When brands consider how to best utilize their marketing budget, many tend to overestimate the influence of social media. While social media can have a sizable benefit towards brand awareness, if marketing efforts cover too wide of an area, money is spent reaching people who were never likely to use the product or service.
Instead of focusing on traditional marketing through social media channels, many brands benefit from a more technically-minded approach. Although these technical marketing strategies are less visible than Facebook posts and re-Tweets, they’re often more effective at developing a sustainable connection with an interested audience.
What Is Traditional Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing uses various strategies to increase traffic for a company across their social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. As with all marketing, the intention is to build brand awareness and ultimately drive sales.
Traditional social media marketing is heavily focused on traffic and engagement. For example, if a post gets a lot of “likes,” it’s considered successful. However, this approach focuses on drawing an audience to the brand’s social media channel.
An alternative approach involves using marketing driven by data, SEO, and features. These technical marketing efforts focus on identifying key customer bases and reaching them where they’re already located.
Technical Marketing
Technical marketing refers to marketing towards customers already familiar with the product or service. It focuses on specifications and key features instead of less concrete benefits, as customers can easily research the benefits on their own. By the time they’re shopping for brands, this type of customer already knows why they want the product, and they’re looking for specific features that meet their needs.
Connecting with industry experts can help spread the word about the technical aspects of a product. One effective technique is blogger outreach. When someone influential in an industry praises a product’s features, it’s often considered more authentic than a social media post directly from the brand.
SEO Software
SEO software continues to evolve and grow easier for a non-technical person to use, thus lowering the barrier of entry for smaller businesses. Most major SEO platforms allow the user to implement various optimization strategies, including identifying and organizing keywords, link building, and content optimization.
However, even as these platforms grow easier to use, stats show that businesses that partner with SEO professionals tend to outgrow those who go it alone. An SEO agency can create content such as guest blogs, long-form videos, and much more. By integrating SEO strategies with marketing, brands can build a foundation where they continually reach interested, informed potential customers.
With so much information available to the average consumer, it’s easy for them to lose interest in a brand. In addition to creating new content, companies must also ensure their servers stay online as much as possible.
Web Scraping Tools
Data scraping is an automated data gathering technique. A program called a scraper can be built in languages like Java to harvest information from Java libraries and other sources. It then organizes the data in a variety of ways for analysis. Gathering data allows marketing efforts to be continually refined, with successful ideas expanded and unsuccessful ones discarded.
Traditional social media platforms provide fairly robust details about post interactions, but web scraping tools are far more extensive. Data scraping provides information on market trends, customer behavior across different demographics, and competitor activities.
Final Thoughts
Traditional social media marketing is an effective tool for increasing brand awareness, but it does have limitations. On the other hand, technical marketing allows marketers to search the web for their ideal audience and then develop marketing to connect with them. As more companies adopt these strategies, the future of marketing remains in a period of both growth and change.
