Social media has become an integral part of our life, with an estimate of 2.3 billion active users. Rather than connecting to friends, family, news, and colleagues, people are using social media to connect to marketers, companies, and brands. Unlike the past, where marketers advertised and hoped for the best, social media gives an opportunity to engage the clients in real-time. Before investing in social media marketing, brands need to understand the social media objectives, useful sites, develop a banner ad, strategies to use, and the metrics to measure the success of the social media campaign.
Choosing the right social media channel is ideal for the success of social media marketing. The choice should be influenced by the target audience and the most likely platform they use. Instagram has a wide range of users, i.e., all classes of income earners. It is ideal for Colonized Coffee as long as the buyers are willing and able to pay. Since Facebook is a mobile app, it will be easy to offer real-time feedback to clients. Analyzing approaches used by competitors is significant before developing the content to use.
Most companies struggle to define clear objectives for their social media activities. Creating awareness for Colonized Coffee will reduce the sales process and increase market share. It is necessary to analyze the brand positioning strategies and understand the impact of social media marketing on the brand. For the brand uniqueness, create original content, personalize promotion, aim for the target audience, and profile prospectively. Uniqueness is significant in attracting the attention of the audience.
Increasing the social media community and accurately targeting a potential audience is a significant objective of social media marketing. To reduce annoyance ads in social media, marketers should target prospective customers. In the case of Colonized Coffee, selecting probable clients and popping up the ad in their profiles would be ideal rather than allowing the pop-ups in every social media user. Brand image and popularity improve as the number of followers increases.
Strengthening engagement strategies increases customer loyalty. Marketers’ primary objective is to create a pool of clients and maintain a long-lasting connection with the customers. Engaging influential social media followers will increase the Colonized Coffee awareness to many people. Brand Ambassadors with a high level of engagement is an effective social media strategy that can be used.
Metrics are put in place to learn what is successful, what needs to be amended, and how to improve it. Determine the social media goals before reacting to comments and tweets posted on the brand. Social media is used for several purposes, from broadcasting news to engaging customers in creating brand images (Soedarsono et al., 2020). Identifying what to be achieved is significant in determining if the efforts put into social media marketing are worth it. At the start of the campaign, create metrics to measure marketing goals. In the case of Colonized Coffee, tracking the number of customers increasing over a period is a vital metric to understand the impact of social media marketing.
Social media platforms have provided an advanced marketing strategy with less effort required. Social media networks have changed from being communication channels only to marketing places. With a good understanding of the targeted audience and marketing goals, social media offers a real-time platform to improve the image of a brand (Soedarsono et al., 2020). Depending on the target audience and the most likely platform they use frequently, marketers can track the improvement of a brand and offer real-time feedback to clients. Since the Colonized Coffee products are affordable to many, using social media and, more specifically, Instagram for marketing purposes will be ideal.
The Valentine’s Day Instagram marketing campaign for Colonized Coffee will include the promotion of the post that acknowledges and engages customers to buy a cup of coffee and receive another cup for free later. Coffee is a type of drink that suits casual, business, or romantic dates (Kurniawan & Rewindinar, 2021). Since Valentine’s Day is a day that celebrates couples or people that are in love with each other, having a cup of coffee together and paying less is an attractive option for many couples. Therefore, the campaign will target both male and female audiences aged from 18 to 30. The psychographic information will include marital status as mainly, the campaign targets unmarried couples or single people who frequent coffee shops, restaurants, or other food joints.
The post for the Instagram campaign of Colonized Coffee will look like this. The engagement strategies for such a post will include likes and comments, where users can tag their friends, partners, or loved ones which whom they would like to share the cup of coffee.
The progress of the campaign will be measured with metrics such as followers’ growth rate, comments per post, engagement per follower, and reach. Followers’ growth rate is one of the least significant ones because seeing the promo post does not have a goal of encouraging users to subscribe to the account (Robertson, 2018). However, growth in followers can be one of the consequences of a successful campaign. Secondly, comments per post also can act as indicators of people’s reactions. Although there is not much to comments, some users might use the comment section as a way to express their reaction or as a way to invite somebody for a cup of coffee by tagging them. Engagement per follower is an important metric as many posts on Instagram remain unseen due to the constant development and changes in the platform’s algorithms (Robertson, 2018). For businesses who want to promote their product, this metric is essential as it represents the number of followers who have seen the post. Finally, there is a reach metric that represents the number of people who had seen the post in general. This is also important as it may be a representation of how well the post was incorporated into the algorithm so that the post got recommended to users who do not know or follow the account.
Using an Instagram campaign as an active marketing strategy is beneficial to businesses such as Colonized Coffee. The coffee industry is a challenging market because of the stiff competition and wide variety of small and large companies that basically offer the same product. Therefore, applying active marketing and creative social media campaigns is an effective way to gain a competitive advantage (Dharmayanti & Darma, 2020). The difference between active and passive marketing is that inactive marketing campaigns are mainly in the time span that they are aimed at. Active marketing implies a short-term campaign, such as a special Valentine’s Day offer, while passive campaigns are aimed at long-term advertisements. There are instances where passive marketing strategy would work for the Colonized Coffee company as well. For example, placing a native advertisement that would attract customers that may share businesses’ values or interests of the company’s audience.
References
Dharmayanti, P. D., & Darma, G. S. (2020). The use of Instagram in coffee shop. International Research Journal of Management, IT and Social Sciences, 7(4), 48-56.
Kurniawan, M. S., & Rewindinar, R. (2021). Point Coffee’s Digital Communication Strategies through Post Feeds Instagram. International Journal of Social Science and Business, 5(4).
Robertson, M. (2018). Instagram Marketing: How to Grow Your Instagram Page And Gain Millions of Followers Quickly With Step-by-Step Social Media Marketing Strategies.
Soedarsono, D. K., Mohamad, B., Adamu, A. A., & Pradita, K. A. (2020). Managing Digital Marketing Communication of Coffee Shop Using Instagram. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, 14(5).