Creating Awareness for a New Brand

In 2017, I was in charge of all marketing efforts, to include managing all social media accounts for a startup. I learned a great deal on how impactful social media can be when creating awareness for a new brand. However, I also learned that no matter how many likes or followers an account may generate over time, if those digital status quos are not transitioning into sales then they're not relative to keeping a business afloat. I found that partnering with influencers who seemed to have a large organic following may bring in a lot of eyes, but again increasing sales was the motive and that was not occurring no matter the different types of content distributed or discounts being offered. These examples of social media triumphs and failures along with many others are the fuel that is going to help me succeed in my future endeavors when I go on to create my own start-up.

I would use social media to promote my business to a very specific target audience that after much research would show the most promise as a consumer. I would utilize the most promising platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc.) that the generation of my target audience falls under and would start by paying micro-influencers to promote the product orservice. With certain micro-influencers having such a select niche following and strong backing I would look for these players so that I can increase the likelihood of posts positively impacting purchase decisions. Word-of-mouth from friends or family is still the number one form of communication when it comes to influencing purchase decisions because of the trust evoked from that relationship. Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) from micro-influencers is the closest way to mirror the success of word-of-mouth because it comes from an influencer with minimal incentive from the promotion besides ensuring that they are showing their followers a product orservice that is trustable and reliable. I would also implement paid ads through Facebook orInstagram because of their highly in-depth tools on selecting a target audience. My media plan would be arranged that each micro-influencer uses numerous platforms to promote as well as one video. This content would be posted on different days throughout a 2-week span. Each micro-influencer's posting would never overlap with others to avoid drowning viewers because that is when it becomes obvious and unattractive. These would just be a few of the tactics I'd implement for a social media campaign to get the ball rolling. If successful, I could use the profits from the sales spike to feed right back into more marketing efforts and possibly new specific target audiences to charmingly broaden the consumer spectrum over time.