How to design a Social Media Marketing strategy in 2018?
A couple of years ago, you could live with a simple social media marketing strategy in your company’s marketing plan. But not anymore!
In 2018, every business must have an online presence and you need to shape your marketing strategies to beat the competition. It’s more like you thought something worked for you last year, but it might not be relevant this year (in the social media space or elsewhere). Social media audiences are spreading like wildfire or perhaps they have reached every corner of the world where people can access the internet (more than half the world is actively browsing through social media). People are glued to the plethora of information with just a simple click on handheld devices. If you don’t have a social media presence, your business will have #FOMO (fear of missing out) sentiment and consequences. But just having an online Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter or XYZ account is enough for the success of your business in today’s device city. You must have a complete social media marketing strategy that is constantly updated with the changing norms.
Needless to say, these advances have led us to a world where audience attention spans are rapidly shrinking as more and more businesses connect with their target audiences on social media. Now it is becoming a challenge for companies to reach their users with the most amazing and relevant content today. Therefore, it is more important for brands to build ideas that work for the need to feed with the speed required. Wow, does that rhyme? Anyway.
We are here to tell you about successful approaches to social media marketing strategies in 2018 that would help you achieve your business goals.
ephemeral content
This all started with Snapchat, the popularity of Snapchat increased when it interestingly appealed to millennials and Gen Z with the ephemeral content strategy.
Ephemeral content is short-lived creative writing that can last up to 24 hours on social media or anywhere. Post that, it’s going to ‘poof’ forever.
This is quite heartbreaking for marketers as they work so hard to create the strategic copy and it can only be appreciated for a limited period (only if someone sees it). However, social media marketers have no choice as this is the most successful trend on almost all platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and even WhatsApp (out of example). That’s why brands are assigning a separate dedicated strategy for social media content and ephemeral content.
Ephemeral content makes it a must to be original yet creative with content ideas. Many brands primarily use the Instagram platform for consistent stories with the most engaging high-quality content to reach their audience. This content evaporates in a few hours, which positively nudges your target audience to take quick action on stories and makes your marketing team smile.
Why does ephemeral content work?
The short lifespan makes the content more authentic compared to sponsored ads.
Stories disappear within a few hours, making the audience anxious to miss out on information (basically #fomo) and leading to faster responses.
Get more attention than the “regular” posts on social media.
In short, you need to have a strategic plan to make this work. You can’t expect it to always work for random posts. You must keep the content (can be images, videos, GIFs, and boomerang videos) authentic, interesting, and engaging for the public to get change within 24 hours.
chatbot
Chatbots can also be a very useful social media marketing strategy. People are always reluctant to change or alien technologies in the early stage and chatbots were not treated any differently. But no longer, they no longer ignore each other like a robotic machine. Bots are used to improve marketing strategies and are successful in providing instant responses to customers or doing things like ordering their food. What we see in those sci-fi movies will soon be real, but let’s not get carried away and talk about the role of chatbots as a social media marketing strategy. In fact, we have seen many companies using bot technology this year with success.
According to Garter, business content creation using chatbots will be 20% by 2018. If the machines can generate continuous, creative, innovative and brand-specific content for social media handles, it could be another exciting milestone in the world of technology where Marketing and advertising companies would love to invest.
Chatbots provide instant audience feedback and increase interactions with the personal touch of conversations. With the passage of time, chatbots are becoming more crisp and human, which would allow you to create your brand tone and give it a personal touch to facilitate the comfort of your users.
Facebook has already been using thousands of active bots in the Facebook messenger where various companies interact with their brand audience.
This is the year to test chatbots for your business with all generations in mind. Before launching a chatbot, we recommend that you test it on your potential audience to anticipate the response and deliver accordingly.
Influencer Marketing
In 2017, brands spent around US$1.07 billion on Instagram influencer marketing and this value is expected to increase to around US$1.6 billion and US$2.38 billion in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
We won’t really say it’s a new social media marketing strategy, as more and more companies have been trying to explore this option for a while. This has made it very difficult for marketers to find authentic ways to keep the audience engaged.
Influencer marketing has become popular among brands and they are consciously making the decision to target relevant social influencers with their brand in 2018. Influencers and brands have to maintain a relationship with originality to impact the influencer’s followers. . Today, the influencers are just faking the information, which mostly makes it look mundane and dishonest. Therefore, this year influencer marketing would be done with the right partnerships and collaborations.
You need to strategically set your brand goals and understand if influencer marketing would follow your services or products. You need to think ahead of time that your influencer content from that influencer and build a good business relationship to target ROI.
We’ve discussed the three popular social media marketing strategies in 2018, but we’re looking forward to much more than this. The next few years are going to see a whole leap in the marketing game and expand the demand for social media marketers. A mobile strategy should top the list of marketing plans first.
If you are looking for a social media marketing company in New York City with a team full of millennials and Generation Z. Contact us today.
Maximum value. Accomplished.