Social Media Marketing
In chapter three of the textbook, it discusses the strategy that social media professionals use to make their advertising effective. Some of these steps include doing research on your audience and platform, creating a tone for the selected audience, and establishing the platform and distribution plan. What I found most interesting and what I believe to be most important, is creating a customer persona for the intended audience. I think this is the most important as step as it does not matter what strategy and material is created if the audience being targeted is never going to buy the product or service. This is also the first step in creating a social media marketing strategy, so it is important to get it right. I have realized through my experience on social media how organizations choose their target market and platform to advertise on.
One organization that I believe is doing a good job of tailoring their advertising to the correct audience are clothing brands like Fabletics. I often see advertisements for their clothing deals on platforms like Snapchat and Tik Tok due to the younger audience using these platforms. These advertisements showcase affordable clothing for young and active people therefore I believe they are targeting the correct market. On the contrary, I see many more political advertisements on platforms like Twitter, where there is a slightly older audience engaging in these posts. Typically, political advertisements are seen in more traditional mediums such as billboards or television commercials, but I believe Twitter expands the audience to more young adults. There are many steps in making an effective social media strategy, but choosing who and where to advertise are vitally important steps.
Another important aspect the textbook goes over is the positive trend of organizations spending more money on social media advertising. The textbook states that spending in social media advertising was nearly 220 billion dollars worldwide in 2024 whereas in 2018 it was just 73 billion. Spending is also expected to increase by another 30 billion by year 2028. I expect this trend to continue far into the future until the next avenue of advertising appears.
I never really took into account just how important the customer persona is. The way you explained it put it into perspective and made me understand that you can't just post content into the atmosphere without giving it a bit of personality. A good way to help me think about that concept is to actually turn it on its head and give the brand a personality similar to your own. The way I see it, this basically gives the customers something to relate to, almost building your customer persona for you just by personalizing your brand to you.
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ReplyDeleteI completely agree that creating a customer persona is one of the most important steps in social media strategy. If you're not targeting the right audience, all the creative work could go to waste. Your example of Fabletics using Snapchat and TikTok to reach younger, active people is a great example of this. I’ve noticed the same thing with political ads on Twitter, where they seem to target a more engaged, slightly older audience. The massive jump in social media ad spending really shows how essential it has become for businesses to get this right.