Social Media Marketing for Consumer Brands

The ‘secret’ (there’s no secret — it takes skills, experience, hard work, and a little bit of experimentation) to successful/effective social media marketing for consumer brands is a mix of content strategy segmentation, understanding the nuances of each social channel, in-depth knowledge of your target market, and brand authenticity.

• Understand the nuances of each social media channel and the way consumers interact on each channel — you need to be sharing/speaking/communicating the way the users of each specific platform like to interact and engage with that platform.

For example, GoPro’s high-quality user-generated content strategy is one of the main reasons they have over 9 million followers on Instagram. GoPro doesn’t use Instagram to push their products, rather they share user-generated content to celebrate a lifestyle of adventure.

• When conceptualizing and creating your social media strategy, make sure you know your audience (target market), your objectives (main reasons for utilizing social media) and create content that is relevant to your target market, your business objectives, and the specific social media channel (vital have a different content strategy for each platform)

Captain Morgan does a fantastic job of this with their YouTube content strategy — cheeky with a bit of attitude, just like the brand itself. With over half a million views per video, it’s a content strategy that is definitely working.

• Measure, measure, measure — have social analytics in place in order to be able to measure performance of each post and to modify based on analysis.

Big fan of Socialbakers. Find their customized reports in-depth, cohesive and phenomenal for monitoring the kind of social media content that works best in terms of growth and engagement. It’s also a fantastic analytics tool in terms of the demographic breakdown of the fans and followers and their growth over a specific period of time.

• Be an authentic brand and true to what your consumers/customers expect of you.

This is where narrative marketing and storytelling come into play — you or your brand is likely to have a powerful story. Share it. Showcase it. Consumers want to know why you care — they want a reason to care also. My agency recently collaborated with BookMunch to utilise one of their most popular social media channels, Facebook, to showcase their team from a storytelling, narrative perspective by launching a new Facebook series of posts titled ‘Humans of BookMunch’. These series of Facebook posts have allowed us to ‘show and tell’ BookMunch’s customers about the people with whom they interact on a daily basis with but might not know anything about.