SMM Strategies for Influencing Consumer Behavior in Retail

Social media is crucial for brand performance today. Many companies use it to engage with clients, enter new markets, and drive revenue.

However, new brands often struggle to stand out. One reason is a lack of understanding of consumer behaviour, which shapes business strategies. Marketers study user patterns to launch or improve products. Sometimes, brands influence buying habits with positive reinforcement.

Smart retail brands need innovative strategies to influence consumers. GrowthJockey helps brands create personalised social media marketing (SMM) strategies aligned with their goals.

This article will explore how brands use SMM to understand consumer behaviour. It will also cover targeting audiences, gathering feedback, and boosting consumer engagement.

Role of SMM Strategies

Currently, social media marketing performance drives business performance. Brands use social media platforms to conduct market research.

The objective of this research is to identify the target audience and their behaviour and buying preferences. Based on the research outcomes and consumer feedback, brands further develop their SMM strategies for user engagement and influence.

Here are the 3 major roles of social media marketing strategies to determine consumer behaviour in retail.

Targeting Audience

The target audience is a group of people to whom you want to sell your products. Brands rarely sell to everyone. Based on demographics and psychographics, companies zero in on people who would benefit from their products.

After selecting a target group, marketers form one or more mock personas to study their pain points and expectations. We will discuss how intelligent retail brands use social media to target audiences.

How to Target the Audience Using Social Media Platforms?

Brands listen to their audience through social media. They do this by tracking users' activity on various platforms and their pattern of engagement on different content types.

Here are the ways brands use social media to target audiences after identification

• Brands create content that their target audience tends to engage with. They perform A/B testing on the content type, publishing time and format using the targeted content.

• Smart retail brands tailor their content for different funnel stages to specifically target users. For example, entertaining content is suitable for brand awareness, but product information content is good for consideration.

Companies also know a lot about their audience by analysing consumer feedback.

Customer Feedback

Users post their comments on their experience. They generally use the company’s social media pages to mention them. While most of the consumer feedback is authentic, brands need to be careful about the prompted reviews.

Smart retail brands could use this feedback to improve their products or services and develop their social media strategy.

How To Utilise Consumer Feedback from Social Media Platforms?

Brands quickly encounter reviews as users tag them when commenting on their experience.

Brands can implement these steps to harness user feedback to their advantage.

• Retailers can interact and provide instant solutions to brand feedback on social media. They can also use competitive feedback from other brands to understand user’s pain points.

• Smart retail brands can create an online community. They can pilot-test their new launches or upgrades in this community, and this group of trusted users will provide constructive feedback.

• It is straightforward for the brands to conduct surveys on their channels. They are an essential medium for getting direct and quick user responses.

Acting on consumer feedback leads the brands to better engagement strategies.

Customer Engagement

90%^[1] of social media users follow at least one brand. Retailers can leverage the traffic to have personal interactions with the target audience. Consumer engagement improves a brand’s visibility, growth and buyer loyalty.

How to Improve Customer Engagement Using Social Media Platforms?

Customer engagement helps create a community of loyal users and influence their buying behaviour. Here are a few pointers that can help marketers achieve strong consumer engagement.

• Customers resonate with solid brand identities. Therefore, organisations should maintain a consistent brand tone for relevance.

• They can ask consumers to create user-generated content, which also increases their trust.

• Today, consumers look for content that adds value to their life. Brands should focus on creating a mix of content buckets that are educational, entertaining, and inspiring.

• Reply to their comments by engaging in one-on-one interactions regularly. Customers feel valued and included when brands respond to their comments.

Several brands have cracked the social media strategy and are reaping the benefits of their social media campaigns. Here are some of them:

Successful SMM Campaigns

Companies like Nike, Coca-Cola, Spotify, Starbucks, and Dove have several marketing campaigns that have compelled mass audiences. Their conversion rates and revenue have grown steeply. We will discuss some successful SMM campaigns.

Nike ‘Just Do It”

Nike's 'Just Do It' campaign focused on consumer engagement. They urged customers to share their experiences and personal stories of inspiration. Users could use the campaign hashtag when uploading their stories, videos or images.

