Facebook recently announced that it is no longer a social media company or a strictly technological company but an organization creating metaverse or virtual worlds, says Anna Ledwoń ‑ Blacha, co-founder and creative director at More Bananas. Businesses should prepare for the necessity of VR and Augmented Reality activities soon. Paulina Kostro is talking.
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Why should every modern business include internet marketing in its strategy, including activities in social media?
I would also like to say that this is the channel with the smallest entry threshold, but that is no longer true, although it is indeed the universal channel. Internet marketing is now one of the universal channels for reaching customers. This is where we have contact points with our customers. We should be there too if they are on social media and in other communication and distribution channels online.
However, I do not think that every social media company needs it. Let’s say about 90% of social media businesses need, but certainly not all. While in most cases – whether it’s for e-commerce or services or as a personal branding tool – social media does a good job, but it’s just one tool. Sometimes it is downright throwing money down the drain on a “because everyone does.”
The first thing that occurred to me was the funeral industry. This industry should, of course, be present on the web – in the form of a website, information on Google maps. However, no social media is needed in the case of a funeral industry company. In this context, the question is often asked about the Bytom Funeral Home? But ZPB is a virtually created entity; such a funeral home does not actually exist; it is only happening.
If we want to build brand awareness, social media will be great for most sectors. However, there are some niches where we will not acquire or reach customers in this way, so then their use is pointless.
Let’s focus on those companies that are on social media. What are the most important benefits of such activities in the context of internet marketing?
Social media allows companies to build a close relationship with their customers and showcase a brand that has a human face and actually reaches out to the person on the other side of the screen. Thanks to them, consumers feel that they are establishing contact with a person, not a brand-customer relationship. It is also worth mentioning the issues of coverage. When we look at activities such as performance marketing (advertising activities aimed at increasing the involvement of potential customers – ed.) Or programmatic (automated advertising activities – ed.), Social media can actually offer the lowest cost of reaching the recipient. However, coverage is not everything.
How to determine which channel of reaching the customer is the best for our business? Or maybe it is worth practising the approach that the more we are online, the better?
Not a channel, but channels – for the sake of diversification. It is crucial because our recipients are usually present in various communication channels. However, it would help if you remembered that nothing on the web belongs to us – except for the website, application or e-mail database.
In the traditional approach to internet marketing, there are media such as earned, owned, paid and shared. In each of these categories, we should find a distribution channel, but most of all in the type of owned ones – as we have recently learned clearly on October 4, that is on the day of Facebook’s “apocalypse” (it did not work for about six hours – ed.).
Many companies that day lamented that Facebook’s immobilization would demolish their business. But it’s not Facebook’s fault, but those organizations that haven’t decided to diversify. We are responsible for what channels we choose, and if we have focused on one card, which is the Facebook environment, it is our fault and our problem.
Each communication channel is only good to the extent that our target group is present on it. Therefore, we don’t always have to choose Facebook. However, you must always measure your intentions and adjust the message to the recipient, including by means of the form and number of the published content. I would advise against being present, for example, in the Trench. This is not a place that a serious brand should be associated with. Therefore, before choosing a given medium, it is worth checking its surroundings.
Is it worth maintaining image consistency while diversifying channels, or is it better to adapt to the behaviour and dynamics of a given medium?
Consistency is essential for brand building awareness. Anyway, most of the activities we undertake in social media are related to building brand awareness and indirect sales. But it’s not about posting the same thing everywhere. Even if we want to inform you about the same promotion, service, product or blog entry – we should do it in a manner tailored to the given platform. Often completely different people follow us via Facebook, and others are on LinkedIn – so publishing the same messages often does not make sense.
About 80% of people expect consistent communication from brands across all channels, but only 60% of them believe that they are talking to the same brand on each channel. It happens when departments in companies do not communicate with each other, so content marketing, social activities and what is happening on the company’s website do not have much in common.
Often, these social media are treated by brands as one entity. What we post on Facebook, we publish one-to-one in the other channels. Remember that even if we publish a post on the same topic – the message must be adapted to the platform.
