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5 Social Media Strategies for Branding

Did you know that social media has been around for over 41 years now? But it wasn’t until Facebook launched its app a little over a decade ago, when businesses realized that it is actually a great tool for marketing. 

Social media bridges brands to the world. With almost 84% of today’s Internet users already on social media, it is no surprise how it came so easy for brands to build awareness and triple in revenue. On the onset of a business venture, what many experienced marketers and advertisers would suggest is to prioritize building your branding and later on your social media presence.  

To consistently communicate your brand across all the marketing touchpoints is already a lot of work, let alone social media. As a marketer, you should make sure that you communicate the same messaging tone in your email marketing campaign as well as in your social media platform. But how do you speak the same tone across different platforms? And how will you easily capture someone who’s a stranger to your brand? 

The answer is strategic branding. 

Branding isn’t only about fonts, logos, texts, imagery, or colors. It’s an emotion that you want your audiences to feel about you. These are basically unspoken feelings that speak so much about you. If your branding is tacky or messy then people would assume that the product might be messy too. But if you communicate your brand with professionalism and sincere intent, your branding will communicate that for you.  

What is branding? 

What a normal person would think if asked about branding would probably be a brand’s logo, its images, and such famous brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds or Apple. Well, people are not exactly wrong about that because these brands have made past the parameters of branding and marketing.  

Take it from Coca Cola. Did you know that 94% of the world’s population recognizes the brand? On top of that, it’s the second most understood word, next to “Okay”. That’s how powerful branding and marketing can be.  

The goal of branding is to create a character for your brand – what it values, what it serves, and how it is beneficial to people. It is generally how you want your brand to be seen. Your brand may not exist forever, but consumer’s perception will.  

Branding goals 

Upon creating your social media strategy, you should think of your objectives and what other things you want to accomplish. These are some common goals you should take note of.  

  • Driving awareness and consideration 
  • Building brand loyalty and trust 
  • Generating leads  
  • Increasing sales 
  • Providing high-standard customer service 
  • Increasing the value of the brand

Common Social Media Strategies 

Once you set up your goals, you should start strategizing your social media, set your target audiences, and start creating content fit for them. 

The following are the top social media strategies that you may refer to in creating yours:  

  • Start with the basics 

Color palettes, lines, shapes, texts, and imagery are your basics. Make sure that these basic requirements for branding swarm across your social media platforms.  

You may play around your banner photo or video on Facebook or twitter, and make sure to make your logo as your profile picture on all your platforms. This is important to allow people to instantly recognize your brand even only by staring at your cover image or reading your bio.  

One tip is to try to create a brand book which will serve as official documentation of your brand requirements as well as the correct usages and applications of your branding elements. It’s crucial that you create a brand book especially if you are working with an agency who manages your social media pages or website. 

Once you’re done with the basics, you may now move on to the intermediate stages.  

  • Improve your visual branding 

If your target markets are the Gen Z and the millennials, it’s apparent that you should extend your visual branding to a higher level. These groups of consumers are visual predators; they do not just settle for lackluster visuals.  

While getting high-quality visuals for your imaging is a good move, being consistent in using images that reflect your brand is also a must.  

Make sure that all the images that you use apply your brand colors or the type of graphics that you usually use. Doing so helps people to easily recognize your brand as the one using those unique styles.  

For example, Apple is known for its monochromatic black, white and gray visuals. While Louis Vuitton is popularly known for its brown-leather canvas with quatrefoils and the LV monogram that is immediately recognizable. While of course, Coca-Cola is very famous for its Christmas polar bear commercials. 

In short words, try to be unique and take time to shape your visual branding.  

  • Develop marketing personas 

Vary your marketing personas in each platform so you can easily resonate your message to them. You may have already set your target audiences in the beginning, but still try to create different personas to capture all different markets. For example, your audiences on Twitter could be millennials aged 22-30 while on Instagram your audiences could be the professional types. This way, you can narrow your content ideas depending on the people who mostly engage to your social media pages.  

  • Establish your brand voice 

This is pretty important especially that messaging is one great factor in a consumer purchase. Your voice should reflect the principles and attributes your brand is trying to build. For example, if your market is families or parents with kids then your brand voice should be tailored for them. Make your messaging more passionate and let it evoke a sense of concern for your target consumers.  

On the other hand, if your target market is the youngsters or children, then make your brand voice fun and relatable. And if they are the elderly, then you may need to be straightforward, honest, and should sound practical and valuable.  

These are only a few of the most important tactics in creating good branding for your social media campaigns and for your business. In this present time throughout the global pandemic, there are also different Social Media Strategies to consider. Whether your goal is to spread awareness or increase your sales, your branding should always reflect who you really are as a brand. 

