Social media, in terms of business marketing, has completely skyrocketed in the past 25 years. Starting as a place to connect with friends, social media has now become a primary tool for over 96% of all businesses to promote their brands, share expertise, build trust and personality, and establish themselves as a reliable source that directly engages with their audience. With so many different platforms, which is best for your business?

Your answer can depend on many things. What is your approach or goals as a business? Who is your audience? What is the type of content you’re willing or able to create? All these components matter to create the best possible version of your company with a transformed marketing strategy. So, which are worth considering?

Platform #1: LinkedIn

With more than 67 million companies and over 1 billion members, LinkedIn is the largest professional networking platform. LinkedIn is known for business connections, professional brand building, enterprise growth, and more. This platform works great for B2B companies specifically, meaning it is great for sales pitches, strong for sharing blog posts, and allows space for many articles and paid ads that target based on your industry and profession.

LinkedIn is more than just sales pitches; it creates a space for sharing helpful tips and humane marketing strategies through those blogs and articles, which helps build trust and credibility for users.

Your company’s first post matters. Encourage all members of your team to contribute to the company by using their personal profiles as well, building even more trust. Commenting on others’ posts makes your company more visible and builds relationships with other companies, so stay on the grid.

Although LinkedIn provides a stable platform for networking, like any other social media platform, companies need to consistently post to stay noticed. Therefore, it is not ideal for casual brands, and engagement may be slower. Post to stay popular!

Platform #2: Instagram

If your company’s specialty is brand aesthetic and building culture, and you’re strong in visual appeal, Instagram is the way to go. This site allows users to experience a brand’s personality and culture, not just its products. Instagram lets followers ask, Do I like what I see? Knowing this, creating a solid brand presence is key. Your feed should reflect your brand; it will be the first thing someone sees, a first impression of your company. Making your feed reflect your brand’s aesthetic and values makes a visual appeal to your products like no other, shaping perspective! Instagram provides opportunities for reels, stories, collabs, and brand-building, which can highlight your company to connect emotionally with customers.

This platform is a go-to for all company sizes! Don’t be afraid to share behind-the-scenes, transformations, tips, and tap into trends. Instagram lets you make time-sensitive stories and promos as well, which makes people feel more inclined to interact when given limited time.

Each post must be eye-catching, which requires constant posting and creates competitiveness, so stay on top of it.

Platform #3: TikTok

TikTok is the most rapidly expanding social media platform today, gaining 1.5 billion monthly users who are generally a younger audience. This platform is best for digital marketing, being known for its short video clips, which keep the attention of viewers, making it extremely engaging. People rely on TikTok for entertainment, discovering products, and watching new creators, so don’t make your post boring. Interesting intros and visual hooks are ideal for a viral post.

TikTok gives brands high potential to introduce their products to a new audience, and with short videos, companies seem less professional and form a relatability that’s unique to other sites. TikTok lets you socialize and comment on others’ posts, and as a brand, it makes you more visible.

Don’t be afraid to participate in popular trends! That is what keeps your business well known, but make sure it fits what your brand wants to sell. Share tutorials, fun facts, transformations, influencer reviews, and more to make sure you’re sharing the back side of your company as well.

A last tip: make use of TikTok Shop. Creators can promote their products and provide direct links for users to buy efficiently and affordably, boosting sales.

Trends are not permanent. Small videos can keep users’ attention, but it is easy to scroll past, so make sure your company stands out and stays relevant.

Find The Perfect Match

Choosing the right platform comes down to knowing your audience, your brand’s strengths, and your content capabilities. Determining between a professional, visual, or trendy look, each social media platform provides a unique approach to connect, so know your business.

Personalized marketing is all about connecting the dots – data and content – based on consumers interests and preferences. Data collection and analysis allows for strategic deployment of individualized content to target audiences. “Customers have more choice than ever before, so we have to ensure we’re meeting their needs in real time, on-demand and personally relevant ways, both online and offline,” Mark Sciortino, VP of brand marketing strategy and planning, Walgreens, relayed in 2018.

Here are three benefits to utilizing personalized marketing:

Improved Customer Experience

Knowing their sensitive information is protected makes customers more comfortable with providing personal information. In return, they should receive more personalized experiences upon subsequent visits.

Increased Brand Loyalty

When consumers provide information and data, they expect to be treated as unique individuals with specific preferences. Dedicate time and resources to implement successful personalized marketing strategies. The result will be a competitive advantage in both brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Inflated ROI

If your automation technology is on point, you can easily identify individual customer preferences. Capitalize on it with customized content across channels online and offline. This will result in more sales opportunities. Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign used common first names to attract millennials. That personalized campaign was the first time in years Coca-Cola grew their sales.

Personalized marketing campaigns require you to connect the three “C’s” of content with the three “C’s” of customization. You must know – and connect with – your audience. To know them is to love them by generating content personalized to them.

Collection

To create personalized marketing, you have to know what matters to your target. That starts with collecting data about them which is relevant to your brand. Real-time collection and analysis of data allows you to consistently evolve your marketing strategies to customers’ ever-changing behaviors. For example, if you are marketing a restaurant, your data collection would include location, demographic, and transactional data.

Creation

For your data collection to be beneficial, you have to utilize the collected information to create relevant content. Data collection allows you to create targeted and customized email marketing, social media marketing, video messages (one reason automated technology is key), and individualized product recommendations. In fact, 2015 research showed that personalized email campaigns received 29 percent higher email open rates and 41 percent higher click-through rates than ordinary emails.

Connection

Connection is built through authentic interactions. Personalized marketing allows you to connect individually and in community with your audience. You can show your human side (social media engagement or working reply-to email addresses). It also allows you to capitalize on consumers FOMO (fear of missing out) by showing how many people may be looking at the same product, how many of an item remain in stock or how long an item may remain on sale.

As with any marketing campaign, there are challenges to achieving these goals. In personalized marketing, the two main challenges to overcome are:

• Consistency. Consumers are interacting with brands across a number of channels, including email, social, mobile, etc. Each interaction with your brand must be consistent at every touch point.

• Time and Resources. To collect the right data, companies must utilize the right technology. Analysis of the data to create relevant content on a constant, evolving basis across multiple channels is key. This takes a significant number of hours and a significant chunk of manpower and monetary resources.

We would love to be a consistent resource to help you connect all the dots on your brand’s personalized marketing campaign.