Socially, Brands Are What They Say

In today’s social media fueled madness, your brand’s branding is in the hands of your buyers. Don’t even pretend to claim you have a brand when you don’t. Fact, buyers are the ones who determine your brand. Some of you may say that you have a brand because of name awareness, but that is all you have. Understanding how buyers think along with the processes of activities buyers go through, is your task to identify what intersects and triggers brand concept in their minds. In other words, your brand is context dependent.

Slip Into Something More Comfortable. Anyone Can Be Better At Social Media Marketing

Many business leaders prefer 16 hour flights in coach than wanting to hangout, listen and engage in social media spheres. Yet; no matter what business you are in, the keys to success lie in successful social media marketing. Effective social media marketing means that you are able to draw your audiences (notice I say audiences because your larger target is to be siloed down into homologous cliques) in, and offer advantages that have them come out on top.

Social Message Segmentation Advantage

For undivided target audiences, demographics are such things as age, race, gender, income, religion, so forth. Emphasis is on undivided because psychographics are not yet applied.  Characteristics such as age, gender, household income, number of children, education level, marital status, or geographic location impact who is most receptive to a brand’s offer. Dependent upon the psychographic category or combination of categories the commodification need may increase, stay the same, or drop off.  Economics too can have volatile effects on how consumers will consume a brand until their psychographic wears them down.  Life turning points too have impact. For some, it increases their need while others drop back, or reduced desire of need. Children, marriage, work, so forth need accounted, as each modifies psychographic personae as well.  Because of this, social content messaging needs to work around psychological layers with personalization (within reason) to build not to mention strengthen brand relationship affinity.

Psychographics are nuance factions about people. Its what interests, morals, attitudes, or options that consumers align with a brand. How a brand assumes psychographics of consumers determines whether relationships are formed. Think in terms of how communities or neighborhoods are subdivided off of area demographics.  For example, some within a community may portray an audience psychographic as self-indulgent living mañana, while others maybe portrayed as conservative less impetuous. Identified self-indulgent sects follow, along the notion of, keeping up with the Jones. Put into action, a brand's social messaging threads would revolve around shopper appeals; thereby, spurring sybaritic inebriating life reality for the consumer. Therefore, identified consumer persona messages [focus of attention] appeal to recognized psychographics.

It’s all about the details.  The magnet of categorizing consumer psychographics permits brands to market focused at the various demographic community segments through recognized personas.  Website content then behaves as context for the process.  Apprehension by consumers to individualize for want of while connecting to a brand is how a brand’s offer connects with identified consumer demographic and psychographic personae, and this is how a brand learns to speak with its social community factions using common message threads.


Resource reference:

Lloyd-Jones, A, & Beynon-Davies, P. (2007). Segmenting the second hand book sectors core customer’s using demographic, psychographic and benefits. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE BOOK, 4(1). p. 133.

8 Social Media Strategies To Improve Customer Service

What is your customer service presence in social media? Yes you read it right.  Social media is more than a way for people to seek out new services or products.  People use social media to make complaints, share their experiences, make buying decisions, or stay connected.  Bygone are the days when a business only had to worry about receiving a call wanting a refund because of bad service.  Today, you face the same challenges as every business does.  Conversations went from one-on-one to one-on-many with social media.  When businesses treat customers well, customers are more likely to talk up the business; however, treat them poorly and say hello to a social media disaster.  Want customers to talk you up? Here is what you can do:

1. Define your brand’s standard for customer service, and have every employee adhere to those standards.  How do you want your phones to be answered?  How about inquires about your business? How are you going to receive new as well as existing shoppers? What is your complaint strategy?  For when it comes to social media, professionalism rules.  Every touch point a customer has with your business needs to carry equal weight.
2. Employees need to think and act as if they are owners.  You need to provide new as well as current employees with guidelines on how to handle both one-on-one interactions as well as one-on-many.  Remember, your employees are extensions of your brand.
3. Know which social media sites your customers use, and establish a presence there.  Be part of the conversation instead of being the conversation.
4. Listen to your customers, and hear what they are writing or videoing.  Social media is an open diary, and how you react further defines your brand.  Keep in mind, social media communication threads can be read by prospective customers along with everyone that follows that person who initiated the thread or video post.
5. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.  While your employees, along with you, may not necessarily agree with a customer’s social criticism, your customer’s perspective is what matters.  Remember when you had that bad experience and lost your cool?  Well that is what is happening when your customers post social criticism.  Reach out, and tell them what you can do to fix the issue.
6. Respond to all social comments whether it is a question, complaint, or complement. Thank them, and take ownership.  This messages your brand’s customer service worth.
7. Do what you state you'd do.  In other words, resolve customer issues timely; and be sure it’s what the customer agreed upon.  Nothing worse than giving away free services or products to have an issue escalate further when all the customer wanted was an apology. 
8. Value your brand and follow up.  Remind every employee that shoppers do share their experiences about your brand on social media.  Make sure that the customer is satisfied with how a situation was remedied.  If s/he is still not satisfied, after remedy, ask how s/he would like for you to bring about satisfaction.  Even though shoppers that write criticism about your brand are under no obligation to change their writing if resolved, the likelihood that they will tell their friends why they’re still unsatisfied is a given.   

The Social Media Fan Pit

For one thing, Social Media (SM) is not a popularity contest.  This means that businesses should not appraise their success solely on fan numbers.  What should your business measure then? Measure your business’s success in interactions.  You know all the likes, comments, shares, and retweets for those postings are what lead to new customers.  

A second thing is that SM is not about constantly posting promotional posts. Why?  Think about it from the consumer point of view.  If you’re a business and all you’re doing is pushing your deals, how can someone get a flavor for your real personality without reading interactions?  In fact, over posting promotions can actually harm your brand.  Now, this is not to say a business should abandon promotional postings in SM.  Instead, businesses should interact, provide leveraged insight, retweet, and encourage testimonials. 

The recipe for SM success is evenness.  SM is actually about treating others, as you would want to be treated.  Additionally, be sure to interact inside of other online social groups, and be your biggest advocate. This will teach you how to better interact along with posting better content for your own page that will build brand trust as well as generate fan interaction.

Need to improve your campaign strategies?  Contact me! I enjoy bringing online marketing goals to life.

Reference Source: 

The “Superfan” Experiment by Allison Howen, Associate Editor Website Magazine.  February 2013.