Tips in using social
media to improve your marketing communication plan
Known
for their cost-effective integrated public relations, marketing and sales
campaigns, Bacall Associates
sees great importance in social media because it serves as a great helping tool
to a lot of business owners today. It doesn’t only help you in terms of public
relations but can also boost your integrated marketing communication plan.
Remember
that a goal without a plan is just a wish. Same goes with your business, it's
crucial to have a plan first before you begin communicating with the world
about your business. This specific plan is called an integrated marketing
communication (IMC) plan. It includes different methods on how to communicate
your business along with its products and services to your target audience.
During implementation, it can also be an effective guideline for your marketing
teams to prevent any internal arguments between stakeholders and to reduce any
problems.
Similar
to your marketing strategy, this plan continues to evolve and once your
communication channels keep on growing, you just need to adjust your plan
together with it. Your IMC can utilize several different communication mediums,
including advertising, public relations, content marketing and social media.
Social media, with its purpose to improve communication, is considered vital to
any IMC plan nowadays.
These
past few decades, social media has been proven effective to the world of
marketing, making it an essential communication channel and a worthwhile source
of customer information.
Bacall Associates has seen the impact of social media on the following
areas, which proved that it could enhance your IMC plan.
Market research
You
can use social media for your market research. Qualitative and quantitative
market research are significant for an integrated marketing communications
plan. You can use these sections as a guide for your strategy and tactics as
well as identifying your target audience. It is often difficult to gather data
on these sections, that’s why the introduction of social media has been a
great help to a lot of business owners worldwide. Social media contains a
plethora of social media data that can be used to discover detailed information
about your target audience. You can also gather qualitative data through focus
group-like questions.
Public relations
Using
social media to drive public relations could also be an advantage to you. In
the past, once a news break out, public relation pros are required to send
emails, faxes, and make phone calls to update the reporters that their client
is available to make a comment. Today, social media has lessened the stress of
PR pros because it provides easy access and great convenience to them. You can
achieve relevance and speed with social media, that’s why it’s now possible to
get a comment out within minutes of the news breaking. It's important that your
audience lives on social media and that your sources are connected to them.
Advertising
You
can also advertise your brand using social media. It's evident that there's a
massive change in the world of advertising today because of social media.
Social media advertising has been around for a short period of time. Not
surprisingly, business owners put big advertising budgets on social media
because of its ability to specifically target your audience, easily measure
your social media advertising ROI, and quickly make changes to your ads. Bacall
Associates claims that it is now the right time to include social media in your
advertising strategy and budget.
Reporting on your
integrated marketing communication (IMC) plan
Using
social media analytics to report on your IMC plan is also feasible. Because of
the rise of social media analytics tools, it's important that you also include
the data available in these tools even if there are already many different ways
where you can report on your IMC plan. Social media analytics helps you gather
data from blogs and social media websites and could analyze that data to make
business decisions.