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Bacall Associates - Tips in using Social Media

Tips in using social media to improve your marketing communication plan

Known for their cost-effective integrated public relations, marketing and sales campaigns, Bacall Associates sees great importance in social media because it serves as a great helping tool to a lot of business owners today. It doesn’t only help you in terms of public relations but can also boost your integrated marketing communication plan.

Remember that a goal without a plan is just a wish. Same goes with your business, it's crucial to have a plan first before you begin communicating with the world about your business. This specific plan is called an integrated marketing communication (IMC) plan. It includes different methods on how to communicate your business along with its products and services to your target audience. During implementation, it can also be an effective guideline for your marketing teams to prevent any internal arguments between stakeholders and to reduce any problems.

Similar to your marketing strategy, this plan continues to evolve and once your communication channels keep on growing, you just need to adjust your plan together with it. Your IMC can utilize several different communication mediums, including advertising, public relations, content marketing and social media. Social media, with its purpose to improve communication, is considered vital to any IMC plan nowadays.

These past few decades, social media has been proven effective to the world of marketing, making it an essential communication channel and a worthwhile source of customer information. Bacall Associates has seen the impact of social media on the following areas, which proved that it could enhance your IMC plan.

Market research

You can use social media for your market research. Qualitative and quantitative market research are significant for an integrated marketing communications plan. You can use these sections as a guide for your strategy and tactics as well as identifying your target audience. It is often difficult to gather data on these sections, that’s why the introduction of social media has been a great help to a lot of business owners worldwide. Social media contains a plethora of social media data that can be used to discover detailed information about your target audience. You can also gather qualitative data through focus group-like questions.

Public relations

Using social media to drive public relations could also be an advantage to you. In the past, once a news break out, public relation pros are required to send emails, faxes, and make phone calls to update the reporters that their client is available to make a comment. Today, social media has lessened the stress of PR pros because it provides easy access and great convenience to them. You can achieve relevance and speed with social media, that’s why it’s now possible to get a comment out within minutes of the news breaking. It's important that your audience lives on social media and that your sources are connected to them.

Advertising

You can also advertise your brand using social media. It's evident that there's a massive change in the world of advertising today because of social media. Social media advertising has been around for a short period of time. Not surprisingly, business owners put big advertising budgets on social media because of its ability to specifically target your audience, easily measure your social media advertising ROI, and quickly make changes to your ads. Bacall Associates claims that it is now the right time to include social media in your advertising strategy and budget.

Reporting on your integrated marketing communication (IMC) plan

Using social media analytics to report on your IMC plan is also feasible. Because of the rise of social media analytics tools, it's important that you also include the data available in these tools even if there are already many different ways where you can report on your IMC plan. Social media analytics helps you gather data from blogs and social media websites and could analyze that data to make business decisions.