The campaign was a success, as Nike created a large community. Their revenue became 847 million USD after growing 10% with Colin Kaepernick’s ‘Just Do It’.

‘Shot on iPhone’ by Apple

Apple launched a campaign to highlight its expertise in quality images. They based this campaign on user-generated content boosting engagement. They asked users to take pictures using their iPhones. Then, they had to upload photos with the hashtag #ShotOniPhone.

They also ensured high engagement by promising a reward. Apple featured 10 chosen winners from thousands of entries on their website billboards. They then converted it into an annual campaign to measure its success.

This campaign had 6.5 billion impressions in 2015^[2]. Twenty-five thousand people mentioned Apple, and 95% of their comments were positive.

Methods to Gauge Campaign Success

Brands need to analyse the performance of their campaigns. This helps them to audit and adjust the SMM agendas. You can use the expertise of GrowthJockey to build an effective audit mechanism for your brand.

There are some helpful tools to make the process easy for you. These tools operate by analysing some metrics. These metrics are:

• Engagement Rate: The engagement rate shows the reach of the content. This is quantified by the number of likes, comments and shares on the posts.

• Rate of Amplification: Amplification determines the number of followers who share the posts. You can measure it by the ratio of shares per post to the total number of followers.

• Social Media Awareness Rate: This shows the number of people viewing the post. It is determined by several sub-metrics, such as reach, social share of voice, impressions, and audience growth rate.

• Reach: Reach is the number of people who viewed your content. These views are available on social media's professional pages.

• Impressions: It is like a reach, but in this case, your post gets two impressions if the same user views it twice. This could be measured using several tools.

Here are some tools that can make it easy to derive these metrics and automate the process.

• Brand24

• Awario

• Canva

• Hootsuite

• Buffer

• Facebook Page Manager App

Brands are finding diverse ways to use social media to increase their business performance. Here are some trends that retailers can leverage in future.

Future Trends to Better Readability

The social media landscape is constantly changing. Hence, brands need to be on their top game to capitalise on opportunities. Some of the upcoming trends that retailers can look out for are:

• Edutainment Videos: Users are more drawn to informative content as they add value. Retailers can use this trend to give more insight into the manufacturing process. This will make the user feel more included with the brand.

• Use of AI: Brands can use AI to generate a complete marketing campaign or to derive ideas to make their services more relatable. Retail brands can use AI to modify and align their content with current trends.

• YouTube Shorts: YouTube Shorts are gaining popularity among social media users. Retail brands can use this platform to create more content and gain more viewership while it is in trend.

Related Article: The Rise of Smart Retail: Transforming the Way We Shop

Conclusion

Engaging with customers is critical to building loyalty. Social media lets brands get real-time feedback and make quick adjustments to their products or services. This interaction builds trust and a sense of community, leading to higher sales and customer loyalty.

Brands that use social media well can create personalised marketing campaigns. These campaigns connect with their target audience by understanding and responding to consumer behaviour. Listening to feedback and using innovative engagement strategies help brands stay competitive in the retail market.

Are you a business owner wanting to use social media to its full potential? GrowthJockey can help. We create personalised social media marketing (SMM) strategies that match your business goals.

Let us guide you through social media marketing and boost your brand's success. Book a call with GrowthJockey today to start building a loyal and engaged customer base.

FAQs

1. What is social media competitor analysis?

This is a process to understand your competitors' SMM strategies. You can use questions about their target audience. Moreover, you can study their strategy, its advantages and limitations, the forms of content, and whether they are successful. This study will help you understand your competitive advantage in the industry.

2. What factors are included in user demographics?

Demographic information of users includes age, marital status, gender, location, ethnicity, household income level, and educational level. Using this and some added information about your target consumer group, you can develop a mock persona. Knowing this information about your consumer base will help you create personalised strategies.

3. What is the audience growth rate?

This metric tells you the number of new followers your social media platforms gained in a particular time frame. It can also be described as the rate or speed at which the brand earned its followers.

1. 90% - Link ↑
2. 6.5 billion impressions in 2015 - Link ↑