SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

-you need to create slightly different content for social media platforms as some are more text-based (conversation): Twitter, some are photo and video-based(YT, Instagram), while some are bringing everything to the table like Facebook. 

Source: https://conversationprism.com/

 Know your audience

-once you know who you are marketing to it should be easier to choose the type of content and the platform you want to use to drive sales. 

GEN Z 

Gen Zedder are considered digital natives and have an indirect buying power of over 1 Trillion Dollars in the US alone. 

Marketing to Gen Zedders rules:

1.Prioritize Instagram

A preference towards visual communication is clearly shaping how brands choose to advertise their products. Companies are using Instagram to market their products and start a conversation with younger audiences. For fashion brands, Instagram is a natural pairing and some brands even rely solely on their online platform as an advertising and promotional strategy, completely ditching traditional media. 

Facts:
- Gen Zedders access Instagram an av. of 16 times a day 
- More than one in five (22%) Brits use Instagram daily
- 13% more likely to be a student 
- 48% of people say they use the Instagram app more now than a year ago 
- Buying decisions of Gen Z are influenced by Instagram (48%) and YouTube (50%)
-  Visual content is 40x more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content

 (SMW London, 2018 and YouGov Report, 2018)

Your brand message needs to relate to your customers. Answering a few questions might be very helpful in identifying relevant content and best possible strategies:

• Do people use your product or service in everyday life?
• How does your offering improve those lives? 
• How are you making the world a better place?

Using influencer marketing can be a jackpot if you know how to play the game. Distinguishing the right influencers that best match with your brand personality is essential for this strategy to work. 

2.Invest more in video

"Studies reveal Gen Z watches an average of 68 videos per day on five different platforms."

-  Video content is 8x more likely to be engaged with than photo based content  (SMW London, 2018 and YouGov Report, 2018)

In order to create a video personality for your brand, you have to know your audience: 

• What do they look like?
• How do they talk?
• What are their personal interests?
• What issues do they feel strongly about? 
• What are their biggest dislikes?

Talking to instagram influencer Lydia Rose (@fashioninflux) revealed that users indeed prefer video content over photo-based and her following skyrocketed since she started to film her short styling videos. 

3.Commit to authenticity



Bob Tomei, IRI's president of Consumer & Shopper Marketing and Core Content Services stated the main findings regarding two studies on Gen Z shopping attitudes, purchasing behaviors and emotional drivers: "Gen Z is deeply motivated by authenticity and a brand’s emotional DNA, which we define as how completely a product or brand aligns with the values shoppers attribute to it. Because Gen Z shoppers rely more on brand recognition to make purchase decisions than their millennial counterparts, it is critical that manufacturers and retailers create transparent and authentic relationships with the Gen Z population early on to build loyalty as their purchasing power grows.”

Because Gen Z consumers were raised in a reality where the amount of information regarding brand messaging and promotion is huge and literally everywhere you look, they have naturally developed a sense for uncovering scams and differentiate brands that really commit to a cause from those that only say so to increase revenue.

For younger consumers, it has become essential today that brands show transparency and authenticity before anything else.


Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323387





THE POWER OF CROWDCULTURES 

"A decade in, companies are still struggling to come up with a branding model that works in the chaotic world of social media. The big platforms—the Facebooks and YouTubes and Instagrams—seem to call the shots, while the vast majority of brands are cultural mutes, despite investing billions. Companies need to shift their focus away from the platforms themselves and toward the real locus of digital power—crowdcultures. They are creating more opportunities than ever for brands....Companies can once again win the battle for cultural relevance with cultural branding, which will allow them to tap into the power of the crowd."


Before the dawn of this digital era, brands strongly believed that creating branded content together with using new online social platforms as a method of conveying their message and creating a direct link with the customer will generate consumer engagement and of course brand recognition, but only few brands turned out to reach online success, while others remained irrelevant. Why is that? 
"To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture."

Social media dramatically altered the way society works and how people access and consume information. Over the years, digital crowds emerged into an online phenomenon, namely "crowdcultures". Subcultures based on interests, opinions and general views. 

"Historically, cultural innovation flowed from the margins of society—from fringe groups, social movements, and artistic circles that challenged mainstream norms and conventions. Companies and the mass media acted as intermediaries, diffusing these new ideas into the mass market. But social media has changed everything."

Social media brings together people that live in geographically different locations, creating communities that grow rapidly and influence the online culture.  

"With a few clicks, you can jump into the center of any subculture, and participants’ intensive interactions move seamlessly among the web, physical spaces, and traditional media. Together members are pushing forward new ideas, products, practices, and aesthetics—bypassing mass-culture gatekeepers. With the rise of crowdculture, cultural innovators and their early adopter markets have become one and the same."

Evidence suggests that branded content is not the best method to break the internet or increase following, engagement and online recognition. Instead, "YouTube’s greatest success by far is PewDiePie, a Swede who posts barely edited films with snarky voice-over commentary on the video games he plays. By January 2016 he had racked up nearly 11 billion views, and his YouTube channel had more than 41 million subscribers."

Cultural Branding 

This is a very powerful approach that can make a brand successful over-night. It involves paying attention to cultural changes and movements, both online or in real-life. Identifying cultural opportunity creates great passage for brands to reach customers and grab their attention (and money). 

Examples of successful crowdculture-targeting on social media are Dove, Axe, and Old Spice.

"Axe mines the lad crowd. In the 1990s feminist critiques of patriarchal culture were promulgated by academics in American universities. These attacks whipped up a conservative backlash mocking “politically correct” gender politics. It held that men were under siege and needed to rekindle their traditional masculinity. In the UK and then the United States, this rebellion gave rise to a tongue-in-cheek form of sexism called “lad culture.” New magazines like Maxim, FHM,and Loaded harked back to the Playboy era, featuring lewd stories with soft-porn photos. This ideology struck a chord with many young men. By the early 2000s lad culture was migrating onto the web as a vital crowdculture.

Axe (sold as Lynx in the UK and Ireland) had been marketed in Europe and Latin America since the 1980s but had become a dated, also-ran brand. That is, until the company jumped onto the lad bandwagon with “The Axe Effect,” a campaign that pushed to bombastic extremes politically incorrect sexual fantasies. It spread like wildfire on the internet and instantly established Axe as the over-the-top cheerleader for the lad crowd.

By targeting novel ideologies from crowdcultures, brands can stand out.

Dove leads the body-positive crowd. Axe’s aggressive stand set up a perfect opportunity for another brand to champion the feminist side of this “gender war.” Dove was a mundane, old-fashioned brand in a category in which marketing usually rode the coattails of the beauty trends set by fashion houses and media. By the 2000s the ideal of the woman’s body had been pushed to ridiculous extremes. Feminist critiques of the use of starved size 0 models began to circulate in traditional and social media. Instead of presenting an aspiration, beauty marketing had become inaccessible and alienating to many women.

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” tapped into this emerging crowdculture by celebrating real women’s physiques in all their normal diversity—old, young, curvy, skinny, short, tall, wrinkled, smooth. Women all over the world pitched in to produce, circulate, and cheer for images of bodies that didn’t conform to the beauty myth. Throughout the past decade, Dove has continued to target cultural flashpoints—such as the use of heavily Photoshopped images in fashion magazines—to keep the brand at the center of this gender discourse."

Source: https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media