Understanding Social Media Marketing and Advertising: Part 1

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We know that it’s difficult to make sense of everything that’s happening in the digital space. It seems that every time you think you might be on top of it, everything changes and the current starts flowing in a different direction. We want to help you understand what’s happening in the digital advertising space, whether you’re a marketer or a seller. It’s time to start transitioning into selling digital media, so understanding and embracing the latest trends will help you stay relevant in today’s market.

In this post, we’ll focus on social media marketing and the newest trends you should know about. Social media networks are constantly evolving and providing new ways for users to connect and express themselves, as well as offering fresh opportunities for brands to advertise and reach their unique audiences.

What do marketers and brands need to know about social media?

Brands can use social media to enhance their shared and earned media strategies. By strategically cultivating their audience through social media, marketers can reach and stay in touch with their existing and potential customers. Realizing the power of recommendations, as well as appropriate brand-user interactions, can help brands continuously refine the loyalty loop in their sales process.

Knowing your brand’s audience is key to formulating a strategy and utilizing the most effective channel for social media interactions. Although Facebook is the largest global social network, the fastest growing social media networks are actually Tumblr and Pinterest. Facebook’s audience is statistically older, Pinterest has a majority of female users and Tumblr is mostly used by the younger generation. Keeping this in mind will help you match your data to channels which will best be suited to your brand. Ensuring you continuously provide users with content they would like to interact with and share will solidify your social media influence.

Advertising on social networks is also an extremely effective way to market your brand and products. Targeting on large, established networks provides countless ways to reach an interested customer through the enormous amounts of data available. Balancing your paid social media efforts with a more organic approach to customer-brand interactions will help produce an efficient social media strategy for your brand.

What should advertising sellers know about social media?

Similar to marketers and brands, sellers need to know their audience. By having a handle on the data, they’ll be more capable and knowledgeable when presenting an advertising solution. Knowing what an advertiser is looking for in their overall campaign, as well as their presence on social media networks is key.

If your audience is in a similar vein to that of the advertiser, then it will probably be a great match for both parties. Being aware of which social networks drive the most traffic to your site can help be a determinant of where a brand can later anticipate to see social interactions if they advertise with you. If you are selling native advertising that is truly quality, brands will find this valuable to their social media strategy, since users love to share something they find interesting, entertaining or useful. Staying on top of your data and understanding the advertiser’s intentions with regards to social media can help your sales efforts.

This article was written by Anna Adamczyk. It was originally published at DMTraining.

Anna Adamcyzk creates new digital training content while managing the delivery of the company's training packages. Prior to her adventure at Digital Media Training, she traveled extensively after earning her degree in psychology and history. In her free time she can be found reading, running and taking on a variety of new creative pursuits.

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage management or associated bloggers.

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