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Social media marketing 101 – it is here to guide your brand into building a presence on social media platforms that will help raise brand awareness, keep your audience engaged through posting relevant content that resonates with them, generate leads from among potential customers, and hopefully convert many of them into purchasing your products or services.
Before you start creating content, you need to develop a social media strategy that allows you to keep track of your marketing goals, and ensure your team understands what they’re building towards. In this social media marketing 101 guide, you’ll first learn the benefits of having a social media strategy. Afterward, we’ll take you through the steps of developing your strategy which will help you maintain a strong presence on social media channels, and help you launch your social media marketing campaign.
The Benefits Of Having A Social Media Marketing Strategy
In social media marketing, it’s very important to have a plan before you start randomly creating content on your social media channels. There are many benefits to this approach, and they contribute to the success of your social media marketing efforts in the following ways.
Increase Brand Awareness
People not only get most of their news on social media but very often use these platforms to decide what sort of products or services to purchase. For example, many travelers decide which tourist destination to head off to based on what they see on social media. They will most likely choose where to stay, what activities to participate in, and what to eat based on which hotels, sightseeing tours, and restaurants have already impressed them on social media sites.
This means if your business is in any of these industries, you can use social media to make your brand visible to your customers. And this is just the tourism, hospitality, and restaurant businesses. Your social media presence on the platforms your target customers use is crucial.
There are billions of people using social media every day, and you’ll miss out on reaching out to them if you’re not present on these platforms.
Generate Leads And Increase Conversions
A social media post is a great opportunity to promote the products or services your company provides. Sometimes the brand itself may be what you’re promoting. You can post content such as high-quality photos and videos showcasing your latest product in all its glory. Social media users that come across your post may have been looking for a product just like what you’re offering. You can even make sure more eyeballs will be on your post by utilizing social media advertising.
Those interested in your product can be directed to your website, where you can set up a landing page to provide them with even more information about what your product can do for them. You can then gently push them further down the buying funnel and convert them into paying customers. Only by having a social media marketing plan could you ensure that your posts, landing pages, and call to action (CTA) are all aligned to drive traffic to your website and make this conversion successful.
Build Relationships With Target Audience
You could post infographics which provide useful tips and advice that is relevant to your audience, or share memes that will make them laugh. Either way, you can benefit from social media engagement since helpful or funny posts have a higher chance of getting shared by users on social media. There might even be user-generated content around your products or services, bringing even more attention to your brand.
You can also use your social media account to interact directly with your loyal fans and customers in your business community. It’s an opportunity for your social media team to show them you care by answering questions, listening to their concerns, and generally providing support in any way possible. By actively engaging with the community, their trust in your brand will grow, ensuring they will stick with your brand over many years.
How To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Now that you know how you stand to benefit from a social media strategy, let’s go through the steps of how to make one.
Set Your Social Media Marketing Goals And KPIs
To successfully launch social media campaigns, you need to first decide what your marketing goals are. Is it simply to raise awareness for your brand, gather followers, and community building and interact with customers through your business account? Is it to create interest in your products or services through high-quality images and social media graphics? Is your goal to generate website traffic to your online store where you can convince visitors to make a booking or a purchase?
Once you know what you’re hoping to achieve, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your performance in the pursuit of your goals. These could be tracked on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis to check your progress and ensure your social media management team can observe what is working as well as what’s not. A few KPIs that tell the story of your social media success are below.
Research Your Target Audience
Your posts on social media will need to target the desires and interests of your target audience. If the products you make are for millennials and younger demographics, then you first need to figure out what are the best social media platforms to reach these users. You’ll also need to consider what sort of brand voice to use when communicating with them to appear as a company they find relatable. The personality you establish on social media whether it’s a playful one or professional will depend on what your audience will respond to.
By observing these users, you can learn how they like to engage, and begin interacting with them in a way they find comfortable. When it’s time to create engaging content, all of your knowledge of your audience including their tastes and interests will become very useful.
Competitive Analysis On Each Social Media Platform
Social media marketers have much to learn from their competitors in the industry. You can observe popular social media accounts that have managed to gather plenty of followers among your target audiences. Pay attention to what sort of posts they make, and how audiences respond to them. You can see what works and what doesn’t, giving you clues to what is possible for your business, if you’re still quite new to social platforms.
