Since ages the marketing has always been considered a spammy art that is used to convince your audience to buy a product or avail a service. Today it's very hard for a person to believe on any plans or clauses being displayed in the marketing campaign for any organization.
Every business person loves their business, but they completely dread marketing. They are aware of the dirty tricks and traps that are used by most of the marketers all around the world. But somewhere inside their brain, they even know that marketing is a must for their sales.
Fortunately, our people are in the age of authentic marketing, where most of the marketers are using genuine ways and avoiding the spammy tricks to market their products and services. Internet Marketing provides a great opportunity for an organization to humanize themselves and connect in a better way with their audiences.
Today the most important job for any marketer is to gain the reputation of a genuine and honest market and business person. In this era, it is considered smart and wise, to be honest with your marketing strategies and efforts. The audience is now clever and it is just a matter of seconds today to identify a genuine or a fake marketing plan.
It takes quite smart and honest efforts to go viral on the social media stage. One single mistake and you will find nowhere on this platform. It takes continuous practice and sets of a planned strategy to witness a nice and respectable position in the search engines.
Here are Three Questions that Every Businessperson Must ask Them to Know Whether They are Authentic or Not.
Business is a passion and a risk involving challenging profession. Over the ages, people tried to become a self-established businessman in the business world. Many of them are succeeded and many stuck. Why does it happen? It is obvious that you should understand your business objectives explicit before you are starting up. Your investment, involvement, finance, operation, team, infrastructure, etc. All should be on the counter.
Successful businessman e.g. Mark Suster once said, "Individuals Don't Build Great Companies, Teams Do." So first, you need a team of the right people at the very beginning. Think about a soccer team that won the FIFA World Cup. You need just the group of attentive people who are ready to dream with you. They should understand, your passion then only you can make your dream business comes true.
Henry Ford, who was an Automobile Engineer in his early career established the Ford Motor Company back in 1903. It took five years for his small company to build the first affordable motor car called the Model T. Model T was the first four wheeler automobile car that the Middle-Class American people could afford. It was the very beginning of his business journey.
Ford, which eventually becomes one of the largest automobile manufacturing company in the world. Here is a lesson we must learn from him. If you are 100% ready with your product then only you should launch it in the market. Building good reputation about your product or service is important.
It was the dream part of your business. Now you must think about the resources. You want to start up a business is fine, but whether it is an amateur dream or a real hope in that business completely depending on the resources. Resources for a small business and a large scale business is very different. In a small business, the resource can be a small shop or office with 8- 10 people working in a small space. Investment for such business is not very huge and operation is also accountable on a daily basis by a single person.
Now if we discuss the large scale business, then the story is entirely different. When you involve a large scale of people in a new business, you must share your dreams with your team.
Communication plays a crucial role in the business growth. Large investment should always focus on good communication from top to below order between the employer and the employees.
It takes quite smart and honest efforts to go viral on the social media stage. One single mistake and you will find nowhere on this platform. It takes continuous practice and sets of a planned strategy to witness a nice and respectable position in the search engines.
Here are Three Questions that Every Businessperson Must ask Them to Know Whether They are Authentic or Not.
1. Why Did you Want to Start Your Own Business?
Business is a passion and a risk involving challenging profession. Over the ages, people tried to become a self-established businessman in the business world. Many of them are succeeded and many stuck. Why does it happen? It is obvious that you should understand your business objectives explicit before you are starting up. Your investment, involvement, finance, operation, team, infrastructure, etc. All should be on the counter.
Successful businessman e.g. Mark Suster once said, "Individuals Don't Build Great Companies, Teams Do." So first, you need a team of the right people at the very beginning. Think about a soccer team that won the FIFA World Cup. You need just the group of attentive people who are ready to dream with you. They should understand, your passion then only you can make your dream business comes true.
Henry Ford, who was an Automobile Engineer in his early career established the Ford Motor Company back in 1903. It took five years for his small company to build the first affordable motor car called the Model T. Model T was the first four wheeler automobile car that the Middle-Class American people could afford. It was the very beginning of his business journey.
Ford, which eventually becomes one of the largest automobile manufacturing company in the world. Here is a lesson we must learn from him. If you are 100% ready with your product then only you should launch it in the market. Building good reputation about your product or service is important.
It was the dream part of your business. Now you must think about the resources. You want to start up a business is fine, but whether it is an amateur dream or a real hope in that business completely depending on the resources. Resources for a small business and a large scale business is very different. In a small business, the resource can be a small shop or office with 8- 10 people working in a small space. Investment for such business is not very huge and operation is also accountable on a daily basis by a single person.
Now if we discuss the large scale business, then the story is entirely different. When you involve a large scale of people in a new business, you must share your dreams with your team.
Communication plays a crucial role in the business growth. Large investment should always focus on good communication from top to below order between the employer and the employees.
2. Whom Do You Serve?
In a startup business, you are serving to your customer. Buyers will decide whether your product is adding any value or not. Serving your customer with satisfaction should be your primary objective. Make small achievable target in the first. Get ready your product. You need a couple of testing or quality analysis of your built. Once you get ready, then only you move forward. Take time if it's required. Do not hurry in taking the decision.
