Advertisers and media planners always look for innovative methods to promote their brands. Recent data says there are nearly 2.56 billion global mobile social media users now and that tantamount to almost 34 per cent penetration. No one can ignore this huge pool of consumers and this says why advertisers and media planners are all heading towards digital marketing platforms.

With the advent of social media, brands realised that traditional methods of marketing will no longer garner the same rewards in the new marketplace. Consumers are now ready to sacrifice brand loyalty for the best deal.

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On the other hand, social media helps businesses in finding new potential customers with the help of the information that they have shared voluntarily. With their basic details available, one can identify their interest area. Advertisers can reach only to the relevant users rather than targeting every user who used a keyword to search for some information.

This is the only channel where one can target their audience depending on a wide variety and not on general demographic or geographic information. Advertisers aim to develop a community of satisfied customers and engage them continuously. Brand managers explore and exploit this channel of advertising even to decide on new products.

Media gurus are of the opinion that brands that can harness their customer’s view and use device insights can be successful in delivering truly connected campaigns. They therefore advice to adopt a 360 degree integrated campaign approach with conventional marketing strategies to have multiple touch points for their consumers.

For advertisers, delivering interesting and engaging content is the only option. Social media gives them the opportunity to broadcast compelling content, without thinking about precious air time rate and compromising on truncating the length of the content. Moreover, creating non-textual content, primarily visual and audio, has become easy and pitching it to the right segment is simple.

The upsurge of social media is a direct outcome of increasing use of mobiles. Advertisers and media planners have exclusive strategies for those mobile users who don’t need a TV or a desktop/laptop to consume content. So, how these users use their device is constantly researched by marketers in order to decide on their marketing strategy.

Advertisers now have content marketing plans and budget focused specifically for mobile users who access social media using their smartphones. As a result of this you see such interesting image-based or video content constantly being published through mobile apps. Making purchases or transactions is much easier using an e-wallet app over traditional or even net banking. Such useful features in the apps keep the customers loyal to a particular brand.

Scope of personalisation of content is another advantage that makes it even more impactful. You can entwine your viewers into visual storytelling that is targeted towards their personal liking and preferences. Short videos or real-time images will surely have greater impact on the consumers’ mind over text-based content and brands will be successful in experimenting with creativity.

By publishing meaningful content one can set industry trends and thereby build trust and develop credibility. More than 60 per cent of digital marketing managers now allocate more budgets to social media marketing instead of traditional offline marketing. There are still a few media planners that consider websites to be more effective to promote their brands but also incorporate social media icons in their websites.

The challenges that advertisers face for social media-based marketing are generating effective content, sustaining the level of engagement or increasing it and finally measuring effectiveness of their campaigns. Lack of earmarked budget for these channels of advertising is another challenge faced by the marketers. But, as the comparatively lower spending generates measurable results, media planners are making a beeline for social media marketing.

The writer is chief executive officer, appsdiscover