With over two million businesses using Facebook for advertising, 50 million businesses using Facebook business pages and 93% of Pinterest users using Pinterest to make plans and purchase decisions, businesses whether small-scale or large-scale, B2B or B2C, local or international, etc. have little to no choice but to use social media marketing to try to reach out to potential customers and engage their current customers.
Reasons for Social Media Marketing
Of course, there are several reasons why businesses, brands and companies use social media marketing. These include:
Access to market and potential customers
According to Statista, 1.37 billion active users visit Facebook every day. Many of these active users visit Facebook and other social media platforms to check on the activities of friends and family, pursue their interests, sell something and socialize online. A business can easily attract the attention of potential customers with ads on the social media platform that their target customers visit the most.
Encouraging engagement
Social media marketing is the best way through which businesses and companies can engage their current customers and retain them. You can use social media marketing to create a two-way communication means for your customers, allowing them to make their wishes known and you can update them on new developments on your products and services.
Customer service support systems
Social media marketing is another great opportunity for companies, businesses and brands to get customers’ opinions by tracking customers’ questions and complaints about the business all over social media platforms. Companies can also get feedback and criticism from customers’ social media conversation with others. It is also the best way to curtail customer loyalty because customers will also appreciate the fact that when they post comments on your social media page, they receive a personalized message rather than an automatic message.
Affordable advertising
Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing can be pretty affordable and sometimes free of charge, after all, you don’t have to pay to open a social media account on any of the numerous social media networks that exist. Even social media marketers who decide to use paid advertising only have to pay, based on their campaign type, for clicks on ads.
Measurable advertising
Apart from being affordable, social media marketing is also measurable. That is, using different analytics systems: Twitter analytics and Pinterest analytics, you can find out the number of people who viewed your ads, clicked your ads or walked away after viewing your ads.
Drive brand awareness
Many startup companies and businesses have applied different social media marketing strategies to drive their brand awareness and increase their brand visibility and recognition. And since 59% of shoppers prefer to buy new products from brands they are familiar with, companies or businesses will benefit greatly for making potential and present customers familiar with their brand.
Target audience awareness
By observing the activities of your customers and potential customers, you can find out their needs and wants directly by asking them for their opinions with surveys or just questions, or by tracking their social media comments about your brand. This way, you can have a better understanding of your customers, their reactions to your products and services and your competitors which would inform your social media marketing strategies.
4 Social Media Marketing Failures That You Can Learn From
With the many advantages of social media marketing, this does not mean that your social media strategy cannot end up failing, having little return on investment or bringing negative attention to your product. This is why every business or company using social media marketing have to look out for other company and brand marketing failures so that they can learn to avoid making the same mistakes.
1. The Coca Cola 2016 marketing hit-and-miss
As the Christmas holidays were approaching in 2016, Coca Cola decided to do their holiday season advertisement with a snow-covered map of Russia which unfortunately excluded Crimea, Kuril Islands and Kaliningrad. They should have probably avoided creating a map of Russia at all, since the Russian map is a highly controversial issue especially since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
After the Russian internet users’ negative reaction to this map excluding Crimea, Coca Cola social media marketing team decided to recreate and post another Russian map which included Crimea this time and unfortunately, earned the wrath of Ukrainians and their online support for the ban of Coca Cola.
This marketing hit-and-miss was further complicated by some important figures in Russia who posted that because of Coca Cola’s restructured map, global American Companies had accepted the annexation of Crimea even though the official stand of the United States and even the European government is one of condemnation of the annexation of Crimea. This marketing hit and miss therefore, warranted many apologies, taking down both social media marketing campaign maps permanently and left behind some unhappy Ukrainians and Russians.
2. Melbourne Cup and horse racing campaign
The Melbourne Cup attempt to connect with their online and social media audience definitely flopped in a most predictable way. After all, the company itself was a controversial one in the first place. The Melbourne Cup attempted to get audience to #NameAHorseRace after themselves on Twitter, forgetting that not everybody approves horse racing and that many people thought it was an example of animal cruelty.
Although, they did promote what they did best and tried to engage their customers, they failed to think of how this marketing campaign could backfire against their brand. In short, they did not think about how people would react to the controversial topic that horse racing is.