Having difficult on where to begin? With 25 years of experience in the industry, iManila is dedicated to creating innovative digital solutions through its range of services such as website development, hosting, and digital marketing. Let’s work together to help get you started in moving your business online! Inquire now and message us today.

How to Get the Most out of Social Media Advertising

It is undeniable that reaching a vast number of audiences would require excessive time and manpower if done traditionally. But in the digital world, a few clicks and a few bucks could go a long way and would pretty much save a lot of time. 

It’s no secret that advertising through social media is widely used today. According to the Forbes Council Post, we see an average of 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day.

It could be confusing to implement any digital advertisement most especially for the first time. Social media advertising offers a lot of options that will allow your brand to reach your targeted audience.

That’s why we’re here! This guide will help you understand how to maximize the resources you put in social media advertising to make sure you get what you’re paying for.

Tip #1 BE SPECIFIC WITH YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

This is the most important part in making an advertisement – the people who are meant to see it. You should be specific on your market, including the age and gender.

Knowing your audience’s online activities is similar to knowing what platform to pour your marketing Dollars in when it comes to advertising. Knowing who your target audience is, is the first step for any company when it comes to developing an effective marketing strategy.

Tip #2 HOW MUCH ARE YOU WILLING TO SPEND IN MARKETING

Marketing budget recommendations is one of the difficult decisions that you have to do whether you are running a company or a small venture. Make sure you have a clear direction on how much marketing Dollars you are able and willing to spend and for how long. 

Tip #3 BE CONSISTENT

Customers acquired after running an ad will most likely not stick around for a long time. This is why being consistent in advertising through social media is important. You want to keep reminding your customers that your brand exists. 

Tip #4 PLAN AND MAKE A STRATEGY

In every ad you make for your business, you must incorporate a marketing mix of ideas and find what works best for your company. It is necessary to know your brand very well and plan your goals. Ask yourself, is it your plan to run an ad for a specific promotion? Or was it your intention to run ads with the objective of brand awareness? Is it your priority to get more leads? Take the time to ask yourself these questions to really be able to identify the best strategy when it comes to running your digital ads. 

If you need faster and more effective results, it’s always better to have options as some digital marketing strategies are better than others. That is why it is important to apply and read up more on effective Digital Advertising Strategies.

If you really want to grow your business, in this day and age, digital advertising is a must and as being said, social media is one of the leading platforms for this. If you don’t know where and how to start, don’t be afraid to ask for professional help. Entrust your business with a 25-year old company like iManila, a full-service digital marketing agency that can help take your business online, starting from your website development, and hosting requirements, to applications development, your technical support concerns as well as your digital marketing needs. Set your business for success in 2021 with iManila and let’s talk!.

 

The Importance of Identifying the Right Target Audience

Picture this: you are thinking of all the possible marketing tactics you can employ for your business. The carousel ad you saw on Facebook showcasing different products, the Instagram story Ad while you were browsing your stories, and the Google Display Ad that you saw as you were surfing the web made you wonder the kind of reach your business can get simply by trying out these different digital marketing efforts. But when you sit down with a marketing expert and they ask you about who you are targeting, you realize you haven’t thought about that part yet.

Who is the target? 

Knowing who your target is the first step for any company when it comes to developing an effective marketing strategy. A target market is a set of individuals that share similar needs or characteristics that your company hopes to serve. These people are targeted to be the end users who will be purchasing your product.

How do you determine the target market?

Because you want to get the most sales out of your marketing efforts, perhaps you’re thinking about capturing the interests of as many people as possible. However, in marketing, the opposite holds true: the more defined and clear the target, the more chances your marketing will work.

When you define your product and what it does, it becomes easy to determine who the end users will be and what they will like the most out of your offering. The key is understanding the needs of your customer, their pain points, and how you can meet that need with your product. This is possible through market research such as customer focus groups, industry reviews, or market surveys.

Making specific messages

Once you have successfully narrowed down a target market, then you can begin thinking of messaging that can appeal to them. This is important as it is about how you approach and come off to your possible clients. How you would approach selling coffee to someone who wants the premium coffee experience would be different to selling coffee to a busy worker who needs coffee to stay awake. Each target segment has different and unique needs and the message has to be one that clearly gets across how their needs can be met with the product.

Getting the audience right 

Usually, the target audience is also the intended recipient of your marketing message but sometimes, it isn’t so clear cut. There are some products where the buyer of the product is not the same as the end-user, so in cases such as this, it is important that the messaging is to the person who is making the purchase. In some cases, this does not ring true. An example would be toys for kids because while the parents pay for the toys, the kids get to influence their parents to buy the toys so in this case, it works that the toys are marketed directly to them.

