Social Media Marketing is the Perfect Tool for Your Brand to Reach a Global Audience

Is your business looking to extend its brand awareness and build its target market well beyond its physical location or country of origin?  In today’s business environment, your brand can effectively extend its reach and compete on a global scale by using one of the many virtual, online marketing methods.  Not many, however, come close to matching social media marketing when it comes to reaching a global audience and then building a relationship with that audience..

Follow the Crowd

According to a recent report from eMarketer, “Social media reaches nearly one in four around the world.”  This gives businesses today – with the help of an effective social marketing strategy – unprecedented access and reach as it pertains to their target market and also for developing new global target markets.  And, as noted in this same report, the social crowd is only going to continue to get larger as, “the number of social network users around the world will rise from 1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion this year, an 18% increase. By 2017, the global social network audience will total 2.55 billion.”

Paying Attention

The largest international companies are paying attention to these quickly-growing target audiences who are just a few Facebook posts or Twitter tweets away.  In fact, the Fortune Global 100 companies are becoming, “increasingly engaged on social media”, “creating multiple accounts to target audiences by geography, topic or service” and “creating original content to share across all platforms and accounts.”  This Slideshare presentation from Burson-Marsteller is packed with statistics and examples of how the biggest brands in the world are using social media to create goodwill and reach out to audiences globally.

Case in Point

Global marketing with social media doesn’t need to be limited to Fortune Global 100 companies such as Sony, Hewlett Packard or BP.  In fact, you do not even need a physical presence in multiple countries.  One case in point is Robin Rile Fine Art – a local art gallery in Miami, Florida that used social media to build, “virtual relationships with over 25,000 museums, Forbes and Fortune 500 members, private dealers, investors and clients around the world and here in South Florida.”

The Bottom Line

Building virtual relationships across the globe is wonderful, but a business must turn those relationships into sales.  And in the case of Robin Rile Fine Art, social media marketing did just that.  The gallery now sells, “high-end works to clients in Australia, Ireland, Greece, France, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Brazil, London, Germany, UAE and throughout the United States” while seeing their, “general price-point has escalated from $2,000 to $30,000 a piece to individual works of art over $5 million in the past five years alone, including original works from Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Indiana, Warhol and others.”

Does your business have a social media marketing strategy that includes plans for reaching and building relationships with a global audience?  We’d love to read some of your tips in our comment section below!