Social Media

There are many features in various social media platforms that can help marketers reach the audience they need. Free features such as hashtags, mentions, including and excluding, and targeting through behavior and interest are all ways to increase visibility (McGruer 161). Not only is managing the business’ own content important, engaging with other people related to the product or service is also helpful with building an audience. One strategy McGruer suggests is to engage with other people’s accounts 10 times a day, through commenting, liking, or sharing (185). This short exercise over time can contribute towards garnering attention and achieving the qualitative goals for the company or organization. Many authors mentioned the importance of the number of shares, likes, comments, and other numeric feature sin social media and encouraged marketers to monitor and analyze the growth as a key performance indicator (Saura et al. 8).

As for content and strategy, it is important to stay on top of what is happening in the community. When searching for relevant topics, trends, and events to follow on social media, it may be difficult to manage the sheer volume of data or possibilities to pursue (Stieglitz et al. 162). Instead of taking into account of every related topic, the authors suggest focusing on subsections, such as specific events or audience interests. Consistent posting with a calendar and planned content are the keys to a successful social media account. McGruer suggests theming daily posts such as ‘motivation Mondays’ or ‘free Fridays,’ as a content strategy (157). The author also points out what specific content an account should share with their followers. For example, “Social media content needs to exist for a reason; otherwise you will end up posting pointless, unengaging content that doesn’t match your audience’s needs” (McGruer 151). She suggests a 80-20 ratio, where 80% of the posts are content related to the product or service while 20% of the posts are the actual promotional posts about the company’s offerings.

This also connects to how marketers should keep in mind the behavior of people scrolling on their social media. Batra and Keller point out that “consumers are most likely to engage with media, charities, and fashion [on social media] and least likely to engage with consumer goods” (127). As CO is related to fashion, social media would be an excellent channel to invest time in. Another point the authors make is that although companies are eager to engage with their consumer base online, only a small “percentage of consumer want to use social media to engage in two-way “conversations” with brands” (Batra and Keller 127). Rather, many prefer to use it as a way to gain information or to build a preference for a certain brand. Social media influences user who are either creating a preference for certain companies or who already have loyalty to a certain brand (Batra and Keller 132). Lastly. McGruer asks marketers to “Consider the actual behaviour of ourselves and our customers within a social media network: most of the time we stay in our social media feed. We don’t leave and visit external websites unless there is a very good reason [breaking news, tips and articles, buy products or services, sign-up for FREE resources, adverts]” (159). Therefore when making content, it is important to consider how to frame the posts in a way to entice followers to click a link outside of the platform.

There is research that social media does not affect conversion rates as heavily as other channels, such as email marketing. Therefore, this part of the campaign will mainly focus on targeting newer audiences, particularly those who are building preference and gaining brand awareness. Additionally, social media engagement will also help build loyalty within a customer base that have already converted. This campaign will take place on all social media platforms with a focus on Instagram as it’s a photo-based platform. We will assume that CO already has a social media account running on top of this XYZ x CO collaboration campaign. There will be an initial series of posts announcing the collaboration, then the account will continue posting added-value type posts, which are general posts that are related to CO’s services. These posts are meant to give advice to users right on their feed as well as entice consumers to visit CO’s website to build traffic and interest. More social media posts of the collaboration will be sprinkled throughout the CO Instagram feed in order to avoid bombarding followers with only promotional posts.