Social Media Marketing -- ORM, Native Advertising & Influencer Marketing - Ramdas Shenoyy

Ramdas Shenoyy - “Performance Marketing”

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Introduction
Today we are going to be talking about ‘Social Media Marketing?’ By the time we complete the sessions, we will be gearing ourselves with enough capabilities to not only understand the digital marketing concepts but will know what and how we could plan for our digital marketing strategy to build our businesses, specifically the social media space.

Show Objectives
By the end of our time together you will gain enough insights on what is critical in generating business for your digital marketing efforts. 

Key Issues
When one talks about Performance marketing with respect to effective use of social media, you need to look at the gain drivers--

• Better targeting
• High relevance
• Creative communication
• Commercial aspect

What You Need to Know
Using social media platforms to reach your audience for brand building and drive your sales and business is known as Social Media marketing. It involves various aspects of listening and engaging with your audience, sharing consumable content and running social media advertisements that help you build your brand but ultimately generate more leads and business.

But with so many social media platforms how do you manage them? The answer is there are a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms.

Social media as an idea is to help build your organic reach or build your earned media. Building your organic reach is critical for any business or individual. 

As a business owner, you will hear conversations like “We are not interested in brand building, what excites us is more business leads and growth. If a brand gets built in the process, it is a bonus!!”.
Social media is an effective tool to connect with the target group where you are able to connect with the current context. Example during Covid many people lost their livelihood. Facebook in India ran an advertising campaign where they showed a Dairy shop owner who employs a lot of unemployed youth and then creates traction for walk-ins for her shop.

What You Need to Do
One will appreciate that to devise any social media marketing strategy it needs to follow the ‘GOLIBEAN’ {Goal Setting- Listening-Build-Engage-Analyze & Optimize}

• Goal Setting – One should be clear as to what you are expecting from the social media marketing initiatives. Either you could be looking at building your brand or you are looking for business leads and this is where goal setting is vital.
• Listening – It is an act of monitoring social conversations around certain topics. It helps you understand what’s in for the audience and identify trends your target audience is following. You should be able to communicate with what the audience is looking for. For any business the value proposition is either resolving a pain area or providing a pleasure moment. The aim is to strike the emotional cord and you should have your ears to the market. You’ll learn about what they’re struggling with, which can help you create content addressing those pain points.
• Build— Building your customer loyalty with social media. Customers love and interact with brands that they enjoy. It is a known fact that customers who follow your business are likely to choose you over competition.
• Engage – The crux of the strategy is to engage with your customers. This will enable the communication piece and provide something which is relevant with regards to the timelines.
• Analyze and Optimize – Once you are able to engage with the audience then what you need to do is to analyse and optimize the response so as to deliver the best results. When we say optimize let me cite it with an example. Optimization means you actually are able to lead your target customer to your shop. The creatives should be attractive enough to drive the call-to-action. A good social media marketing strategy could also assist in sending customers directly to your site and increase the inbound traffic.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Online reputation management (ORM) is when, in order to address any negative or false comments, you actively need to monitor mentions of your brand on websites and social media. 

ORM mainly works by responding to negative customer comments online and reacting to stories in the media (both social and traditional) that paint your organization in a gloomy light.

The difference from traditional PR
Online Reputation Management is also important for establishing transparency of the organization in this instant gratification ecosystem that we live in. Given the sheer number of social media sites and options available where the brand could be mentioned, online reputation management can seem daunting.

The 5 Magical principles for ORM:

1. Prompt Response 
2. Do not run away from the negativity 
3. Own your mistakes
4. Top rank in your SEO efforts
5. Automating Online Reputation Management

INFLUENCER MARKETING.
Influencer is often used terminology where you see a lot of people who claim to be influencers across different domains. Many people though will have different opinions about influencer marketing. If you have not heard about the term earlier, you will start wondering ‘who are these influencers?’.

Influencer will be the one who:

• Has the power to impact the buying decisions of the target group because of his or her thought leadership, position, or relationship with his or her audience.
• A follower community in a niche domain, with whom he or she actively engages.

WHERE CAN YOU USE INFLUENCER MARKETING?
One of the aspects of efficacious social media marketing is to have continuous engagement with your target audience. It should align with the business goals and a good influencer marketing strategy will ensure that: 

1. Get new customers on board
2. Marketing assures that you have repeat purchases and this agenda should be one of the key objective of influencer marketing
3. Building customer loyalty

Native Advertising
Native advertising which looks like a normal advertisement in terms of look and feel and does what advertorial does in the traditional media parlance. You may ask then, that if it looks like normal advertisement then the reader or the target audience is actually fooled thinking they are actually reading a neutral editorial content. 

Native advertisements camouflage smoothly into the main advertising listing and there will be some signs calling it as a sponsored feature but it is more like a Red Herring prospectus where the target audience will miss the signs.

Some of the signs which tell you that it is Native advertisements

1. Signs like sponsored feature 
2. Recommended for you
3. Small ad or X icons
4. Suggested post
5. Suggested videos
6. Newsfeed advertisement

These are some of the ways which indicate that they are native advertising. Depending on the platforms where they are showcased their definition may change.

Why you cannot ignore Native Advertising

• Reason #1: Native advertising has those catchy headlines and invariably have better click rates and has 50% more click rates than conventional display advertisements. The gossipy nature of this content makes the reader click on native advertisements.
• Reason #2: Native advertisements break the clutter in the advertising world where they dress up like content and show themselves as an advertisement in the garb of content. So while reading a native advertisement the reader reads it like the conventional content and it helps in developing a sense of opinion and intelligence which motivates the audience towards the buying decision.
• Reason #3: Native advertising helps to maintain the flow and UX of the consumer and even though the consumer would know that they are reading or watching paid content they are ok with it.

In the B2B world where you have white papers, used cases, blogs, product videos etc, native advertising plays a role of a supporting actor to substantiate the claims made in the above marketing collaterals 

The What of Native Advertising?
Essentially native advertising provides feed of content that provides benefit to the consumers. The various formats like animations, videos, podcasts and image carousels can be quite engaging. One has to also appreciate that one single individual will be present on different social media platforms and the mind share, presence and consumer behaviour will be different on different channels. While designing content of native advertising you need to ensure that you adapt the content as per the flavour of the medium.


Your digital marketing strategy is an important piece for generating leads and improve your engagement with the customer. A digital ready organization is important in today’s context. It is a dynamic landscape and you need to constantly evolve and learn to improve.
Getting more business is essential for success and performance marketing plays an important role.

Ramdas Shenoyy is a Performance Marketer, Senior Marketing and communication professional, Founder of www.Stirfrymba.com – a media portal which features business, life and young leaders across the globe, Senior thought Leader in the B2B domain for Asian Markets and CMO at Silicon IT – a SaaS based CRM solutions Company.


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