With social media, companies can reach much larger audiences than ever before. Social media has enabled companies to increase brand awareness, engage with customers, and cultivate new leads. With social media, the phenomenon of brands advertising a lifestyle and not the products has also gained even stronger traction.
Social media changed not only personal relationships but also the business-customer relationship
Often, we think that social media and the internet have changed the way we interact with one another. Think back to your life before social media. How did you even spend all your free time? Social media has changed our lives. On a personal level and it has had a major impact on how businesses approach marketing.
To understand how social media changed marketing, you first need to remember how things were before social media existed.
How has advertising changed?
Marketing Before Social Media
There was digital marketing before social media, but it was limited in both application and effectiveness. Email joined the ranks of outbound marketing tactics and the advent of search engines allowed for the first inbound marketing.
These days, it was still more common for businesses to rely on non-digital forms, like print, TV, or radio.
How Social Media Has Had an Impact on Marketing
When social media hit the internet, its purpose was still as its name implies. To build and maintain social connections between people. The purpose was to facilitate the relationship between people remotely. Platforms were for individuals to network; they were free from businesses and ads. Try to remember how your Facebook or Twitter feed looked more than 10 years ago — it’s unrecognizable from today.
Progressively, social media changed. From a place where you connected mostly with friends, it became more fake. Users could follow brands and individuals like celebrities and influencers. This led to some major changes in the way businesses approached marketing.
Marketing Is More Accessible Than Ever
One of the biggest obstacles to starting a new business used to be marketing. Without marketing, no one knows that your company exists. However, paying for traditional marketing is expensive and the results are often not measurable.
A key selling point of social media marketing is that it’s open to everyone. It’s easy to set up an account on any platform and there are no costs to getting started. In fact, many businesses can reach their audience by running only organic marketing campaigns. They never have to for ads at all. This gives small companies with limited budgets the chance to reach customers like never before. With it comes also greater insights about analytics as brands have the chance to visualize which ads work best.
But Social Media Marketing has become perverse
However, as social media marketing was first an eldorado for brands and companies, it quickly turned perverse. Nowadays, businesses continuously have to overpay the platforms to reach the users who follow them. The control of social media platforms on who will receive a certain post has made businesses dependent. This has to change! In regards to the budget that companies spend, and how brands interact with customers.
Share your visions and brand philosophy
Why should you share your vision?
“Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn’t happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.” – Simon Mainwaring
When people become customers, they essentially become important partners of the company. Everyone within an organization is aware of and shares a common vision. Just as that, companies must also understand that sharing their vision with customers is equally vital. Customers may share a companies enthusiasm but there needs to be more. Indeed it will not be sustainable unless they are part of the long-term goals and vision of the company. The company’s vision must incite passion and excitement. Not just within the organization, but in the minds of customers too.
When everyone connected with your company shares a common vision, two benefits quickly appear. The attainment of goals is faster and the possibility of ambiguity is reduced dramatically. In any case, given that every company must focus on its customers, putting together a customer experience strategy without a shared vision would be counter-intuitive to success.
The vision of customers has changed
Sharing your vision with customers would mean that your company is completely aware of who its customers are. Secondly, how each customer’s ‘journey’ ties in with the company’s long-term goals. It is not wise or practical to underestimate the importance of a shared vision. It is possibly one of the strongest common factors that can create a bond in the mind of the customer. Sharing your vision with customers means that your company knows them. What they have set out to achieve, their pain points, challenges, and even achievements.
This understanding would make it easier to prepare a vision statement. For both customers and employees. When customers see the commonality between the company’s vision and their own expectations, they can trust the company. After all, your business exists for the customers. Keeping them at the center of everything will make them love your company more than any other in the market.
Advantages
Clearly, social is essential to your marketing mix. What’s even more important is developing a current brand personality that you can leverage to share your brand values. You want to come off as organic while having your content look native. Like something your audience would naturally see in their feed.
Being active on social media with native, organic content helps. Crafting a story around your brand values that resonate with your audience is even better. Consumers are increasingly aware and interested in company social impact (which probably isn’t news to you). It’s one of the driving forces behind consumer purchases, especially in the millennial demographic.
For example, A 2017 Cone study revealed that 87 percent of people said they would purchase a product based on the brand’s values and their brand affinity. If you’re trying to get your audience to connect with you, then you should take sharing your brand values seriously. This virtue alone will help establish the type of audience-brand affinity you (and they) are looking for.
What comes next?
As currently, brands have been sharing their vision through videos or images, most of it was in 2D. Customers and especially the rising professional class who grew up with advanced technology now have other expectations. The demand for immersive content in all parts of marketing has been growing. There is no doubt that the demand is there. Now, it needs an answer.
What are we doing at Soulside to solve this problem?
At Soulside, we are committed to solving this issue for both the interests of users and brands. By not influencing the relationship between users and companies, we allow the communication to stay healthy. We want to give everyone the entire control of what you will be seeing in the app.
Advertising has become more and more mixed with so-called native content to improve the user experience. With Soulside, you have the possibility of creating and sharing content through a 3D Space. Hence why companies will be able to truly share their values to users who won’t feel any difference from others’ posts.
If you are curious about all these processes, feel free to get in touch with us at contact@soulside.app
Read our previous business article here.
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