Social Media Marketing 101: Learn The Basics

Social Media Marketing 101 will provide the basic concept that you need to know about marketing in social media.

Digital marketing has now a very wide range of scope, thanks to the Internet. Gone are the days where all marketing strategies are directed to other forms of promotional and advertising digitally. As well as in print, to name a few are newspapers, magazines, and more.

While these forms mentioned above are still being utilized by marketers in all of their marketing pursuits. The use of the Internet has definitely shifted how brands market their products and/or services. Online advertising, in general, has greatly evolved over a period of time and is continuously flourishing as time goes by.

As we have mentioned earlier, businesses in all types of industries can leverage the use of the internet to grow their business. However, not all businesses are financially well equipped to have a strong marketing strategy for their business growth and development. One great advantage of the internet is that, for business owners like you, you will not need a huge amount of budget to reach out to your target consumers. Online marketing is in fact cheaper than having to promote your brand in print and the like.

Thanks to social media, brands are able to easily and effectively:

• Connect and build a relationship with their target consumers.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Boost their leads and sales.

What is Social Media Marketing?

One of the most powerful forms of digital marketing as of our modern-day is social media. The very good thing about social media marketing is that all kinds of businesses can make use of all forms of social media available. According to statistics, 95% of adults online, aging from 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand via social media ~ MarketingSherpa. This goes to show how effective this type of marketing is.

Social media marketing is a form of marketing that makes use of social media sites as a marketing tool. Take note that your social media marketing will require you to have a “social interaction” with your target audience, grow your niche, and earn more sales. Social media marketing, if done right, is your one-way ticket to establishing your brand’s name and boosting your business’s full potential. As many experts would say, you should consider social media as your investment.

How Social Media Marketing Benefits Your Business?

Let’s just put it this way, your business needs a social media presence. It doesn’t matter if you are a start-up or a multi-million company, you need your social media presence to help you become relevant to the masses, why? Because everyone is on social media. Apart from this, we also made a list as to how it is very useful for your business as a whole:

Get to Know Your Competitors

Remember the saying “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”? This is pretty much how it is. Social media keeps you in the loop about the whereabouts of your competitors. You get to keep an eye on your other competitions, study how they implement their marketing campaigns and all their other social media tactics. Compare it to yours, see which ones do not work for you, and then decide the changes you want to apply to your marketing efforts.

Promote Brand Awareness

Social media has been proven to effectively establish brand awareness. It helps brands boost their online presence by increasing their engagements. Statistics show that as of our current year, 2019, there are over 3.2 billion social media users worldwide and this number is continuously growing.

Increase Lead Generation and Conversion

How your audience reacts to each of your posts is a very good possibility for improving your lead generation, boosting your conversions as well as sales.

Establish a Relationship with Your Audience

You cannot just post anything on social media and leave it be. You also need to engage and connect with your followers, this is how you create a lasting relationship with your audience. Interact with them through your post’s comment section. Communicate with them by replying to their inquiries and comments, also by providing them with help and support whenever they need it. Establishing a good relationship with your audience also builds their trust and loyalty to your brand.

Cost-Effective

Social media is way cheaper than traditional media. Unlike any other forms of advertising such as tv commercials, billboards, and the like, as for the internet, you will only be required to pay less than $3 for your campaigns to reach about 1,000 people.

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READ MORE :

What Is Inbound Marketing And How To Integrate It With Your Digital Marketing Strategy
What Is The Conversion Funnel And How Does It Affect Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
Is B2B Marketing Agency Ideal For Your Company?

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How You Can Create Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Of course, every goal starts out with a plan. Before you start implementing ad campaigns on different social media platforms, the very first thing you need to do is to create a social media marketing plan. To help you achieve a successful outcome on your social media marketing, read through the steps below and apply them to your brand:

Determine Who Your Audience Are

The first step to your social media marketing plan is to determine who your target audiences are. After which you can harness your campaigns based on their needs and interests. Consider your buyer’s personas and categorize them accordingly. Doing so will help you to also determine the types of content you should post for each of your buyer’s persona.

Which Social Media Platforms Will You Market on

There are a plethora of social media platforms you can market your brand on. In planning out your social media marketing strategy, it is important that you also determine which platforms you will be sharing your content. As for choosing your platforms, it should be about the needs of your target audience and where they spend most of their time.

Create Your Content

Note that your content must be unique and engaging. As a marketer, you have to be creative in your posts to earn your engagements. You may also check out the type of content your competitors have been posting and think of ways on how you can uniquely promote your brand.

