From the days of Orkut to Facebook to thousands of more social media channels today, the world of social media is ever expanding. People across the world enjoy these platforms and use them as a means to connect to the rest of the world. About 2.34 billion people engage in social media worldwide. This number will face a steady increase in the years to come. This increasing interest, in fact, establishes a clear potential for brands to market to a global audience. Social media can thus be effectively used for global marketing of brands.
The success of marketing comes from becoming visible to your audience that you aim to approach. And in the age of smartphones, social media is the closest platform to become visible as a brand to your customers and relate to them. Here are 6 simple ways to use social media to establish a brand connection with your audience at a global level.
Table of Contents
1. Use Social Media to understand your audience
Understanding the social media platforms your audience use will help pick the optimized channels to extend your global marketing efforts into.
While almost everyone uses Facebook, your channel of importance might be more media oriented such as Instagram or Snapchat, or towards a more professional platform such as LinkedIn, etc. Some digging into demographics of social networks, improve SEO score will give an idea of whether the segment is worth the investment.
Popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram offer demographic data and their enhancing users will be a great place to establish your marketing efforts to reach the audience across the globe. Picking up regional topics of common interest among your audience can help streamline the marketing to reach them well.
This way you can tweak your marketing material to be more suitable for these audience based on their choices and interests. You can also observe audience interest through social media channels that will help you find the right hashtags in the perfect party dresses for girls, emoticons, etc. to get noticed.
2. Blog your way into their hearts
Content is king. The use of social media for marketing is all about reaching your customers right in their comfort zone. It is about engaging them with your brand constantly and to get noticed by more people. Research about your customer base can be very well used to create amazing targeted content for the audience.
Creating content for an international audience can be very tricky because of the diverse interests, lifestyles, cultures, and attitudes. But strong research of social media background can help arrive at common aspects of interest that can be the topic for your blogs. You can make use of bloggers outreach to create content that markets your brand.
Apart from an in-house blogging team, you can use popular bloggers to market for your brand. This will get noticed by their fan base as well.
The content should not only reflect global interest but also have some local or region-specific discussion to make it more relatable to people. Twitter analytics can be a great way of knowing the trending topics of different regions. Your content should also embrace cultural differences while delivering the message. This will ensure the brand feels more relatable to the audience.
3. Keep a clear brand message
Social media is a great place to create the perfect brand image and establish what your brand stands for. A clarified brand message will help you capture a refined set of the audience from different parts of the world.
The posts shared should always be consistent with the message the brand stands for and this will help establish a good connection with the users. Digital media can be used as the voice of your brand. But keeping your brand values consistent and clear is important to create a fan base.
Through simple and concise messages and posts, one can capture global interest in the brand. Keeping a consistent tone helps the audience identify the brand and correlate them with the values easily. This will also help them understand the distinction of the brand from the rest. Social media can help you create a unique profile for your brand that leaves a lasting impression rather than just another content that your audience view while scrolling through.
4. Go multilingual and multicultural
Diversity is the one message that in fact unites the world into a beautiful platform. Branding efforts through social media can be successful if the content is available in local languages. This is because social media is a more personalized space of marketing as opposed to mainstream advertising channels.
Hence making the audience feel linked or relatable to the brand is important to achieve a good outreach. A very important point to keep in mind while using social media is to ensure your brand message does not get lost in translation. There are various local social media sites that help to communicate in local languages easier and these platforms have gained popularity in the past few years.
The reason behind the same is that the audience feels easy to communicate in native languages. Although English is widely spoken across the world, content in local languages establishes a homely hint to your brand value. Multicultural branding that takes into account different social norms, customs and rules can make your branding efforts fruitful.
The content needs to be sensitive towards these aspects and this will help you reach targeted groups of people. The use of social media channels especially in local languages makes customers feel like you are one of them. This will increase brand acceptance in more places across the world.
5. Understand and Adapt
Social media is the perfect place to understand the shift in trends. In fact, it has forced companies to adapt to the changes in global markets. so as to cater to their target audience better. Some countries might show a decreasing interest in a product while some might show up as a potential market.
Social media channels help observe these changes and can assist with marketing. It can help understand if your product has a striking differentiation from any other local products that are popular in the regions. And only through such differentiation can a global product achieve a healthy outreach at a local level.
Social media enables understanding your customer's values, interests, needs and alternatives available to them which helps you place a strong and informed marketing message. And by adapting to the changes it is possible for global big names to establish a local connection and get recognized as a home brand.
6. Engage with your audience
Social media helps with global outreach. The key is to maintain a strong and loyal customer base to stay connected and engage with them to understand the value they have for your brand.
A successful customer reputation is necessary to keep your brand value high and that can only occur if you are available in a platform they often use. Your business feels approachable and comfortable in a social media channel which increases your credibility.
A social media post should be a beginning to interact with your audience. These posts can be your place to receive feedback, suggestions, etc, from your customers. Understand which type of content you share interests and engages them with your brand and plan your marketing efforts based on the same.
Social media users often look for small and simple messages that leave the impression of the brand. Creating such marketing campaigns can make your brand approachable to the audience. Social media if harnessed well can enable businesses to establish successful global marketing even with minimal efforts.
Source:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/global-marketing-and-international-business
https://study.com/academy/lesson/using-social-media-for-global-marketing.html
https://oursocialtimes.com/using-social-media-for-international-marketing/
https://www.brightlines.co.uk/things-to-know-about-international-social-media-marketing/
https://globalmarketingprofessor.com/how-to-market-to-a-international-consumer-through-social-media/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/global-social-media-strategy/