3. Dove’s transformation campaign
Dove has always been known for empowering women and encouraging women to focus on realistic standards of beauty and the concept that everybody is beautiful in their own way.
Their “Real” beauty marketing concept has always worked for them as seen from their “Real beauty sketches” marketing campaign and “Evolution” marketing campaign had focused on making women proud of their natural looks over the years and it had worked for them till they brought the Transformation marketing campaign.
The Dove Transformation ad saw a black woman transform to a white woman after the use of the Dove body lotion. Of course, a marketing ad involving anything like skin color or race definitely resonated wrongly with their target audience both black and white. This ad had the misfortune of offending racists, non-racists and people against racism.
The marketing ad also disproved all their previous brand messages and contorted the brand image that they had spent over nine years trying to build. With that single ad that went against the “all beauty is real beauty” concept, they dismantled the reputation they built over the years. The ad alienated and even insulted a large part of their audience and definitely caused many to walk away.
Despite their apology after the ad was removed based on customer (women of all races) complaints and backlash stating that they were uncomfortable and even infuriated with the ad, it still took some time for Dove to recover from this brand awareness setback.
4. The Audi #PaidMyDues campaign
From research, Assignment Man have realized that while planning for social media marketing campaigns, inevitably, brand social media marketing teams can decide on marketing ads that bring no returns to the company (no return on investment or brand awareness).
For example, the Audi #PaidMyDues marketing campaign which had nothing to do with beautiful luxury cars and definitely backfired. Many people follow Audi on different social media platforms to see different beautiful photos of luxury cars. So, when Audi decided to tell real-life stories about people triumphing over adversity, they definitely didn’t carry their audience along.
Of course, they probably thought they could engage their followers by asking them to tweet or Instagram their inspiring stories but they were wrong because many followers felt irritated with these inspiring stories which did not have anything to do with cars. Some social media audiences were found complaining about how the marketing campaign had nothing to do with cars and many threatening to unfollow Audi on social media.
Although the Audi #PaidMyDues campaign did not offend anyone’s values, it resulted in a great drop in engagement level with their audience, customers felt that Audi was no longer as invested in their main purpose which was making great cars and many customers also felt that Audi was not listening to their opinions and customer feedback since it took them more than two weeks to completely drop the campaign despite complaints from clients.
What You Can Learn from These Social Media Marketing Failures
Know your target audience
Based on research by an academician at custom paper writing service, any brand, company or business that does not know their audience is sure to fail in their social media marketing. Taking the example of Audi’s #PaidMyDues campaign which was based on good intentions but definitely did not resonate with their audience.
Consider the different ways marketing campaigns can be misconstrued or twisted
Companies and businesses need to be careful of the way their campaigns can be twisted on social media. Different types of people hide behind their phones and computers on social media and will take any opportunity to get followers on twitter and get influence by ridiculing people and brands if given the chance. Therefore, brands on social media should be careful not to create open-ended social media campaigns that can be twisted in different lights and backfire.
An example is ALDI social media marketing campaign which asked people to fill in the blanks. The ad was something like “Complete the sentence by filling the blank space” and it ended with sentences like:
“I became an ALDI lover when I tasted ________ for the first time.”
The ad was definitely twisted by people on social media who began to make crude comments and eventually the campaign had to be terminated.
Keep track of your analytics
Track your analytics and customer feedback to see if your marketing campaign is resonating in the right way with your target audience.
Be careful with controversial concepts
College-paper.org reviews also advises that you should be careful how you feature controversial concepts like sex, drugs, race, violence, etc. in your social media campaigns.
Deal properly and carefully with social media negative feedback
All in all, companies, businesses and their social media marketing teams should be careful to improve their skills, logical thinking, and knowledge so they can deal with social media negative feedback in the right way.
Conclusion
Although, it is kind of inevitable for companies and businesses to make social media marketing mistakes once in a while due to different reasons, these can be minimized by looking at other brand’s social media marketing campaigns (especially competitor’s) and knowing what your target audience wants or does not want.
Guest Post: About the Author
Becky Holton is a journalist and a blogger at best paper writing service. She is interested in education technologies, expert writing, my assignment help and is always ready to support informative speaking. Follow her on Twitter.