Social media strategy key to brand awareness

Local businesses must embrace opportunities on the web and design a social media strategy if they sought to build brand awareness, Brand Wagon branding agency managing director Peter-Jan Grech told The Sunday Times.

While just under half of Malta’s population have made online purchases – 79 per cent of those are aged 25 to 34 – a considerable number of local firms were still grappling with making their first steps on the web. And it was not necessarily the old-school businesses which are hesitating.

Earlier this month, Brand Wagon (known by its own brand BRND WGN) screened three custom-created videos at the second annual Business Leaders’ Malta event to illustrate the “prime opportunity for marketers to build brand awareness”.

More than 250 chief executives were bombarded with publicly available statistics, which were jolting, nonetheless: over 41 per cent of the population is now on Facebook, Malta’s second most visited site after Google, and now officially the world’s third largest ‘country’.

That is besides the Maltese among the 90 million professionals on LinkedIn and the 175 million registered on Twitter. The latter was becoming increasingly powerful in just two years, promotions by Dell on Twitter helped generate $6.5 million in orders.

Fifteen per cent of social media users are more inclined to buy brands advertising on social networks and 25 per cent are more likely to find out more about brands advertising on social media; 55 per cent of EU internet users change their mind on what brand to buy after online research.

Brand Wagon’s own €30,000 investment for clients ranging from banks to fashion retailers had generated 315 million impressions over recent months.

With his business partner Kris Vella Petroni who returned to Malta after working for a fast evolving agency in the UK for several years, Mr Grech said Brand Wagon was increasingly working on campaigns on social and digital platforms for business to business projects or those involving consumers under 40.

Mr Grech said it was fair to say some of Malta’s brands were aware of these trends.

“Many businesses are amazed by them, however. While they want to go social, digital and global, they are not taking the steps in the right direction. It is as if there is a fear of the unknown. Some people still think Facebook is a waste of time or that it is only for young people, but the statistics clearly disprove that notion completely.”

He stressed businesses had to understand their consumers and their market better. It was imperative they identified what people were reading and where, which media they were turning to, how they were sharing information, and how they were talking about brands.

Mr Grech believed all brands had some kind of niche available to them online.

“The reality is that we have gone full circle,” he explained. “Years ago, if people in the community found a particular baker’s bread was better than others, they would tell their friends, who told their own friends. They talked about it and made it social. It’s the ‘like’ button people are clicking today.

“Social media has become the modern-day word of mouth, the piazza. Never has there been a better way to spread the word about a good brand or product.”

Social, he cautioned, applied to good products and honest reviews. If people liked a product, they were likely to say so and write reviews or tweet. They did the same about the products they did not like.

Now, under new web trends, good quality will get firms further. Last month, Google changed the way it ranked search results, which is now based not on how many links or keywords a site had, but on the number of good reviews.

The move, which the US’ Online Publishers Association, estimated will shift $1 billion of advertising revenue to sites Google ranks higher, aimed to push down low-quality content sites.

Mr Grech stressed online business activity was becoming increasingly about content, user-friendliness and reviews. It was not just about a mere presence – a mistake many local businesses seem to make online – it was also about engaging the customer.

Social network users reacted immediately, passing information on almost instinctively, growing a potential customer base at faster rates than ever before.

Firms at the other end had to respond to customer demand with the same speed online.

Social networks were particularly business-friendly because they offered ready-made platforms with many resources. A social media strategy still required investment and, ideally, dedicated teams, but the funds involved were not extraordinarily prohibitive. That was probably one of the reasons why more than 10,000 new websites integrated with Facebook daily.

Social networks also helped facilitate internationalisation strategies as Maltese businesses increasingly sought to tap overseas customers. They were also ideal for start-up companies which could not afford prime retail space but only an office in an unfashionable part of town.

Mr Grech said online stores or online presences should ideally be complemented by a modification in local and international logistics so companies would try to avoid importing goods to ship them out again to rationalise costs, for instance.

Mr Grech emphasised firms which sought to be increasingly forward-looking had to think in terms of new generations to whom technology was second nature and who were embracing technology much earlier than their predecessors.

Meanwhile, Malta’s business community was lagging much further behind when it came to tapping opportunities presented by mobile applications.

More than 200 million active users were accessing Facebook on their mobile, a group proven to be twice as active on the network as non-mobile users. Much of this activity fell within the 21 per cent of European 25- to 34-year-olds spending more than six and a half hours a week browsing the web on their mobile.

People were now increasingly likely to leave their laptops at the office and use their mobiles for web browsing while they were on the move. Brands, however, had to act quickly to ensure internet services were mobile-enabled or users would not access them if they could not share links, offers, or be social.

“Social media is about being social and enticing consumers to be social about brands,” Mr Grech said. “Companies must, however, give consumers good reason and the means to be social about their products.”