When it comes to social media marketing and advertising, the founder of Wordstream and MobileMonkey is a great person to take advice from. Wordstream is a “Pay-per-click” services company and provider of the most popular PPC software in the world. In fact, Wordstream is the foundation of PPC strategies for more than one million professional marketers worldwide.
At the same time, Kim is also the founder of several more marketing companies such as Mobile Monkey Inc, an incredibly powerful chatbot software. Moreover, Larry Kim often lectures at MIT and Harvard, while the American businessman has won many marketing awards from professional bodies such as PPC Hero, Search Engine Land, and the US Search Awards.
Larry Kim is a well-known social media marketing and advertising guru. In this article, we take a closer look at his opinions and advice for getting ahead.
Traditional Advertising And Marketing Strategies
If you listen to Larry Kim, you will know that a product or service is only as good as the marketing and advertising around it. You can have the most amazing product but nobody will know about it without effective social media marketing and advertising.
For the most part, Kim also believes that traditional advertising and marketing strategies are designed to interrupt and this is far from valuable to customers. For example, billboards and television ads have long forced their way into the lives and lifestyles of people around the world.
Simply put, these ads rarely provide a value of any kind and offer no apparent reason for people to pay attention to them. With this in mind, traditional ads need to be clever. However, this often involves manipulating the customer.
Meanwhile, social media users in the modern day are not so easily influenced. In fact, most people are now desensitized to traditional marketing and advertisements. What’s more, most social media users appreciate transparency and authenticity over clever ad placements that you might find on radio or television.
Taking Time to Understand Social Media and Your Target Market
Social media continues to change at an exponential rate and Larry Kim is always quick to emphasize the importance of using every possible avenue to your advantage. At the same time, there is always the risk of spreading yourself too thin. Mastering one channel is always the best way to get started.
Whether you’re building a community on Facebook or developing a brand presence on Instagram, similar rules will always apply. Regardless of the platform, you’re using, quality content stands out. However, in order to produce truly memorable content. You must remember that the context in which you place this content is just as important as the content itself. With this in mind, businesses and brands need to master using hashtags and realize that interaction is much more beneficial than any amount of reach.
You should combine these two and produce quality content that people can actually find. This is the first step toward nurturing interaction. This interaction can take the form of likes, shares, and comments. Ultimately, your engagement metrics are always more important than the number of views on your content.
When you break this down further, Kim states the aim of social media should be to produce valuable content that the audience will want to consume. However, you need to put this content in the appropriate context. Once you’ve done that, you should make it available in such a way that the audience does not have to work for it. Either way, quality content that the target market can find is the end goal.
So what actually works and what does Larry Kim advise in terms of social media marketing and advertising?
Let’s take a look at some of the most important points being made by the marketing guru:
10 Important Notes on How to Master Social Media Marketing and Advertising
1. Get Your Social Media Marketing and Advertising Strategy Right from the Start
Larry is always quick to talk about the importance of strategy and planning. In other words, rather than use trial and error, it’s much better to devise a plan that is based on some sort of strategy.
Needless to say, this will save you time as well as the money it takes to start again. Kim also explains that it’s important for business owners to appreciate that getting started in business is both complicated and difficult. With this in mind, every strategy should be carefully planned. You should also be patient when it comes to taking action on whatever strategy is put in place.
2. About Using Email to Leverage Your Reach on Social Media
For many people, email marketing is dead but most experts realize the true value of an email list. According to Kim, you can turn email subscribers into messenger subscribers and this is highly beneficial for marketing. In fact, through his businesses, Larry has shown how email and chatbots can be used in tandem and how both channels work well for direct marketing.
While it’s not always a good idea to direct your target market from one platform to another, using email marketing to expand your reach on social media is often better than not using the email list at all.
3. Focusing on Clicks and Interaction for Greater Reach
When it comes to social media marketing and advertising, reach and traffic is everything.
Good content is nothing if it doesn’t generate some conversation and interaction. When you think of search engines, content is rank based on algorithms and click-through rates. For this reason, it should come as no surprise that social media reach works on a very similar basis.
This simply means that the rate of clicks and interaction will determine your reach on social media. As with Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pay attention to content and posts that receive more comments, likes, and shares.
