What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media is so popular that for many people it’s the first thing to check when they wake up and the last thing to do before they go to bed. It doesn’t matter if you run a small business or a big company, you need a social media presence.
If people don’t have enough information about your business, they cannot become your customer. Social media can help you to boost your brand visibility among your valuable customers. Interacting with customers through social media is very important for your business marketing strategy. It is a critical part of your business marketing strategy.
So, why is social media important for your business? And how exactly can you use them to boost your marketing strategy? Don’t worry, I’ll give you all the answers.
Why Is It Important?
Social media marketing (SMM) involves the use of social media platforms and social networks to promote a company’s service or product. In short, every marketing activity that uses social media is called social media marketing.
Social media is a powerful tool and social media marketing is a powerful way for all sizes of businesses to reach their audiences. Social media marketing is a part of digital marketing that uses the power of social media networks to achieve brand and marketing goals. It is an effective way to connect with your audience, generate new leads, and increase your brand awareness.
Social media is all about helping your customers to understand your brand better. Social media marketing isn’t as easy as it looks. There are many other things to do than simply posting a photo on Facebook or Instagram.
Social media is a vital part of marketing. There are a billion users, or more than half of the world, active on different social media platforms. Monthly active users on different social media platforms include:
- Facebook: 2.910 billion
- YouTube: 2.568 billion
- Instagram: 1.478 billion
- Pinterest: 444 million
- Twitter: 436 million
- Reddit: 430 million
- LinkedIn: 303 million
- Quora: 300 million
Social media has an advantage over traditional media: it can get your business in front of people more easily. You’ll engage more with your current customers as well as attract new customers. Consider some of the other benefits of having a social media presence:
- Cost-effective
- Increases brand awareness
- Increases website traffic
- Customer insights
- Increases sales and leads
- Brand loyalty
- Advanced targeting
- Build a community
- Global reach and visibility
- Content marketing
Social Media Marketing Strategy
A good social media marketing strategy means choosing the right social media platforms for the right audience and giving them relevant content. Follow the steps below and accomplish your social media goals.
1. Set Your Social Media Goal
Do you know why you are using social media for your business marketing? This is the most important thing you should know before you start your social media marketing plan. Set SMART goals that get you where you need to be:
- Specific
The goal should be focused and identify a tangible outcome. - Measurable
Make sure your goal is trackable. - Attainable
Set goals that are possible to accomplish. - Relevant
Goals should be relevant and make sense within the business mission. - Time-based
Goals should be completed within a defined time frame.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
A target audience is a group of users who are most likely to respond positively to your products or services. It is the overall audience you want to reach.
Understanding your audience is a difficult but important part of your marketing strategy. Different users use different social media platforms. If you don’t know who your customers are, how will you be able to know whether you are meeting their needs or not? Once you know who is your target audience, create your company profile and engage with your customers.
3. Create Your Company Profile
Choose a suitable social media platform for your business marketing. There, you need to create a strong company profile for your online customers.
In your company profile, you should include your company name, location, contact information, website URL, products, or services. You can write about your company, but not at too great a length.
An effective social media profile will help your business connect with its potential customers and attract new users. Also, it creates awareness about your company’s services and products.
4. Analyze Your Competitors
Identify who your competitors are and analyze their activity on social media. By analyzing, you can compare your positive and negative aspects with those of your competitors and correct the negative ones by working on them. You can see where you stand against your competitors and do better work toward achieving your goal. Use all this analytics information to improve your own marketing strategy.
5. Create Engaging Content And Post Regularly
When you create a social media strategy, it’s important that you include many different kinds of content. Types of content that are most valuable for social media marketing include:
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Video
If you create and optimize videos based on what works best for your audience, it can help you very much to connect more with your audience. More than 50% of brands are using videos in their marketing strategy. You can add CTAs in your videos so you can engage your viewer to actually do something. YouTube is a great platform for sharing videos, engaging with potential users, and gaining new users.
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Infographic
Infographics are graphic visual representations with any kind of text or information. Infographic converts boring or dull data into an interesting format. You can add your company information (logo, website link) in infographics and share them on social media. They can be used to create brand awareness on multiple social media platforms.
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Text-based content
Social media content drives engagement for your brand, so it’s important to create and maintain a social media presence. It’s challenging to create a brand identity with just text-based content, but you can create interesting blogs and written posts and increase your website traffic by putting that blog link or short snippet on your social media platforms. Twitter is the best platform for this type of content.
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Video stories
Stories mean the mini-videos that you put in your social media stories section that last for 24 hours before disappearing. Nowadays, they are in demand. You can add your upcoming events and offer announcements in your stories. You can engage with your audience by creating question-answer sessions, and poll stories. Also, you can give them some BTS glimpses of your company's work.
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Images
More and more people prefer to see content rather than read it. In fact, images are some of the easiest content to create and work well on every social media platform. People love to watch and share visual content on social media. You can look at your own Instagram and Facebook feeds.
It’s a good rule to mix up all types of content for your social media platforms and check which type of content your users want to see.
6. Analytics And Insights
Social media analytics means collecting data from all social media channels and evaluating them to do better work in the future. Figuring out which content works and which doesn’t should be your first priority. It’s important to analyze your own brand’s weaknesses and strengths with the help of social media insights. You can use the inbuilt analytics tools that all major social media platforms offer. This will help you to track your social media performance.
7. Social Media KPIs
How do you know that your marketing strategy is working well? With the help of KPIs, you can measure the performance of your social media campaign. You need to track the key metrics that help you reach your social media marketing goal. The social media KPIs that you should be tracking are:
- Impression and clicks
- Follower growth
- Post reach
- Likes, comments, and shares
- Profile visits
- Website traffic
- Sales or conversions
- New leads
Social media is a difficult, but important, part of your business marketing. So take the first step, create your company profile and start working on your social media marketing strategy. Learn more about social media marketing and how it can help you to create a strong online presence.