An entrepreneur at heart, Prabhkiran started working or planning on his entrepreneurial journey from his college days at IIT Bombay. He started his first business venture in his college days with a lassi cafe, known as khadke gLASSI. As if studying for an engineering degree didn’t keep him awake enough, he launched Bewakoof.com out of his dorm room with an initial investment of Rs 30,000 in his 2nd year of college, 2012. Currently, he is the Co-founder and CEO of Bewakoof.com, one of the largest D2C fashion brands in India. The brand has a total customer base of 10 million and is adding more than 2 lakh new customers every month with a repeat customer rate of 65%. It has become one of the most sought-after fashion and lifestyle brands for the millennials and GenZ, with a following of 6.1 Million on Social Media. Apart from work, Prabhkiran is also a big movie buff and an avid reader.
If you’re not on social media, are you even in the race?
In an age where everyone you know is hooked to some kind of social media, a brand that has no presence on Instagram or Facebook is as good as a ghost. If you’re not a part of their everyday life, chances are you’re not a part of their life at all. Many would not agree but it certainly is not untrue.
Social Media provides quick exposure for brands and speedy access to potential customers.
With Advertisement tools tailor-made for easy business marketing, promoting a product and analysing performance is not a mammoth task any longer.
The question is, is running ads enough and is that all social media is for brands?
Not at all, in an age where individuals are spoilt for choice when talking about entertainment & commercial content and are questioning everything that they’re consuming online, in heaps at once – the audience’s appetite for good content is larger than ever and keeping their attention is no easy task.
Uncomplicated, Fun, Informative and Relatable content is what they want and brands understand that – every big banner or upcoming brand that you see is capitalizing on this easy access to a large audience and using social media to acquire new customers and retaining loyalists, oftentimes not with product promotions but by pushing out relatable, engaging content.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the multiple advantages that Social Media brings to a Business.
Besides bringing easy access to a large audience and enabling a direct connection with its audience, Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram also help you extend your business presence beyond physical boundaries. Some important advantages that power Brands to engage, connect and win their customers are as follows,
Understand The Audience
If you understand your customers and their needs, you can serve them better and keep them longer. Social Media provides a very condensed equipment for research. How and what type of content your customer engages with online, speaks a lot about him/her. With the visibility that Instagram and Facebook provide into the lives of individuals, studying your customer has become easier than ever.
Build Brand Personality
Engaging with your customers is important but the message or communication you put out is what determines how long your customer will stay with you. The content you create serves as an extension of you and chars your Brands online and offline personality – it’s this personality that your customer wants to interact with. If it’s not true to what your brand is, your customer won’t stay.
Putting out valuable, honest content directed towards the right people helps a brand differentiate itself. Show your customer who you are, what you do and what makes you unique. This will keep your customer wanting to come back to you for more.
Makes Brands Relatable
If you’re online, you’re naturally participating in a mass interaction and your customer sees that as something that he/she shares with you. It makes you relatable and accessible. Socials humanize brands, they give them a tangible human persona.
Customers are invested, they watch your social media activities more closely than one would think. If used correctly, social media puts brands right in the center of a customer’s everyday routine, given that an average individual spends more than 145 minutes online daily.
Stay Aware Of Competition
Besides helping brands learn about their customer’s behaviour, Social Media helps brands also stay updated with their competitor’s behavior. Analyzing your competition’s media moves and content gives you an insight into not just their strategy but also your audience’s personality based on how it engages with you and your competitors.
Grievance Redressal
You probably did not expect reading that here, seems more fitting for an HR document right?
But in all it’s honesty and transparency, what social media helps brands the most with is addressing customer grievances and complaints. It’s made brands answerable to customers. All businesses will have ‘bad experiences’ but understanding that these ‘bad experiences’ have to be acknowledged and minimized is what helps brands grow. Social media, with the direct connection it provides with the audience, serves as the right medium for correcting bad customer experiences and winning customer trust.
Partnering With Opinion Swayers
Influencers are Social Media royalty. People love them and brands need them. Partnering with the right influencers plays a key role in bringing you closer to your audience and expanding your reach.
Achieving the kind of reach and exposure that social media provides will never be possible through traditional media like Newspaper Advertisements, TVCs and Billboards. Traditional media is not as fast and although it reaches a large audience the connection is only one sided, it’s not real engagement. Social media enables brands to converse with customers not just as a brand but as a friend and this results in longer, faster and deeper connections. It is not just about reaching customers it’s about building a community that thrives on brand trust and loyalty.
“Customers may change preferences but your community stays with you because it believes in the things that you do and admires you for it. This is what makes social media so special for brands.”