4. The Power of Using Chatbots for Facebook Advertising
Larry Kim is the CTO of Wordstream and a known expert in chatbots in particular. With this in mind, his advice regarding chatbots and Facebook ads is especially interesting.
In the words of Kim “Facebook ads on messenger bots are far more powerful than ads anywhere else on the platform. ” Just so you know, Larry believes that these ads have a 500% higher chance of converting customers. The actual reach of Messenger ads is just as impressive.
But what does this actually mean?
It means that Facebook Messenger ads not only raise awareness but also convert at a much greater rate than any other ads on Facebook.
5. The Importance of Mastering One Social Media Channel
Every other business is scrambling to master Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter. On the contrary, Larry Kim thinks that more businesses should focus on mastering just one platform.
Now, that’s not to say you should not have any presence on these other channels. Rather, the point is to explain that establishing a brand on one channel is always easier than “spreading yourself too thin”.
When you think of it, most brands make their mark on one channel before branching out elsewhere. This definitely makes sense if you want to create a focused strategy for social media marketing and advertising.
6. Knowing Your Core Belief and Communicating Your Message
When you finally decide on the best social media channel. It’s just as important to be clear on your overall message. That is to say, you should know what you want to talk about and how you want this message to come across.
Larry Kim states the importance of knowing “What’s your point” and ensuring this point is clear enough for people to understand. What’s more, Kim explains that creating this message is simply a case of using the same principles that you might use for company branding.
For example, what is the core belief of your company brand? If you can pinpoint the answer to this question, then you will discover the most memorable way to communicate with your audience.
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7. Content Marketing and Publishing “Only the Best Content”
Everyone knows that content is king. In reality, though, there is now so much content online that search engines and hashtags are necessary to identify quality content. With this in mind, it’s essential to publish valuable content and avoid anything that seems substandard in any way.
It’s true, the current social media environment is an “attention economy” and this attention comes at a price. Even so, without the very best content, price is irrelevant and attention is next to impossible. One great post every few days is always much better than several average posts every day. Moreover, paid promotion should be reserved for content that matters.
8. Harnessing the Power of Influencer Marketing
For many years, marketers and businesses were reluctant to acknowledge the impact of influencers. However, the statistics don’t lie. Influencer marketing is now a large priority for most professional marketers. In this respect, Kim believes that every business or brand should be identifying and reaching out to the most relevant influencers as part of their marketing strategy.
That being said, it’s essential to choose the right individuals and spend time on this process rather than rushing ahead with those who might have the largest following. As a rule, interaction is a decent guide. After all, a busy comment section is often a sign of an influencer to whom people actually listen. Either way, influencer marketing is essential and this is especially true for social media.
9. Creating a Unique Presence on Social Media
Larry Kim is famous for his thoughts on “unicorns.” He uses this amusing reference as the basis for many marketing efforts. Just so you know, his point is that brands should try to be like a “unicorn in a sea of donkeys”. This essentially points out the difference between a remarkable subject and one that is mundane.
As you can imagine, this is a reference to the fact that most brands fail to stand out. Rather, they only produce content that blends in with that of their competitors. On the other hand, a unicorn can produce content that will not only attract attention but also give the consumer something interesting to think about.
At the same time, it’s not as though you need to be controversial or outrageous with this content. For example, even something as simple as an emoji can change the game. In fact, an emoji can communicate more feelings than a single word and this is often the most positive way to stand out. Needless to say, this is not a suggestion to use emojis in social media marketing and advertising. Rather, it’s a quick way to illustrate how taking a different approach is usually beneficial on social media.
10. Using Stories to Connect with Social Media Users
Larry also believes that stories are the key to connecting with a target market. For this reason, it’s important to share the personal side of the brand and communicate on social as an individual would. You can share inside stories or behind-the-scenes photos but, either way, the point is to connect with the audience in the most humane way possible.
If you want to implement this in marketing and advertising, then it’s critical to build a brand story that your audience can connect with.
Final Thoughts
While Larry Kim is certainly most famous for his conquests with Wordstream and chatbots in particular. The entire basis for his success is related to marketing and advertising. Either way, this practical advice is not only insightful but also proven in his own great success. More importantly, endless businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups have used this very advice to get ahead with their own social media marketing and advertising strategies.
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