Set a Schedule for Your Content Posting

Organizing your posting schedule will ensure that all your planned content will be posted and will not be put to waste. You may also use social media management tools to help you schedule all your planned posts and content. These tools automatically share your content on schedule and monitor all audience engagements and interactions for you. More so, these tools will help you save time and enable you to focus on your other tasks. To help you out, here are some options for you:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps you keep track of and manage all your social network channels. It allows you to keep track of what the online community is saying about your brand, and also helps you to respond to people easily.

Buffer

Buffer lets you manage your social media accounts, it also lets you schedule your future posts across all your social networks.

Sprout Social

From managing your social media marketing strategies to content curation, scheduling, publishing, reports, and analytics, you can get a hold of all these features with Sprout Social.

Socialbakers

Socialbakers help you understand your audience’s behavior. It allows you to leverage social media through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). It helps you connect with your audience and enhance your customer base through the tool’s content personalization.

Popular Social Media Networking Sites

Here, we will be discussing the top social media networking sites where you can find most of the online population. Our age of digitization has become one of the major resources for both small and big businesses to establish their relevance to the masses and further develop their business. These social media platforms have bridged the gap between having a solid and loyal relationship between a consumer and a brand.

People who are using these social media platforms are continuously growing in number day by day. As for marketers like you, you can use the following social networking sights for all your planned social media marketing strategies:

Facebook

Facebook is the largest and most popular social networking site as of our current day. It is also the very first to have surpassed over 1 billion user accounts. As for this year, there are over 2 billion recorded Facebook users. A proof that it is the easiest place where you can connect with people from all over the globe. Thus, Facebook is pretty much where social media marketing all began.

Whether your goal is to drive more traffic on your e-commerce site, promote brand awareness, generate more leads or online conversions, you can make use of this social media network. You are free to post any type of content from videos, photos, blog shares, etc.

Instagram

Next on the list is Instagram, this social media networking site is the second most popular social media. Instagram is all about the visual content which sets it apart from other networking sites. You can share content such as videos, photos, stories, and live videos.

As for business owners like you, you can have your own Instagram business profile. This will allow you to monitor the analytics on your profile and posts. You may also use third-party tools to schedule your posts on this social media platform.

Twitter

Twitter is where #hashtags were born. While this social media networking site is one of the oldest, this social media platform has over 336 million monthly active users.

You can search for a hashtag and see other posts from consumers and businesses that have used the specific hashtag. This allows you to look for people who are also searching for the kind of service or product that your company offers. You can post videos and photos but remember that Twitter has a limited character count.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a perfect social media networking site that B2B marketers can make use of. Also, if your target consumers are based on job titles then this social media platform will work well for you.

LinkedIn has over 303 million active users and most of its users are working professionals. More so, it is considered a social media platform for business. You may find more accurate information about people on the platform such as their job position, work email, what company they work in, etc. While it may not be as advanced as Facebook or Instagram in terms of campaigns, it will give you a lot more job positions you can target than Facebook.

Social Media Marketing Do’s and Dont’s

DO’S

• Know and understand your audience. Just like how well you know your company, it is also very important that you have a clear insight as to who is your audience and what do you need.
• Always have a plan. Everything should start out with a plan. Doing so will greatly help you to set your goals and monitor how you are performing.
• Post regularly. The secret to establishing your brand’s online presence is to post regularly on social media. However, do not post content just for the sake of posting, your content must be engaging enough for you to earn an interaction with your audience. Consistency is the key.
• Maintain your brand identity. Your brand identity is what sets you apart from all your other competitors. Establish your brand’s identity and then incorporate it to all your posts, in any type of content (e.g. you can stick to a one color scheme, the same business name, and profile picture to make your brand recognizable.
• Have a Complete and active profile. To ensure the people of your credibility, you have to present a complete profile. Put all the necessary information that consumers need to get to know more about your business. Also, using logos, showing people attention-grabbing and impactful portraits about your brand will ensure people that you are credible.

DON’TS

• Don’t start posting unless you have already your brand identity. Before you make use of any social networking sites, it is very important that you fully understand your brand identity and the type of tone you will use on all social media platforms.
• Do not spam. Know the difference between promoting and spamming. One example of spamming is by joining social media groups and posting the exact same promotional messages in all posts.
• Do not use poor grammar and commit misspellings. Keep in mind that committing grammar mistakes and misspellings on your posts decreases your credibility. This is why you should make use of social media tools to help you check your content and proofread them before posting.
• Avoid Negativity. Posts that promote negativity such as sad and depressing posts will not help you to have a useful conversation with your audience. Instead of posting negativity, you can share quotes, memes, and other content that will gain positive reactions from your audiences.