Marketing is a vast and complex professional field. It impacts everything from high-end B2B sales to selling a pair of socks on Amazon. The sheer vastness of the marketing world is reason enough to make it feel complex and overwhelming for those who must operate within it. But the challenges don’t stop there.
In addition to its complexity and variety, marketing — especially digital marketing — is in a constant state of evolution. As customer expectations shift, technology advances, modes of communication change, and industries rise and fall, marketers in every industry must be ready to adapt.
However, underneath all of the flashy changes in modes and messages, one constant theme is always present: the need to connect with your audience.
Human Communication in Marketing
Dharmesh Shah, one of the co-founders of HubSpot, once said, “Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.”
This tenet is simplistic, easily-overlooked, and it absolutely cuts to the quick of what it means to market in the 21st century. If you aren’t connecting with your customers, providing a unique experience, and both relating to and solving their problems, you will find success elusive.
While most marketers are perfectly familiar with the idea that they must connect with customers, things like data analytics, digital marketing tools, and convoluted marketing strategies can make it difficult to maintain a human perspective.
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Why Social Media Is Critical to Making Connections
With so many marketing options available to a modern marketer, it can be difficult to decide how to allocate resources. However, there’s one mode of marketing has consistently gained momentum, regardless of the industry or objective: social media.
Social media has grown exponentially over the years. In 2005 just 5% of American adults actively used a social media platform. By 2019 that number had risen to a staggering 72%.
With so many potential customers flocking to the social media world, it only makes sense that it has become the new marketing standard. Along with the size of its audience, social media also enables companies to market their products and services with visual aids and it increasingly impacts search engine optimization (SEO) results.
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Image Source: Pexels
Making Healthy Connections on Social Media
It doesn’t matter what way you slice it, social media is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of a marketer, and, when used correctly, it can be the perfect way to connect with your audience.
Nevertheless, the key phrase here is “when used correctly.” If you don’t use social media correctly, you can end up throwing money away. Even worse, if you aren’t careful, you can actively harm your brand, as was the case when Snapchat approved an offensive ad asking readers if they’d rather slap Rhianna or punch Chris Brown.
If you want to avoid the pitfalls of social media advertising and still manage to connect with your audience in a meaningful way that provides results, you need to keep a few things in mind:
Pinpoint Your Digital Location
The first thing you always need to consider is where your ideal audience is the most active on social media. Even if you only count the giant contenders, there are still seven different social platforms currently in existence, and trying to use all of them at once is an excellent way to waste time and resources.
Instead, always conduct market research to identify your audience (if you haven’t already done so) and then discover what platforms they use the most heavily. You can do this by using a tool like BuzzSumo to identify where your industry keywords are being used the most often.
In addition, if your audience is diverse, consider segmenting your marketing in order to create smaller, more homogenous demographics that can be more effectively identified and targeted.
Remember, Timing Matters
Creating a social schedule is a critical step in genuinely resonating with your audience.
For instance, if you’re an entertainment publisher and an industry-specific, time-sensitive piece of news drops — such as Marvel Studios announcing a new movie — you will want to post about it quickly. This will help you remain authoritative and relevant and will allow you to capitalize on an initial surge of traffic.
Once you’ve segmented your audience and found the platforms that they prefer, take the time to analyze how they interact, when they tend to be the most active, and what kind of content you are trying to share with them. Then, use this information to create a schedule that optimizes your engagement through the proper timing of your posts.
Value Consistency and Measure Results
Finally, as you create a viable strategy to engage with your audience, make an effort to codify it. By creating clear rules and guidelines, you provide your team with a blueprint for how they are to represent your brand. This can be instrumental in:
- Helping you maintain a recognizable voice regardless of who is creating your content.
- Allowing you consistently to espouse a cause as a company.
- Enabling you to create standards that weed out both misinformation and disinformation that can undermine your credibility.
Making Meaningful Connections Through Social Media
While modern marketing is full of options, there’s no doubt that social media is at the front of the pack. When used correctly, it can be a powerful tool that enables you to connect with your audience.
If this is done skillfully and with a purpose, it allows you to resonate with pain points and develop leads through an organic process that is more effective than any television ad or billboard has ever been in the past.