Social media marketing complements your website and overall marketing strategy. In concert with other channels, it can be used to amplify a company’s message, augment targeted advertisements, and reach groups that might otherwise never encounter your brand on their own.
In fact, most customers encounter multiple touchpoints before committing to a purchase. The average is said to be eight. If such is the case, that means one person encounters your brand multiple times before they buy. But it does not mean you need eight channels, although it does help. it simply means that they will come back to reexamine information or seek new resources.
On it’s own, however, social media is where people meet your culture and interact with your brand. Quite often, customers will follow your channels up to and during the time they engage with your brand, and share posts relevant to their experience, which may be the extent of their interests.
A 2019 GoodFirms survey found that 85% of social media users unfollow brands when keeping that relationship no longer suits their interests. That could be the brand of the car they just sold, the shoes they no longer wear, or the guy that just finished working on their house. Also unfortunate is that some brands only see the shrinking number of followers, not realizing the effort made to keep an existing customer is less than getting a new customer.
Customer retention should be the focus of social media management and keeping their interest should be what it’s all about. In my work, I identify audiences and speak to those interests. Often, someone looking at matters of style have an ongoing interest in style. Ads I created for the beauty brand, Younique visually spoke to style while the messaging spoke to value.
Social media posts I created for EmeraldPro Painting followed a similar pattern. The design industry in general, while filled with diverse groups with contrasting thoughts, follows Pantone’s Color Trend Report. Given there were overlapping categories with those I marketed to at Younique, repurposing another industry’s strategy worked well to keep the primary demographic’s interest. To do this, I downloaded the catalogs from EmeraldPro’s three primary paint suppliers and Pantone, and create a macro to make close color approximations between the two for Summer, Fall, and Winter.
Another way to keep a customer’s interest on social media is through brand stories. It is best to do this through simple education and industry humor, and never by expressed opinion. In the examples below are images that came with stories. First is the CMYK color wheel that linked back to a blog posting on the company’s web page. Second is a color tile, like those I would make to accompany finished pictures of work to show the exact color used in a social media post. Third is a comparison of Sherwinn-Williams’ 2020 forecast of popular colors against the best selling colors reported at the end of that year.
Chris Snoke 
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