Being more cost-effective 

Knowing who your desired target market is, makes it easier to make decisions when it comes to budget allocations. If you have a much narrower targeting, you will save on money and get a better return on investment. For instance, you would get better results by targeting women aged 20-30 and into cooking rather than targeting just women. Your money is not going to waste on wasted audiences if you have clearly defined your target audience because you are taking out of the equation people who are unlikely to purchase your product.

Now that you know about the first step to an effective marketing campaign, you are ready to move onto the next stage. Here in iManila, we believe in the importance of getting the right message across to the right audiences. We are dedicated to helping you achieve your business goals through the right digital marketing. Learn more about how we can work together. 

A New Battle: Instagram vs Misinformation

The fight against misinformation has always been an uphill battle. This time, the battle sees itself on new ground: Instagram.

Instagram puts its foot down and tackles head-on the rampant issue about fake news.

That was the decision months ago when Instagram decided to add a tool that allowed its users to report posts that contain false information. The results? The posts are sent to the fact checkers of Instagram and from there they can be hidden from Instagram’s Explore page and hashtag page, the public spaces of the app.

We cannot blame the juggernaut photo app for taking this precaution. Other social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are plagued with fake news, conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation.

The Battle Plan

Facebook wants to be more serious about battling against fake news on Instagram. The photos app will add ‘false information’ labels to conceal the post in question. Should users still want to view the post they have to click ‘See Post’ to get there. These labels are set to appear not just in the main Instagram feed but also in Stories. It will also warn users who will try to share a post that has been previously debunked by fact-checkers.

Instagram is currently working on being much quicker in fanning out the flames of misinformation before they go viral. If they get signals that a post may be false, they cut down its distribution as their third-party fact-checkers attempt to review it. In short, Instagram urges its users to take a second guess with the flagged posts they see.

While this may seem like an incremental step into getting rid of misinformation completely, it may leave a lasting effect. In Instagram’s battle for misinformation, this tool may prove to be a double-edged sword.

Side 1: Less Hate, More Credibility

Information these days travels faster, whether true or false. The images that accompany this news, it makes these posts all the more convincing. As a result, a person’s perceptions can be easily manipulated with just a simple click of a post.

These effects can be destructive as people’s opinions can be largely shaped by what they see on their own feeds. Even if one person would agree with a post, it would be a source of affirmation for most users. Misinformation set to defame a certain person or brand can bring about hate be the one to set the course for its discourse. With the wrong intentions behind posting, any posts with claims can be destructive.

Facebook’s efforts to fight back against fake news materialized after they realized how Russia used social media in their favor to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They estimated that around 70 million Americans could have seen the Russian propaganda ads. This reflects the potency of false information propaganda in swaying the opinions of the public.

With the enabled tools of Facebook and now Instagram aimed at flagging false information, while it is not a guarantee to eliminate all sources of misinformation, it can help in lessening its reach. This can warn people to be wary of the content and will lead them to seek for other more credible sources of information. This reinforces the path to better credibility in these social network systems.

Side 2: The Influencer Dilemma

This, however, begs the question on how this can affect the future of influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing, a kind of social media marketing, use endorsements and product mentions for individuals called influencers. These influencers often have a dedicated social following and are seen as experts in whatever niche they belong to. What enabled this marketing form to work is because of the high trust the followers of these influencers have, making their word gold.

Influencer marketing was never one to be stagnant as technology and trends constantly change. However, what will it mean for the landscape when posts by influencers can be flagged as false information? What will happen when these claims by esteemed influencers are deemed as misleading by fact-checkers? What if it’s the word of facts vs the word of influencers?

Though these still far stretch, with Facebook’s sworn dedication to combat fake news for itself and Instagram, anything impossible now could be possible eventually. This presses a challenge to influencers and marketers alike that low brow tactics aimed at promoting your product will not suffice. If you want your product to be credible for your customers (and now the fact-checkers), it must have a substantial basis.

Truce

For now, we can call it a truce.

It can be good with its fight for false information, but since this is relatively a new feature used on Instagram, we cannot be entirely sure of where it can lead the influencer market, which resides in this app. Technology is ever-evolving but it is a tool that helps improve how we work and live our lives. Having the right tools that strike the balance of satisfying the demands of both the users and businesses is essential to ensure the best experience for everybody, which is the goal at the end of the day.

Marketing your business on Instagram shouldn’t be as scary as riding headfirst into a battle. You don’t have to do it alone as there are digital marketing agencies fully equipped to help you, just like iManila.

Let iManila be your partner as we navigate new terrain, drop us a message at [email protected].

How Well Are You Remarketing Your Company?

A study done by Google suggests that 95% of visitors will not convert the first time. Stats like this may seem so scary because for business owners and marketing executives like yourselves, you have to ask the question: “How do I get my consumers to convert or buy?” 

