Social marketing or SNS marketing is a channel used by businesses of all sizes, startups, and affiliated marketers. Depending on who and how, the usage of social media will drastically change. Today’s article will discuss how a startup can efficiently utilize SNS marketing to promote its business.
1. Customer development
Steven Gary Blank criticizes the methodology “build it and they will come” and argues, like product development, customers should be developed. Interviewing, observing, and searching for customers is a necessary step in developing customers. A startup can determine whether there is a need for a service or a product through SNS marketing by observing the responses of potential customers by creating a Facebook post, tweet, or an Instagram post. In a different setting, publishers publish books for bloggers because they can preview responses of the readers based on whether daily contents the blog are popular and responsive to the readers.
2. Hypothesis verification
Startup, like adventuring into an uncharted ocean, requires accomplishing the impossible. Therefore, it is essential for startups to hypothesize, test and act based on the tested results. An inexpensive and quick way to test the hypothesis is through social media. If the startup hypothesizes that 23-year-old female university students living in Seoul would like its service, it should immediately set the Facebook advertising to target that specific population and observe the response.
3. Obstacles of entering the market
The biggest weakness of a startup is the appearance of competition because of its size. To survive the harsh startup jungle, a startup needs a few tricks up its sleeve, one of them being SNS marketing. Inexpensive to be part of long tail marketing, SNS marketing takes a long time to obtain its fruits of labor and allows for a company with long existing SNS marketing to pull further ahead in the competition. As an example, one startup published one article a day for three years adding up to a thousand and a new competitor with its greater capital published thousand article in one day. Both startups have same number of total articles published, but the startup with three years of publishing history will have a brand while the competitor will be marked as a spam by the search engines. As a result, a three year gap will always exist between the well established startup and the recently established startup.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison.
SNS marketing is one of many tools to promote a company. If used right, it could be a medicine supplementing the company or if used wrong, it could be a knife that could kill the company. Rather than focusing on number of visitors or followers, if SNS marketing is used as an essential tool, new opportunities can be discovered through SNS marketing.
writen by jong-bum Lee / trans. by techforkorea
관련 기사
