run the very real risk of alienating those customers. The challenge will be to use social media to reach prospects in a way that delights rather than irritates them. Software tools can help you listen for keywords and flag relevant tweets or posts in a geographic region so a business can engage, offer an incentive and turn a conversation into a sale.
Employing machine learning to reach the right audience. Consumers on the Internet don’t want to be advertised to – but they do want to engage with brands they have an affinity for. Companies like Google use sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to match customer intent with appropriate brands.
In 2015, as technology makes machine learning simpler and more affordable, this level of sophistication expands to small-to-medium businesses. More social media software will incorporate this tool to help small businesses derive powerful insights into their customers.
Twitter example: Using social media software with predictive analytics can help you find tweets that are relevant to your business. Search for tweets with the keyword “coffee” and you’ll be inundated with results. And while the same tweet with “coffee” in it will be relevant to one customer, it may be useless to another. By observing the tweets a business owner replies to (finds relevant) and applying a variety of machine learning algorithms to those tweets, a Twitter marketing tool predicts which tweets are most likely relevant to that customer, saving time and money versus doing manual searches.
Blending paid and owned content. As marketers have perfected their social media strategies, they have found that blending paid and owned media together lets them get content out to more people while keeping costs down and still maintaining an authentic voice. Striving to find the perfect blend of paid and owned media will be a challenge for businesses in 2015.
Enlisting employees to help share. When employees are sharing their company’s social media content on their own channels, businesses cash in with a higher organic reach and engaged employees who feel passionately about the company. How should a business organize this effort? Simply ask!
You can start the conversation by presenting all employees with a social media policy. Similar to a media or press policy, a social media policy gives your team parameters and guidelines on how and when to communicate company information on social media and blogs. And, depending on the business, offer employees incentives in certain circumstances, as appropriate.
Measuring ROI. Businesses with a high return on investment have built their social media strategies around engaging and rewarding relationships. Like any marketing strategy, social media is an investment and in 2015 companies will get better and better at measuring their results. We recommend building the tools right in so marketers always know the difference between time invested and the number of tweets that converted into downloaded offers.
Laughing it up! Social media marketers have found that one of the best ways to connect with their followers – many of whom are Millennials – is to be silly and give them a good laugh. Businesses can achieve this through pictures, videos or even corny jokes. Humor has boundaries. Make sure that jokes are within good taste, tied to the business and relevant.