The world of social media marketing has taken huge strides in regards to how it can be used to harness huge advertising capabilities as well as the potential to send your company into the viral space. However, it can be a seriously difficult environment to navigate if you don’t have the know-how or the experience in order for you to effectively use these platforms.
The current Marketing Manager for WireWallet, Marina Lazarou provided us with an amazing insight into the world of social media marketing, and we had the opportunity to ask her the questions that are on all of our minds. Firstly, we asked the 22-year-old marketing whizz, where are the main areas that companies waste their budget when marketing? Marina Lazarou told us “On paid campaigns. If they don’t know who their target audience is, they’ll spend a lot of money on reaching as many people as possible. Displaying your ads to random people who are not interested in your services will not help you achieve the traffic you want, nor will it bring you new customers. Do not try to appeal to everybody! It’s important to create your buyer persona, in order to invest your money (and time) wisely.” We also noticed that many companies are trying a “one size fits all” approach and it seems that Marina Lazarou clarifies this. Companies should pick a specific area that they want to target, and go hard!
We also asked Marina, what can companies in the Fintech arena do to better target their audiences? Marina explained to us that “Do not try to reach every person on Earth. You must first define who your target audience is, their age, their countries, etc.; people who are interested in your product. As soon as you complete this step, you need to create relevant and useful content to share it with them.” Essentially, what Marina is saying is that you should do your research before committing to a targeting campaign and that you should know your audience inside-out before attempting to reach out to them.
Finally, we had the opportunity to ask Marina for her opinion on which platforms are best for companies to advertise on and she explained it in the most amazingly simple terms “LinkedIn is a must. It’s a professional platform in which you can better reach your audience. Instagram and Facebook are also perfect platforms to promote your business as the audience is huge, and with a “trend” culture, it is much easier to get viral advertising if you are able to put forward engaging content that users will share. This ultimately provides free advertising for your business. Through these platforms, you can also conduct targeted advertising and receive performance analytics”. From what we understood, it seems that Marina Lazarou expects companies to have a presence on professional platforms such as LinkedIn in order to have a corporate identity and show that they mean business, whilst having a more “personal” appearance on everyday platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to better serve the larger and more daily community.
The interview with Marina Lazarou was certainly a great insight into the fun, but albeit scary world of social media marketing, and with the young marketing manager currently under the wings of the Fintech entrepreneur Andrew Anastasiou we expect to see her flourish and become a well-known name not only in her chosen sector of marketing but in the financial industry as a whole.
Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.