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flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Marketing Plan (34-slide PowerPoint presentation). Introducing our new and improved digital marketing template plan designed to capture your audience's attention, generate interest, create desire, and prompt action (AIDA model). This template is not just for a one-time campaign but for ongoing business activity. It's perfect for [read more]
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When it comes to social media, you don’t need to pay to play, but it’s a good idea to know what everyone is up to as you form your own digital marketing strategy. Paid social media ads are increasingly seen as an integrating tactic. Let’s say you’ve spent time and money developing a great new how-to video or article—how do you make sure people see it? How can you increase visibility of your positive product reviews, media coverage, blog posts and educational content like white papers and presentations?
1# Play the game
Paid social is the only reliable means of building a targeted and effective audience for your brand on the major networks, not only because there’s just so much content out there, but also because the algorithms used by the big players have to favor paid over organic for practical reasons. Survival of the fittest, in social terms, means not only those posts most deserving of engagement, but also those brands most willing to invest in encouraging that engagement. There are many ways to play the game as promoting your posts on Face book, Face book ads, Twitter promoted Tweets, LinkedIn ads, etc.
2# Learn about Organic vs. Paid
When your strategy is focused on only organic there’s a problem. When your product’s target market is in North America, while Facebook is a global network, then organic reach can’t be controlled by region. So a full 80 percent of those fans are of little or no value to you for the purposes of their social strategy.
On the other hand focusing on a targeted paid social campaign while maintaining organic content distribution as well seems like a better solution, specifically, creating ads and promoting posts targeted by region, age, and interests. This strategy will ultimately increase the value of audience demographics and generate more qualified sales leads.
3# Pay attention to new players in the field
As much as it is important to pay attention to the big three: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s also crucial to identify the major new players in 2015 when it comes to image-centric marketing as Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Imagery content is becoming the core of E-commerce. The more capturing your imagery the more likely your ad will stand out and create a buzz around your brand, yielding greater results from an ROI perspective. The best-performing ads are relevant to the target audience and written with clear, compelling words and employ vivid images.
In comparison to organic social media engagement, paid social offers advantages in exposure, targeting, analysis, scale, and eventual ROI that make it essentially a necessity in today’s highly competitive market.
You can download in-depth presentations on Digital Marketing Strategy and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
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These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
