In recent years, social media has become a dominant force for business marketing. Companies around the globe have turned to familiar platforms like Facebook and Instagram, or have leveraged more professional social media environments like LinkedIn to connect with audiences all over the world.
Businesses that haven’t used these secret weapons to increase the revenue of their brands will find this handy guide to be right up their alley, allowing them to capitalize on the incredible power of social media/visual marketing.
In this article, we will present you with 5 Reasons to convince you to consider visual and social media marketing as your next go-to marketing campaign.
No matter if you’re brand new to digital marketing or have done it for the past 25 years, this will help you understand the power you can use for the growth of your business prospects. Please take notes while reading the following material. See what fits you and what you can integrate today.
At the bottom of this article, we’ve got a surprise ready for you!
1. Audiences Are Very Easy to Target and Track, and Campaigns Are Easy to Modify
With social media platforms and the myriad of tools they provide to the online marketer, you can easily control the targeting of an ad campaign. In the past, people had billboards — massive banners strategically placed along the busiest roadways. The problem with that approach was that the billboards didn’t target anyone specifically. They’re there for everyone to see, but very few people care. Billboards are still used today, yet they are known for producing less-than-desirable results.
Using modern tools like Google AdWords, the digital marketer can target specific keywords a potential customer is searching for. Facebook Ads have the potential to be even more precise. You can identify and cover a target audience by location, age, gender, languages, and interests, only to name a few of the many demographic choices available. This will reduce your customer acquisition cost tremendously as you can focus on exactly the people that you want to help you grow your business and your brand.
Social media platforms also facilitate audience tracking. Traditional ways of marketing included sales letters sent out to regions with little regard for specific audiences. Not emails, mind you, but actual physical letters that were delivered to mailboxes. The only way to track the success and reach of your letters was to gauge responses. Out of the 10,000 letters you sent, only a tiny fraction would get responses. Typically, these responses consisted of two potential outcomes:
- A response from someone who wants to buy the product or service.
- The letter never reaches its destination and comes back as “Return to Sender”.
Today’s digital marketing makes audience tracking so much easier. With the available tools, you can see the exact funnel a buyer went through, such as the exact video you made, or a specific post that really got them interested in doing business with you.
If you need to modify a part of your ad, modern social media tools allow you to make tweaks on the spot — tweaks that take effect immediately. Let’s circle back to the big, costly billboards that you make fun of when you pass one by on your road trip. Once it’s up there, you can’t do anything to it. What if there are grammatical errors, or your company’s phone number has changed? Well … you can take it down, but you’ll have to buy a new one. Spend money again, not only for the billboard itself, but maybe you need a new designer. In short, traditional marketing methods force you through the exact same tedious process that takes money and time — time that in our fast-moving world, where everything is on-demand, at the push of a button, you just don’t have.
Using the modern ways of social media marketing, you can make changes and updates instantly. Simply go into the ad management tab of your chosen platform and with a handful of clicks … you’re all done.
2. Leveraging Influencer Marketing
If you’re not sure what an influencer is, or what influencer marketing entails, don’t fret, we’re going to let you know. Influencers are social media personalities that have established, very well-targeted audiences. Brands and companies engage with these influencers by getting into contact with such personalities to promote their specific products or services to the influencer’s audience. This has the potential to increase traffic for the brand that pays the influencer for the advertisement, and typically also has a positive change in the sales of a given product or service.
Influencer marketing works on trust; the audience of the influencer already thoroughly trusts this person. When a brand or product is promoted by the influencers, the followers will definitely consider their point of view. Through mutual trust, consumers will trust a business more quickly than if they were to use traditional marketing strategies.
The influencer route skips the part where the business needs to attract an audience and build visibility for the new product. In other words, influencer marketing enjoys a shortcut to success. The influencer produces content for a specific niche; the content may include tutorial videos, pictures, animations, advice videos, top products for a specific use, etc. This is where they can introduce the sponsored item, giving an honest (or influenced) opinion on the item. It is often required that the influencer brings to the viewer’s attention that a piece of content is sponsored, although this is not always adhered to.
Influencer marketing has the potential to be extremely powerful in terms of producing results. When used strategically, it can provide a return on investment (ROI) of $6.50 per dollar spent. You need to figure out if you want to give this marketing method a try. To begin, research an influencer that aligns with your company’s beliefs. Jump on the wagon while the quality influencers still have the means to accept more products. Some of the best refuse to work with up to nine out of ten brands.