The customer is the decision maker so you must ready to demonstrate your built and make your customer understand it. You should be ready to answer all the questions your customer may ask.
3. Is Your Audience Benefiting From Your Way of Promotion?
Communication between the business and audience plays the crucial role. Once you are ready with your build you can start promoting your business to the audience. Understanding of your build to the audience will help them ready to make the purchase decision. Every flow of words and verbal communication will matter in a raising business. Your audience can ask several questions some of them you may have answered. If you get a new complicated question you must tell your audience that you will come back with an answer later rather than giving a false answer.
You should ask your team to maintain a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) documentation on a regular basis. Every day once you start serving your audience there will be learning. You should learn from all the feedbacks. Never stop learning in a business. All large business is based on everyday learning so you come to know your audience behaviours and whether they are benefiting from your way of promotion or not. It will also help you to improve your future promotions.
5 Reasons Why Brands Don't Achieve Social Media Authenticity:
(I)- No Brand Voice to Begin With
It's quite tricky to create a brand voice from a fake and the spammy campaign on social media platform. Even if you are able to create a brand voice, it's quite sure that brand voice won't last for a longer period of time.For any startup organization, it is important to learn to align the brand voice to the overall objective of the organization. The online networking, voice needs to be cohesive with the overall voice of the brand and the services both offline as well as online. The only way to get a nice brand voice is by becoming consistent. If you know that your audience and customers are liking a certain tone or context, then you have to make a complete preparation of the same and continue impressing them.
Sometimes the brand voice offline and online are different. So in order to set up a nice online brand voice, you have to risk your offline brand voice and familiarity.
(II)- Not Giving Importance to Core Brand Messaging
One of the most important thing most of the organization neglect is not emphasizing on brand messaging. It is important to continuously enlighten your audience about your products, services, offers, etc. There are certain things that you must keep on filling in the ears of your audiences such as why your brand is the best? What makes you different from others? Why have you opted for social media platforms? What do they feel about their customer service experience?When brands miss out on core brand messaging, brands slide and sip while trying every tactic to attract clients to their account. The only key that will help is to remain honest with your strategy.
(III)- Avoiding Social Media Mission Statement
What's the prime reason behind your online networking marketing? You require a north star to serve as your directing light all through the substance creation and advancement procedure to keep up bona fide online engagement. Your online networking statement of purpose ought to answer inquiries, for example, "Why is my Image Utilizing Social Networking?" and "What Does my Image Bring to the Table that is Profitable for Customers?"(IV)- Content is not Customer Targeted
Who are your prime targets? Know precisely whom you are conversing with. What is their part? What is their imperviousness to your service/product? What are their inspirations? Key buyer bits of knowledge will help you better comprehend the sort of content that will be "Sticky" and resound with customers for legitimate online engagement. The better you know your personas, the better you will have the capacity to interface with your crowds in natural ways. Understanding practices and the focused scene will help you to make content that addresses unmet needs. Personas are a critical segment of your technique and having all around created personas influences ROI.(V)- Content Lack Clarity
Several brands have to rethink about this. Why are they using social media platform? If you are here just to sell then I am sure that you are not having a nice future in the online marketing sector. Every single word that you're posting must provide a certain amount of knowledge to your audience and the clients. There must be some kind of motivation attached to your words in order to keep your audience interested in your posts. If you are really interested in getting authentic engagement, then you must start thinking what your audience from you not what you want from them?There are Some Interesting Ideas that can Help any Brand in the Social Media Authenticity:
1. Follow a unifying rule of business promotional that should deliver the same message all across the media at the same time. It includes Broadcast, Print, Flyers, Social Media, Website and all other channels of business promotion.
2. Share stories of your employees can be a good method of authenticating your brand. A company can be popular from the mouth to mouth words from its employees. Never forget that the first big mouth and the internal audience in an organization is the employee. If they talk good about your business, then it gets easy to authenticate your brand. Sometimes, you can post the stories of your employees in the Social Media handles.
3. Try to post more contents regarding your business and be very specific to the business objective. Sometimes brands make the frequent unrelated posts in the Social Media which may lose audience interest.
4. If your audience gets involved in a conversation in the social media posts that creates the authenticity. A brand should post interesting ideas over the Social Media Networks so the audience can participate in the communication process.
5. Communication is the key to success for brand authenticity. If your communication is specific to the brand, the audience can understand and relate it, then that Social Media page becomes successful.
Why Customers Love Authentic Brands
infographic courtesy of: Visioncritical.
Final Words
Before you start building an authentic image, you need to build a nice brand for yourself at the social media stage. Without a proper and strong brand platform, social media authenticity becomes quite difficult to achieve. Your Brand is your rudder. Without a nice brand, it will be just like pushing a cart without wheels. Even with the right strategies you have to struggle. As brand authenticity is important, building a nice brand is equally important.So be authentic, be honest and be genuine to your customers and you will find they are genuine with you too!
Hello Friends, I am Sumit, CEO of Socioboard Technologies and the Marketing Head of Socioboard. I'm responsible for the overall marketing strategy of SocioBoard which includes product roadmap, positioning, inbound demand generation and digital marketing. Socioboard's new approach to open source social media management is changing how Social Media Marketing companies, digital agencies, corporations, and web/broadcast media across the world think about Digital Marketing.
