Senior sales consultant at social media tracking company amaSocial, Petrumarié Jacobs, chatted to Chai FM about these trends. Click on the audio above to listen to the interview.

1. Marketing to Generation Z

Generation Z (Gen Z) includes people born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. These individuals demand that brands respond instantly and that they provide a quick, error-free experience across all your digital platforms.

Here’s how you can ensure your social strategy appeals to Gen Z:
  • Create content that is short, to the point and communicates your brand’s value as quickly as possible, or you may run the risk of losing your audience and a sale. 
  • Make sure your website is mobile friendly. Gen Z spend most of their digital lives on smartphones, so if you're hoping to drive them back to your company website, make sure that it works perfectly on mobile too. 
  • Show diversity through your content. Gen Z are the most culturally and socially aware. Therefore, it is important to represent diversity in your posts and ads in order to form a connection with them.
  • Don’t ignore the value of video and the importance of visually appealing content if you want to win over the hearts and minds of Gen Z. Non-promotional, short-form storytelling is the way to go. Remember to tailor videos for various platforms and devices.

2. Consumer Engagement

Whether it is a brand mention, product-related question or a complaint about poor service, customers don’t want to go unanswered. This is why continuing to provide tip-top customer service through your business's social pages is essential. 

Here’s how you can improve your consumer engagement strategy:
  • Increase customer loyalty by acknowledging and engaging with your customers’ comments or posts. Don’t forget that they chose your brand over your competitors, and they want to know you appreciate them. For example, you could repost a positive mention on your profile. Customers love a shout out. 
  • Don’t delay in your responses – social media users are all about instant gratification. To keep your response time short, create helpful, pre-written responses for general inquiries and always try divert negative conversations into your brand’s private inbox. 
  • Make sure that your customer engagement strategy organised. You can do this by creating a schedule that clearly states who is managing which social media accounts and at what times.
  • Take note of and analyse your customers’ comments and complaints.This information is useful for your marketing department and can help improve your products and strategies.
  • Ensure that your customer experience is integrated and consistent across all brand channels. Brands have multiple touchpoints and consumers want seamless and unified interactions on each platform. 
Use a social media monitoring tool, like amaSocial, to set up custom alerts, which will instantly notify you if your brand is mentioned on social media. These alerts will also ensure your consumer response time is quicker than ever.

3. Micro-Influencers 

Micro-influencers have a smaller following than macro-influencers; most of the time, they have less than 10 000 followers. Their smaller following means that they are able to develop personal relationships with their followers and are often considered experts in their niche industry. They target a small, specific audience, making their marketing potential very high. 

Here’s how to pick the perfect micro-influencer(s) for your 2019 strategy: 
  • Consider what sort of subjects the micro-influencer covers as well as their area of expertise, and make sure that this aligns with your brand. 
  • Look into who makes up their following and ensure that you share a similar target audience. 
  • Create content that aligns with the micro-influencer you have chosen. They are more willing to publish content that relates to their specific tastes, which gives your content a greater chance of being shared.
  • Make sure that the influencer’s approach is passive when it comes to marketing a product. A more subtle mention of the product will inform followers, as opposed to pushing them away. 
amaSocial can help you identify, track and build relationships with influencers. With amaSocial, you can also set contribution targets for influencers, which is helpful when determining your ROI.

4. Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories offer marketers an opportunity to reach a higher number of people. Stories are more relatable and interactive, and offer more flexibility when marketing your product. With new features being launched regularly on Instagram Stories, they are here to stay in 2019.

Here’s how you can include Stories in your social media strategy: 
  • Take advantage of the polls on Instagram Stories to get quick customer feedback and insights into their preferences. For example, by asking the question “Which colour handbag do you prefer, black or red?”, customers will be able to answer right then and there. 
  • Add links to your Instagram Stories to direct your followers to blog posts, exclusive offers on your website or product information. This provides an opportunity to increase traffic to your sites and also generates leads for your brand.
  • Use Stories to increase brand awareness and stay top of mind by documenting your brand’s day-to-day activities. They are also perfect for once off quick promotions, sharing of new products or promoting your partnership’s with Influencers. 
  • Amplify a Call To Action (CTA) using the overlay text feature. You can make sure that your followers don’t miss your CTA by highlighting or repeating it in big, bold, colourful lettering. 
Once your social media strategy is on the go, it is vital to track its performance. This will allow you to determine the success of brand messages and campaigns on social media. 

amaSocial is a complete social media tracking and reporting service. It helps marketers, community managers and analysts to measure social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, as well as brand mentions on blogs. For more information, visit www.amasocial.co.za or email [email protected].