Some useful statistics you need to see before engaging with an influencer:
- 84% of Micro-influencers on Instagram charge up to $250 per sponsored post.
- 70% of Millennials trust social media influencers more than the celebrities we’re used to.
- 67% of brands have employed the use of influencers when promoting their content.
- 86% of women will check out the social media reputation of a product before making a purchase.
- 57% of brands use influencers regularly, for all their marketing purposes.
Being aware of influencers and their potential can result in a successful marketing campaign.
3. Introduction of a Landing Page
We cannot stress the importance of an effective landing page enough. It’s the place where the people interested in your product or service will funnel before deciding if they’re comfortable with doing business with you. Whether they come from your Facebook Group, Instagram post, YouTube video, or a promotional email, the landing page is the place you need to have to generate the highest conversion rate.
A great landing page should provide useful information about your company, including what your offer is and your contact details, to the visitor. Landing pages are mostly used to help in the communication between prospect and brand.
The way you design your landing page will want to accomplish the following:
- Increasing Conversions
- Generating Leads
- Collecting Data
The difference between a home page and a landing page is that the home page has a more general feel. It will only highlight your brand, including what you do, and provides access to other parts of your website and social media. A landing page, however, has a specific goal in mind. If your landing page doesn’t follow the previously stated goals, take it down, and back to the drawing board you go.
Some useful information when trying to get your landing page to rank higher on a Google search:
When ranking web pages, the almighty Google algorithm will take a handful of things in consideration. The first of them is the user experience. It is paramount that your page is user-friendly; if people have a hard time navigating, your user experience will be ranked poorly. If you happen to be affected by this, invest in user experience specialists. They will be able to provide easy to read information and enhanced visuals for a better-looking aesthetic.
The second criteria is the loading speed of your page. Page speed is an extremely important performance metric for ranking you as high as possible. If you’re affected by this, get a web developer specialist to take a look at your JavaScript and improve your cache.
Third, Google will evaluate your descriptions, tags and the overall text you have on your page. Employ a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist to take care of this issue if it applies to you.
Last, have a keyword. Every landing page should only have ONE keyword that will be focused on and this keyword is included in the tags, slugs, descriptions, and page title.
4. Not as Intrusive as Other Modern Marketing Strategies
We’ve talked earlier about outdated, old-school marketing strategies. There is even a modern tool that has proven to be ineffective, that being so-called cold emailing. Visual marketing overpowers outdated practices. If you wake up to your phone notifications ringing and when you look you see emails from brands you’ve never heard of before, asking if you want to buy their product, those notifications can be very intrusive. If you needed their solution, you’d have looked for it, right? It is especially annoying if you have absolutely no use for what a given company is selling. Think about them trying to sell you a lawnmower when you live in the middle of the city, in an apartment. There is a time and place for emails as a lead generation tool, but not in case of an early-stage acquisition.
When is it the best time to use emails? The ideal time is after you’ve gotten a site visitor to sign up for your newsletter using their email address. Build your email list and keep sending enrollees offers; feed them materials and testimonials, send them to some of your videos, to your Instagram account, or to the landing page we talked about earlier. If they have not purchased from you today, keep them excited about your brand and they will become more comfortable with buying in the near future.
5. Gives You the Option to Build Product/Brand Buzz
Visual marketing will let you create a perception in a potential buyer’s mind. You set the stage and prepare them for something even before they’ve laid their eyes on it. This is why people line up hours before a store opens just to get their hands on the newest piece of technology. It is because of the producer who builds up the anticipation and desire. The key is getting your followers excited about the product or service you offer. You don’t have to spend millions of dollars to organize an event like an exhibition for your product. You can use social media to achieve the exact thing. Make a concise, very easy to understand promotional video and make your audience want to have your product right away. In other words, you create the buzz with videos and your audience will flock to your new products and services in short order.
Check out what Neil Patel, master of the marketing space, had to say regarding videos on products: “Product videos can increase purchases by 144%.” We strongly recommend researching his material. His website is one of the best sources for reliable and efficient marketing strategies, tips and tricks.
If you want to find out more about the opportunity to master visual content marketing, bringing your business to a whole new level, contact IGW now!
Sources:
Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
https://infographicworld.com/blog/
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