8 Things Great Brands Do In Difficult Times on Social Media

Running a business that you have built from scratch certainly deserves major appreciation. But have you ever wondered what it takes to be a big brand in the market?

If you desire to take your business to the next level and join the market leaders one day, you need to observe and learn how these big brands maintain their success despite all the adversities.

Thanks to the widespread reach of social media, digital marketing practices have become a lot more convenient for businesses.

And now, if you want to monitor the marketing activities of the big brands in the market, keeping an eye on their social media profiles will be enough to gain some major insights into their strategies and goals.

Scrutinizing the social media activities of the big brands can help you learn the current market trends, what their target audiences are and how they plan to engage the audiences.

However, the most important thing you can learn from these big brands is how to maintain the brand image and success during a crisis.

Here are a few social media tactics that great brands use in their difficult times.

1. Developing a strategy that solves the biggest challenges

Nobody likes to face the same old challenges again and again. The big brands are no different. If a big challenge is coming their way, the marketing team addresses it first and devises a strategy that solves it once and for all. This is where social media planning takes center stage.

When things are not working for you, it is wise to identify the problems first instead of trying random things. Once you do that, forming a social media marketing strategy will be a piece of cake.

For instance, a lack of engagement on certain social media platforms is a major challenge that most brands face. Finding where the target audiences are and developing the strategies accordingly is one way to deal with the problem.

Similarly, a proper social media marketing strategy can address several other challenges.

Big brands are doing it all the time. The key is to identify the challenges that are making it difficult for you to run your business. The moment you acknowledge the challenges, you will find a number of avenues to avoid them and fix them for good.

2. Rope in influencers

Influencer marketing is certainly one of the most successful marketing strategies of today’s date. And big brands never shy away from roping in influencers to promote their services and products, especially when there’s a bit of turmoil in the market.

Even though influencer marketing is effective, it can still be combined with social media marketing to produce better results.

Using an influencer's popularity for promotion has been an age-old practice for marketers. According to a report, 71 percent of millennials in the US are more likely to purchase online products and services recommended by others.

This is why most big brands are now turning to influencers for better conversions, especially when the situation is challenging.

Interestingly, these influencers are not just conventional celebrities from entertainment and sports backgrounds.

In 2018, YouTubers, social media bloggers, and Instagrammers also joined the list of influencers.

In fact, they are more popular among social media users than conventional celebrities. This is one of the reasons why big brands often leverage their popularity to improve their brand image.

3. Targeting the audience that matters

Unlike small businesses, big brands know who their target audiences are. This is why their marketing strategies are so appropriate. Many businesses do not realize this, but identifying the target audience is a fundamental step in marketing.

Assignment help is meant for students and researchers. Targeting senior citizens is not going to provide you with any results. A well-planned audience-specific marketing campaign can turn things quickly in your favor, even if the odds are against your brand.

While launching a new product or service in the market, the big brands always do customer research to see which audience is more likely to avail of the service or product.

Once the target audience is determined, the brands start their marketing campaign on the specific social media platforms where most of the target audiences are.

As mentioned before, the choice of social media platform is crucial for social media marketing.

Many brands use this technique when their sales go down. Focusing all the social media efforts on the target audience limits the expenses.

Besides, the chances of conversion are higher when the brand focuses only on the target audience. If you are responsible for running a small business, you can use this tactic to your advantage when things seem a bit challenging.

4. Remarketing

Remarketing is getting increasingly popular with time, and this is one of the major tactics that the big brands are using today’s date, irrespective of how the market is currently functioning.

Remarketing is a technique that allows marketers to track your internet activity and serve you with ads based on your actions on the internet.

You may have seen how your social media feed gets filled with the ads of a fashion brand after you check out the brand’s website on your computer or mobile.

Remarketing on social media platforms allows the brand to engage past customers and convert an interesting prospect by repeatedly showing them something they have shown interest in.

