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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
Summary
We give you lesser-known social media marketing strategies used by successful multinational corporations (MNCs). It highlights the importance of creating personalized experiences for customers, developing an efficient content marketing strategy, building a community, diversifying content, utilizing brand advocates, choosing relevant social media channels, establishing a social media budget, and running cross-channel campaigns. These strategies are aimed at enhancing brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately, business growth through social media.
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Social media platforms often aid in marketing and also provide businesses with additional capabilities and benefits, but only if integrated with the business and managed carefully.
In fact, social media networks are becoming key channels for global communication and collaboration, such that global management is deemed as a necessity in order to obtain the optimal usage of social media to potentially result in a competitive edge and create value.
The value that can be realized from investment in social media, especially in a multinational corporation, include:
Improved company reputation and image
Brand awareness from global audience
Improved legitimacy as a company to do business with
Legitimacy as a company to work for
Better communication, both within and to external parties such as customers or suppliers
Want to create a winning social media strategy for your business? While social media has the potential to provide multinational corporations with the excellent benefits listed above, like all technology investments, there is a risk involved and if something goes wrong the market reach social media provides isn’t always a good thing.
In fact, social media could pose a significant risk to multinational corporations that do not manage it well on a global scale. This is especially the case of negative commentary from stakeholders online, that can be easily and quickly spread through the social media network.
This is often referred to as “crisis communications”. Ian Pope from MAGNUS Investor Relations + Corporate Communication supports this view and stresses the importance of efficient global management in controlling the risks involved through his interview with Corporate Risk & Insurance, with his statement that “crisis communications have changed with the advent of social media in one main area and that is speed. Speed is the overarching thing that’s changed”.
These are the ways in which social media now affects global management:
Changing the way, the organization reacts to risk, where traditionally the “Golden hour” to respond to any crisis to is now 15 minutes
The organization is open to negative, neutral, or positive commentary from a larger range of stakeholders, who all have the license to do so at the organization’s expense.
There are more channels to communicate through and deal with crisis, however this is a double-edged sword seeing as there are more channels by which crisis can originate from
The business continuity plans will need to be adapted with top priorities being placed to engage with stakeholders very quickly, not just resolving other operations.
Advantages of Social Media for MNCs
It’s easy to see that social media marketing is a key element for success in marketing and many marketers realize the potential for business growth using the platform. However, some of these professionals are unsure of which tactics to apply and if they are effective.
There are numerous social media content ideas available over the internet for a digital marketer. The social media ideas, mean the way MNCs can use various social media platforms and various strategies to create a strong, unique and engaging content. The advantages for MNCs are numerous and if used correctly, these advantages are bound to be realized.
They are:
Increased Brand Awareness
More Inbound Traffic
Improved Search Engine Rankings
Higher Conversion Rates
Better Customer Satisfaction
Improved Brand Loyalty
More Brand Authority
Cost-Effective
Gain Marketplace Insights
Thought Leadership
Social Media Strategies
1. Create a personalized experience for your customers
Creating a personalized experience for your customers is always a great social media idea, while considering the importance of their interaction with the brand.
Chatbots are not only a great way to automate certain everyday tasks. Social media engagement ideas for day to day interaction with the customers include use of chatbots. MNCs achieve this by creating ads which redirects the audience to a messenger window which is linked to a chatbot. Linking ads to your chatbot helps the companies to:
Break the traditional views customers have of the companies only trying to sell to them
Makes customer’s experience more personal
Boost sales
Create a loyal fan base
Among the most successful content marketing strategy, the MNC can use one of the following ideas to implement. The below mentioned ideas can be used as a guidance for designing of the content.
Social media campaign ideas
Contest ideas
Social media promotion ideas
Engagement ideas
2. Create an efficient content marketing strategy
Quality is key and content is no exception. Among the different social media ideas, content marketing has been a prominent form of marketing for a long time and this is not set to change anytime soon.
Linking quality content with the right posting schedule and the correct frequency of posts leads to attraction of larger audience base.
It is one of the most creative social media ideas used by MNCs, which processes and implements a content marketing strategy so as to engage and retain customer and also compete with the competition.
High-quality SEO content coupled with all the above helps bring in the right customers at the right time for the multinationals. Aside from its ability to attract an organic audience, a good content marketing strategy can be implemented for free.
3. Create a community for your audience
We agree “followers” and the many other metrics are important, they are not the only ones responsible for social media success. The audience must not think of you as a robot. MNCs integrate personality in their posts through humor and emotions, so that their audience can relate to the brand.
Social media is all about being social, and the customers expect unique posts and comments to their interactions, else they will lose interest. MNCs make their communications interactive by:
Asking the audience questions
Gathering their opinions on certain matters
Sharing newsworthy information rather than just information about products or services
Liking and sharing some of their posts rather than just the other way around.
Asking them to interact directly with your posts through “likes” and “shares”.
4. Jazz up your profiles with a diverse content strategy
The companies usually jazz up the content by using different media posts on a regular basis. It is well known that people respond to good imagery, fun videos, and some interesting podcasts once and awhile.
Among the social media ideas, diversifying the content on the landing page across platforms results in better engagement for the companies. This adds to the overall personality of the brand.
5. Use brand advocates
The MNCs have brand advocates who are vocal about the brands. The brand advocated need not be only celebrities and they are ambassadors as they are paid for promoting. Advocates are the people from various walks of life who are avid users of the products and can provide feedback as well have following towards their views. At times, even the own employees can be good brand advocates for the company.
6. Create profiles on the relevant channels
The companies are present on all the relevant social media channels. This ensures they are able to reach as many people as possible. If you analyze properly, it can be seen that, the companies are not present on all available social media networks, but on the relevant ones. The relevance of social media networks can be established by the target audience chosen by the company. For example, you won’t necessarily need a LinkedIn profile if you are launching a clothing brand; the same as you won’t need to be on Pinterest to promote your surveillance services.
7. Establish a social media budget
MNCs always have a social media budget, which ensures the efforts taken by the digital marketers are channelized. Social media platforms are one of, if not the most important, forms of marketing. Allocating the right budget to your social media endeavors is crucial for the overall success. Not only this, leveraging that budget with the right strategy is the most cost-effective way for companies to reach the chosen target audience.
8. Run cross-channel campaigns
To further engage customers, the multinationals run cross-channel campaigns across all their social media channels. Keep in mind that these campaigns are run by virtually every company today, so creative social media ideas are required to stand out from the crowd. An efficient cross-channel social media campaign will:
Tell an engaging story
Link back to a specific landing page that gives the audience more information about the campaign
A unique and memorable name coupled with relevant hashtags
Conclusion
It’s clear that social media marketing has its advantages, and many MNCs have utilized different social media ideas to stay relevant and engage and attract audience over their social media profiles. This provides further impetus for all the businesses to become active on the social media platforms, so they can remain consistent with their audience. There is no reason why not to adopt and implement social media into the marketing strategy for any company. Its cost effective, easy to manage, creates a brand following, and also easy to control and modify.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
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