Name one place where you can reach and develop personal interaction with the most people worldwide at the same time? Social media world.

Over 3 billion internet users, regardless of their age, gender, and background, actively seek out new information on social media platforms. In other words, they are keeping their eyes and ears open and ready to be influenced. Especially for consumer products brands, in order to capture and expand their market share and profitability, social media is the next battleground they have to conquer. And to successfully manage social media marketing efforts, a brand must establish a distinctive brand image, ensure the quality of all the contents it generates online, and leverage the back-end data to measure success and analyze its audiences.

It is an era in which people are offered resources upon resources of information and products. Having compared and weighed various options, customer bars are elevated higher than before. And it is way harder for them to be convinced by a brand, let alone stay loyal.

Therefore, to keep current market share and acquire more, a brand should switch its mindset from being fully product-centric to one that incorporates customer focus. With the combined nature of social networks and mass media, social media has become a unique marketing channel – less formal, yet more personalized. When it comes to social media marketing, the brand has to be patient and tactical, showing the world who it is, what it provides, and gradually develop close connections with customers.

Traditional marketing strategy is focused on the products and services, expecting customer to come to the brand once they noticed how good the products and services are. There is no doubt that the quality of products and services is an extremely important factor in purchasing behavior. However, in a highly competitive market like today, it is far from enough - customers can easily find substitutes in almost all categories.

Another shortage of traditional marketing is instant feedback. Due to the lack of data tracking, it is not easy to measure the effectiveness of traditional marketing efforts, which will cause a waste of marketing budget on less-profitable channels. What is more, traditional marketing methods are very restricted on collecting customers’ instant feedback and analyzing customers’ preference. Through phone/online survey or paper comment cards after a long time of the purchasing, brands can only hear from a small amount of people who might share some similar characteristics or backgrounds which will lead to a biased outcome.

That is why social media has become a booming marketing trend. It allows all brands to approach their customers in a more friendly, casual style. The distance between brands and customers are significantly shortened, which creates a win-win situation where customers proactively develop interests in brands, and brands get to learn more about their customers. There are three key points to be highlighted when executing social media marketing strategy:

• A distinctive brand image has to be built and spread. It is very important to have a strong, unique, and consistent brand personality, which reflects the brand’s identity, positioning, and even culture. Brand image plays a crucial role when increasing brand awareness among audience, and directly influence customer’s purchasing decision.

• Strictly control the quality of all contents generated by the brand account. This ties closely with the brand image maintenance. The “quality” consists of not only caption, hashtags, text, picture sharpness of the posts, but also the frequency of posting, response to comments, social media profile, likes and re-posts, and all other contents created by the brand account. Every detail matters.

• Make the most out of the data provided by the platforms. To measure success of marketing efforts, measurements should be set up at the strategy planning stage. The brand should take fully advantages of the back-end data and design the metrics based on marketing goals. On the other hand, social media data allows brands to observe the whole consumption journey from brand recognition to final purchase (through the post), so that they can analyze the performance of each marketing step and alter strategy accordingly. Last but not least, the demographic data on social media platforms can be studied on different levels to understand current customers’ preference, and even explore potential customers through better customer segmentation and targeting.

As social media marketing grows into an unstoppable marketing trend, brands need to build their unique brand image, continue to deliver high quality content, and learn to develop data analytics to exploit deeper business insights. CGN is also pushing the envelope to transform consumer product business, from offline to online through social media marketing and other digital strategies. Besides generating revenue and gaining profits, long-term business development is our ultimate goal.