Since big brands have a huge customer base, remarketing allows for reviving sales by addressing past customers when the new tactics are not fetching conversions.

Social media platforms like Facebook have a host of tools that can be used for remarketing. We all have seen how effective those Facebook ads have become in today’s market, haven’t we?

5. Tracking the conversions will help invest more effectively

While customer research and acknowledgment of the major challenges help brands devise an effective social media marketing strategy, monitoring the conversions can allow them to understand where they should invest for the next few months.

Tools like Google Analytics help brands get information about where the traffic is coming from. This helps the brands understand which social media marketing is working and which is not.

As mentioned before, when the efforts are limited yet focused, it can reduce expenses while improving the outcome. Since conversion tracking allows the brand to find the best-performing mediums and efforts, they can strategize their investments accordingly.

Whether a crisis or an off-season, smart investment can effectively cut expenses while boosting sales.

The big brands are already aware of the conversion tracking process. It is the small businesses that need to learn how to use the results to improve their ROI.

Whatever the results say, unless you have a solid marketing strategy for your social media efforts, fetching better results is going to be difficult under all circumstances.

6. Focus on the video content

Videos have been one of the top social media marketing tools that have grown in popularity year after year. The views of branded video content have soared by 99 percent on YouTube, while on Facebook, the growth was 258 percent between 2016 and 2017. In fact, the number of retweets of a video tweet is six times more than a photo tweet.

It is quite evident that social media is currently exploding with branded videos. And it is not that all the most-watched videos are shot with a professional camera.

Even videos shot with a regular mobile camera are now going viral. You have seen how brands start a certain trend and ask the viewers to tag the brand on their videos.

The idea of leveraging user-generated videos to promote a brand is simply brilliant. It is no surprise that big brands often encourage audiences to upload their videos with a branded hashtag.

While such campaigns are driven organically, the brands gain significant mileage on social media without spending too much on the activities.

7. Hashtag campaigns

Regarding user-generated content, hashtag campaigns have been quite effective for brands in organically promoting their products and services in the market. Everyone remembers the “Share a coke” campaign by Coca-Cola that received a great response from the market.

While the beverage company was struggling to compete against rival companies, this hashtag campaign skyrocketed its popularity to another level.

KFC’s “National Fried Chicken Day” campaign is another instance where a leading brand breaks social media with a hashtag. The beauty of hashtag campaigns is that they are organically driven, which is not only cost-effective but also improves the profit margin of the brands. Also, this is one campaign that delivers a massive amount of conversion.

As a marketer, you may like to take notes from these popular hashtag campaigns as they can be quite effective in driving your social media engagements. Besides, this strategy can be implemented during the time when a brand struggles to make sales and generate significant ROI in the market.

8. Pivoting

Pivoting is one of the toughest choices brands make to save their businesses. When all the social media efforts seem to fail, brands usually have no other option but to look for a new approach to engage the audiences and drive traffic to their sites.

Since social media trends change, pivoting often becomes essential for businesses to stay relevant in the market.

The brands that have been in the market for several decades understand this more than anyone else, as they have seen the transition of marketing means (from print to electronic to digital).

Brands that have successfully pivoted their marketing strategies have survived the transition, and those who couldn't are now a part of the history.

Social media marketing is no different. Like big brands, you must reconsider your marketing approach to achieve better results. Tracking the recent trends can help you understand what marketing activities will rule the next decade. Being prepared from the beginning offers you a massive advantage.

As you can see, there are many things to learn from the big brands. However, you must also keep an eye on the latest trends to understand what the current market requires.

Also, you cannot depend solely on your evaluation of the big brands. The big brands have a larger capital. So, there are certain social media activities that you cannot perform, but they can.

Furthermore, what worked for the big brands, may not work for your small business. While some of the observations can be really useful, you also need to consider the other possibilities.

It will be wiser if you take the lessons and see which tactic is practically viable for you and which is not before trying those social media activities with your small business.