On the occasion of Social Media Day 2022, Vishal Sharma, Deputy Director, Media Relations, Brand Development & Communications, Lovely Professional University, in an exclusive interaction with MediaBrief, speaks about how Social Media empowers marketing and how brands have modified their communication approach to leverage the medium. He underlines the role of Social in Lovely Professional University’s media mix and highlights how its celebrating the day. Read on.
Social Media Day is celebrated each year to recognise the impact that social media has had on communications around the world. So how has Social Media impacted your business and your communication approach?
Social media has definitely created a strong impact on communications around the world. With its recent eye-opening surge during pandemic, social media has proved to be a stand-alone medium to get your businesses up and running.
For LPU, social media has always been an integral part of laying out all prominent communications and engaging with the audience through various available platforms. Unlike traditional media, social media is a quick two-way communication media which gives it an edge to effectively record feedback and improvise with a focused approach.
Social media has definitely helped the brand to soar exponential heights in becoming one of the most followed higher educational institutions in the digital space in India.
How are you celebrating the Day? What are your thoughts on moment marketing of commemorative days?
For us, social media is our happy space where we would love to celebrate social media day with our audience rather than our family. We are planning for an engaging social media day and will highlight the moments where social media can definitely be a helpful tool (quirky too).
Talking about the brand’s approach towards moment marketing, it has never failed us to grip those brownie points that a brand fruitfully seeks. Moment marketing has always come up with promising results for the brand.
For example, As the youth is our primary target audience, it is important for a brand to target the LPU did the moment marketing when the latest seasons of famous and one of the most hyped Netflix series, Money heist and Stranger Things were released by inculcating the famous learnings in our Monday Motivation quotes. This moment marketing impressively helped the brand to fetch impeccable results.
List three strong ways Social Media empowers marketing. What role does it play in your Media mix? By how much is the pie for Social media in a Brands’ marketing mix increasing? By what percentage has your social media marketing budget grown over the past?
Social media has steadily empowered the way brands market in the digital space. Creativity is what brands demand and lays their most emphasis upon. Social media’s huge and focused audience reach has helped the brands to target effectively and reach the targeted audience.
Additionally, maintaining the brand image and making sure that the brand is always in talks amongst the Target Groups (TG) have always been key advantages that social media leverage for brands to market.
In our overall media mix, social media holds 25-30% of our communications. It is an inevitable strong tool to comprehend the right communication with the right people. With the right marketing efforts comes the strategically planned budgets which have increased by approximately 34% as compared to the previous year’s budget.
How important is it for every marketing and brand and other vertical teams to be given L&D help on learning digital marketing (and social media as a part of it, of course)? What initiatives does your company undertake on this count?
It is impeccably important for every marketing and brand and other vertical teams to be given L&D help on learning digital marketing, since there is a lot to learn about it. LPU ensures consistency across all branding and digital media platforms by maintaining constant communication amongst professional teams.
The teams are regularly updated with new opportunities that they can leverage in the social media space. The university strives to be one of the most dynamic members of the social media community by ensuring that all information is efficiently shared with the audience in time. Thus, LPU lays true emphasis on the importance of being social media savvy and leveraging social media up to its fullest potential.
What are some of the successes your company has had using social media?
LPU has done numerous campaigns on social media and many of the campaigns were related to society and how we can work on some social issues including women empowerment or promoting sports tools in education.
However, we think one important campaign that we did with Chetan Bhagat has really stuck a crowd where we partnered with Chetan Bhagat to talk about how LPU is now amongst the top university of the country and that campaign really hit and got well, people from across the country got to know about the LPU strength in a very subtle way. Which went really well.
Another big campaign that we did with Raj Kumar Rao where we talked about what he perceived about as the quality education and how LPU is one of those quality education providers also stuck a great deal and got the people. These are the two projects which went really well and had at least ten million users who got engaged through these two projects.