Each channel has clear guidelines regarding the content formats that can be published on it. For example, it is not worth publishing posters or infographics on Facebook – because these are not formats that will look good in this medium. TikTok, on the other hand, is not a place to “reheat” YouTube content – we have to create native materials tailored to this platform. Twitter, on the other hand, is based on short texts that often trigger discussions and comments. So it makes no sense to put, e.g. photos, in it.
You don’t need any special intuition to publish on a given channel. You need to do your homework and familiarize yourself with the principles of content management in a given medium. The next step is active presence – you have to observe and absorb what is happening on social media. I deeply regret that marketers say over and over again that TikTok is “so infantile and stupid”. Then I ask: “But you looked there?” Usually, I hear the answer: “I installed the application, saw some idiotic videos, so I uninstalled after five minutes.” This means that they haven’t really worked hard on their homework because they have no idea how the TikTok algorithm works. And you only need to spend an hour on this application to see how effectively its algorithms work, which instantly adjust the content to the user’s choices. It may be,
And it’s not about becoming the alpha and omega of every social media imaginable. Being a leader, team manager, CFO, or head of marketing, we don’t need to know the technical details and interface of each social media channel. But we should know their potential and possibilities.
Not all of our clients are on Facebook or Instagram; therefore, we must never forget that we only learn about the group of clients that use social media. But nevertheless, it is a base of additional knowledge that is worth using.
It is worth using social media, for example, to build a brand image, but what else is worth publishing on a company account?
There is no universal recipe. It is a matter of the industry, the adopted strategy, and our goals in relation to the activities we conduct on social media. You can list the most popular formats: webinars, press releases, quotes or memes – only that these are the content that will not necessarily work in a specific business. So the answer is “it depends.”
How can a business attract customers through social media? And how can the effectiveness of such sourcing be measured?
We can use social media at many stages of the sales funnel – this may be the stage of building brand awareness, strengthening interest, commitment or a strong purchasing intention. But since we are talking about customers, they must be clearly distinguished into B2B and B2C. In the case of the B2B group, we have a number of options. We can focus on social selling, paid campaigns directed to our website; they can also be campaigns acquiring leads directly on a given platform.
How is it measured? An effective tool is, for example, Google Analytics, but it can also be an inbox launched in a given medium or the number of new contracts with a merchant. The simplest procedure is to add information about the phone number to the Facebook or LinkedIn website, which we will only use to contact customers from social media.
However, in the case of the B2C group, the basis is the Google mentioned above Analytics, thanks to which we measure the time spent on the website, the bounce rate, sales or the average shopping cart. We may also be tempted to use customer experience tools and research how social media users react to our website.
It is also good to analyze social media statistics, remembering that in this case, we get data related to user engagement rather than direct sales.
Definitely not. Social selling is activities carried out by a private person, most often a trader – mainly on LinkedIn. It is selling through relationship building. On the other hand, live commerce is a live broadcast that takes place via Facebook, Instagram or Tik-Tok, during which the user can make a purchase. This format is now trendy in the East, China, but also in the United States.
The platforms mentioned above strive to keep the customer at home – that is why, for example, they enable them to pay for the purchase on their platform. How is it going to be adopted in Poland? We’ll see. We remain wary about paying on social media, but looking at what is happening in other countries, this could be the future.
Speaking of the future, I would like to ask about the future of Internet marketing. Can you tell me about the trends that are already visible on the Polish horizon?
It is primarily a new internet, i.e. internet 4.0, in which we will no longer distinguish the virtual world from the real one. For new generations, it will simply be the world – no online or offline division. This trend is coming; virtual universes (so-called metaverse ) already exist. Facebook recently announced that it is no longer a social media company, not a technology company but a tool that develops metaverse or virtual worlds.
The natural consequence of this phenomenon will be the enormous popularity of virtual and augmented reality. It is not worth delaying the conviction that it will happen “only” in five years when the Z generation enters the market. It is worth starting to think about it now to take care of the necessary financial and human resources focused on virtual and augmented reality activities.
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