THE PROBLEM OF BUSINESS VALUE
Businesses are products. They should be perceived as products by their founders. ...
Traditional advertising channels are highly overrun by the digital era and online communication channels. The types of tools available in the age of Internet can enable competitors to create campaigns and launch attacks that are unheard off in conventional mass-media.
So as to have a better understanding of how different communication channels work, we’ve scoured the internet and concocted a nice little list that’ll help you get a grip on how your favorite platforms do business.
1. Social networks
THE social media tool of today’s society. With billions of users worldwide, it’s the most used online communication channel. Facebook provides its users with almost every service imaginable. If you’re a business and want to reach fans with the most diverse demographics, then you are in the right place. So who uses it better? A good example would be Air France and their retargeting campaign on users who have already checked out a flight but haven’t actually booked it. According to Facebook’s success stories, ‘the company used dynamic ads for travel to retarget this audience and further segment the audience into people who had visited within 0-2 days and 3-30 days.’ This resulted in 2 million people reached globally and 12x increase in conversion rate, amongst others.
LinkedIn is the ‘number one platform for B2B lead generation, rated by marketers’ – according to the platform’s own blog. As the world’s largest professional network, it allows companies to engage with a wide community of working professionals in order to reach their business goals – something not possible on other social media platforms. LinkedIn’s business-oriented profile is highly attractive to businesses. For instance, HubSpot – a marketing software provider – had the most successful campaign on LinkedIn, in the detriment of other social media platforms, with a 60% CTR rate, by using brief and concrete Text Ads.
Runner-up only to Facebook, Twitter is the 2nd most popular social media platform of our times. The platform is all about hashtags, so if you can come up with a memorable one and get it trending, your campaign will be a huge success. Lay’s knew how to take advantage of the platform’s cool environment with their #DoUsAFlavor campaign. All bets were placed on the consumers’ love for chips and a competition was launched for choosing the best ideas for new flavors.
2. Media sharing networks
Gathering 1 billion monthly active users, as of this year, IG is also the go-to place for fashion brands. For what is more, with the newest shoppable stories the app introduced, the active user is one tap away from buying everything they need. Clothing brands have decided to take this at heart and implement amazing campaigns to exponentially increase their sales Let’s take a look at Madewell: apparel brand with a relaxed style, has taken over Instagram by encouraging their customers to post stories, photos and videos using #everydaymadewell, with the promise of a much-coveted repost.
With around 100 million active users, Pinterest built its brand around major events happening in people’s lives: marriage, starting a family, buying a house, planning a vacation, etc. Using the obsession of pinning your life away, Honda came up with one of the most effective marketing campaigns on the platform. It was launched at the same time as their CR-V. They’ve challenged the 5 most active pinners to ‘get out and live life’, the way they are pinning it. The success was huge, the #Pintermission went viral and the results were above expectations: over 4.5 million interactions in a month.
3. Discussion forums
Quora
The place where you can ask away your questions and received quality answers very quickly. Users can follow topic discussions or other users, downvote and upvote questions, answers, reactions or comments, and the backend algorithm will display only the most qualitative ones. At the moment, the platform allows only text-based ads, having had a beta version of image & video-based ones – but without an official release just yet.
4. Blogging and publishing networks
Medium
Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter.’, simply put in their own words. The publishing platform offers membership status to its users and allows them to dive into a variety of topics, written both by professionals and amateurs. Nonetheless, they’ve given up on ad campaigns back in 2017, according to an official blog by their CEO, Ev Williams – condemning this broken system of ad-driven media and aspiring to do more.
The online world gives businesses using these platforms the power to reach targeted audiences, according to their selling goals. All of them, and many others are yours for the taking; the catch is to know exactly how and when to use each of them in order to have an effective campaign.
Sources of inspiration:
https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/social-media-channels-business-223554094.html
https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/which-social-media-platforms-best-for-business
For more articles like this, you might want to subscribe to our Newsletter.