In this day and age, it’s no longer enough to just market your products one time or just for a fixed period of time. The fact of the matter is, with the amount of information going around online, consumers’ attention is constantly being pulled from one direction to another. So how exactly can you persuade your buyers to actually take action and go for the “buy now” button?

The answer can be summed up in one word: remarketing. 

Gone are the days when you simply market a product and hope to the heavens that your marketing campaign has been seen and/or heard by the right audience. In today’s highly online world, marketing campaigns are a combination of efforts to target new audiences and to remarket or continuously show visibility to potential and previous clients or website visitors. 

Remarketing campaigns are basically designed to show your company and/or your products off to potential customers who have either visited your site or previously used your mobile app. This remarketing type of campaign can easily be applied thru Google Display Ads.

Remarketing campaigns are also akin to the scenario when customers opt into your newsletter. Many companies today religiously send out electronic direct mailers or email newsletters to databases which they have maintained and grew over the years. These databases are considered as goldmines to these companies, who are able to use these precious contact details as a means to market directly to people who they know are already interested in their product or service.

So where will YOU begin with your remarketing? 

  1. Start with an understanding of your remarketing goals. Who exactly do you want to remarket to? Do you want to target existing clients? Do you want to target clients who have abandoned their cart? 
  2. Evaluate your databases. Are they up-to-date? What kind of your clients are your databases composed of? Do you maintain a database? 
  3. What kind of channels should you use to remarket? Are your clients more inclined to open their emails? Are they more inclined to see your Google Ads? 

Getting started seems difficult but once you’ve gotten the hang of it and you’ve seen the results in conversion, then you’d be happy you did it anyway! 

Just take note that every company does remarketing differently. What might work for us may not work for you – so it’s really about putting in the patience of trial and error. But like what we said, if you’re able to figure it out and do it correctly, we’re sure you’ll be happy you did it! 

Scared to give it a try by yourself? Get some experts to help you!

Drop us a message at [email protected] or call us at +632 490 0000. 

Social media trends that you should follow this 2017

As of January 2017, there have been over 3.77 billion active social media users around the world. This rate increases day by day and there’s no way we could stop it. Why douse a blazing fire when we could add more fuel to it?

More than being a virtual billboard of events, photos, promos, and updates, social media creates online connections that our business needs – connections that can eventually create engagement. These are the small gestures we do online such as liking, commenting, retweeting, responding to comments and messages. Not only do these actions create engagement but also pave the way for lifetime brand loyalty, as luck would have it.

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As social media continues to establish itself as a great avenue in achieving our online marketing goals, it is our duty to adapt with the constant changes it confers. Here, we have three of the most anticipated social media trends for us to consider applying this year.

  • Chatbots, talkbots, and chatterboxes

Social messaging is not new to us but in recent years, it has been repurposed to as a virtual customer care application for businesses. Often called as a chatbot, talkbot, or a chatterbox, this additional function of online chat is used by many netizens. And we can’t blame them. It works as if they are just sending a private message to one of their friends. It’s the easiest and quickest way for them to ask questions and raise their concerns without them going to a physical store or calling customer service only to be answered by a voice operator.

One prominent social messaging application today is Facebook Messenger. An instant, free, user-friendly and has distinct features that fit perfectly to be an online social messaging tool for every business. Through this, netizens exert less effort but get more prompt resolutions. Just imagine how the 1.15 billion daily active Facebook users will love your brand once you start utilizing this new social media trend.

chatbox

  • Virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) hyped the public when it was re-invented in 2014. From its first onset during the 1800s, VR has come a long way. Today, when you are using VR, you think and act as if you are on the very location of what you see. This developed technology offers an extraordinary medium for us, marketers. It pushes our marketing strategies to its limits. Making us think how could we use such technology that is hardly used by other brands. Moreover, it carries a lot of advantages that we shall consider it to give people a new and best experience they can’t get anywhere else.

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  • Videos and more videos

All things video will continue to take over the social media sphere this year. If almost everyone can watch a video and even capture one using our fingertips, our brand shall, too. You see, social media is more about psychology and sociology more than technology. It lets us show that our businesses have a personality, just like anybody. In this case, we better express how collaborative we are with our audience through the use of 360-degree videos, snaps, stories, live streams, and even the recorded videos. People love to see our human side through authentic content and we shall give it to them. We can use videos for live events, holidays, behind-the-scenes, interviews, contests, and a lot more. It offers a diverse opportunity and diverse business results either.

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Let’s not deny it, social media is proven to be the most powerful online medium more than anything else. The more inventive it gets, the more our brands should get by it. However, the main concern here is to provide the more personal interaction our market wants and needs in an instant. In case you’re having trouble crafting your marketing plan for your business, iManila is here to help you out. Contact us now and let’s catch on these trends together.

 

Reference: Forbes