When you’re launching a new company, social media marketing is one of the most exceptional ways to gain traction. However, it’s not the only marketing strategy you can utilize. Many brands don’t have a digital footprint in the social media space. While it might seem hard to fathom, social media isn’t suitable for every brand. In order to discover whether social media is a great fit for your brand, you’ll need to look at a few factors first.
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1. Niche Effectiveness
Start by researching your particular niche in order to uncover other brands and how they’ve experienced success on various apps. If your company possesses a major visual component such as makeup, fashion or skincare, social media marketing is pretty promising. If you’re in a niche like cremation, you’ll need to do more research in order to see how you can properly monetize it. For those unique niches such as cremation, you might use social media platforms to build brand awareness as well as education. If you’re educating people on different details within the industry, there is a host of people who will happily engage in that type of content.
2. Collaboration Opportunities
In order to build a strong brand, partnerships are necessary. By connecting and building with various influencers, you’ll get your products in front of new audiences. However, the wrong collaborations can appear forced and opportunistic (in a negative way). Take a look at how brands within your niche engage with influencers.
Content partners are beneficial in their ability to help brands scale. Alternatively, the wrong affiliations can cause a drop in visibility or likeability. This is why some major corporations drop public figures as brand ambassadors. The optics matter. Consider the optics of certain partnerships as well as the content your brand would produce. If your presence would lead to a ton of contention and bad press, social media might not be a great fit.
3. Target Audience
Turn the television to a channel such as the Cartoon Network. In between cartoons, the commercials run. These advertisers know that children don’t typically have money to spend. However, they know that they’ll ask their parents to buy those products. Because the children watch the advertisements through a television screen, they still have to ask their parents to insert their payment information on a separate device to make the purchase. Nothing about this process requires social media. It’s about knowing who your target demographic is.
Once you’re clear about your demographic, you might not need to promote posts every day on Instagram. Your toddlers and small children aren’t on Instagram. Do some market research in order to learn more about your target customer. By uncovering their daily habits, interests and routines, it’s easier to factor in the marketing style that works best in order to reach them. A radio ad might outperform a sponsored Facebook post in undeniable ways because you’ve secured a primetime spot on a radio station that caters to your target audience.
4. Time, Effort and Profit
Take a look at your capacity. How many people are on the marketing team of your company? Are you a one-person show? If you’re running everything on your own, social media marketing can go both ways. If your content has a viral moment and brings more sales than your company can handle, this can lead to burnout. However, if you have a team in place to handle upticks in sales, social media marketing can be worth it. If you don’t know how to even post a picture on your Instagram feed, it’s a new skill set you’d need to learn.
If you have the money to outsource this process, know your numbers to make sure it’s worth it. If you’re spending more on marketing and not making it back (and a profit), social media might not be suitable for you. In most cases, social media marketing’s effectiveness as a viable strategy has more to do with a brand’s capacity to handle it than anything else.
While social media platforms transformed the way businesses operate and people engage with each other, they’re still not the final answer for every business. In the same way that you have friends who delete their social media pages and move on with life, there are plenty of businesses and brands who opt to use different strategies to find marketing strategies that work well for them. By factoring in these components, it’ll become easier to see if social media marketing is a good fit for your brand.