You will also be able to spot opportunities to take advantage of. For example, your main competitor may be dominating one social media platform like Facebook or Twitter but is almost non-existent on other social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. If your brand is aimed at teenagers and young adults, you have a chance to get their attention without competing directly with your more established competitor.
Choose Your Social Media Platforms
You can use many social media platforms to reach a wide audience if you have a marketing budget. If you’re a small business, you can focus on the best platforms based on your audience and the competitor analysis you did earlier. Here are some of the most popular social media platforms that you can be on.
With nearly two billion daily active users, Facebook is one of the largest social networks in existence. The Facebook Ads platform provides plenty of ways to target customers based on their preferences and run advertisements they will come across. The platform has always been what most social media platforms try to reach in terms of user count and success.
Facebook is particularly effective for B2C types of advertising with a large number of millennials and Generation X users currently using it. Your Facebook page can also contain valuable information about your company, where it’s located, and how Facebook users can contact you directly.
Meta’s other social media network which began as a simple photo-sharing application has grown to support over a billion, monthly active users. The demographic is slightly younger with Instagram having mostly millennials driving engagement on it. It’s a place where people go to follow their favorite brands, browse products, and even purchase them without leaving the app. If you can show off your products in stunning photos and videos, you can achieve success on this platform.
TikTok
TikTok has been rising as a fierce competitor to Instagram in recent years, and can also boast about a billion monthly active users. The age of users skews a bit lower compared to Instagram, with TikTok having mostly Generation Z followed by millennial users. The focus here is on short-form video mostly, with a heavy focus on content generated by users. If you’re planning to collaborate and do some influencer marketing, TikTok could be a great way to build awareness for your brand.
Twitter has only 200 million active users daily consisting mainly of millennials. While these numbers are much lower than the different social media sites mentioned earlier, Twitter is still the way many people get their news. It’s the place to make an announcement or break news about upcoming events, products, or updates related to your business. Twitter is a great platform to keep in touch with B2B customers as well as B2C type customers.
LinkedIn has over 770 million active users worldwide and is primarily a B2B platform that connects businesses and professionals. It has baby boomers in addition to the millennials and Generation X audiences found on other platforms. Apart from being a place where recruiters can find those looking for employment, LinkedIn is a great place to impress your peers with thought leadership posts, and business development.
YouTube
YouTube is all about video content, and the platform has managed to get over 315 daily active users across the world. It’s mostly millennials that use YouTube, although other generations have a considerable amount of presence as well. This is the platform that you can use to showcase your product features and explain how they work in detail through long-form video content.
YouTube is where your customers go to do their research before purchasing a product or booking a travel destination. You can use video to educate and provide useful information that your audience will appreciate, building trust, and ensuring their loyalty for a long time.
Other Platforms
There are other platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Clubhouse which are quite popular around the world. However, there are some unique markets where local social media platforms are sometimes more dominant than even Facebook and Instagram. In South Korea for example, you need to be present on platforms developed by Kakao and Naver to reach their audiences. To learn more about these platforms, read Social Media Marketing in South Korea.
Start Creating Content
Now it’s time to put everything you learned about your audience, competitors, and current trends into good use by creating social media content. A few examples of content could be high-quality promotional videos and images for your products, a behind-the-scenes look at the amazing service your staff provides, an explainer video that dives into advanced features of a product, and infographics that provide useful titbits of information. You could even go live on platforms like Facebook and Instagram during product launches or Tweet about upcoming updates to your audience.
You can also rely on your existing followers and fans to share what you post, taking your content in front of even more eyes. You could introduce hashtags and encourage people to use them when sharing their content. You could also share and like their posts to show your support to your loyal fans. There may be trends on platforms like Instagram and TikTok that you can quickly get into, and show how relatable your brand is to those viewers.
Have A Schedule For Your Social Media Posts
It’s important to maintain a social media calendar and schedule your posts properly instead of randomly dropping them whenever you feel like it. You can find what are the best days in the week when your audience is most active on the platform to decide on your schedule. This will ensure your post is seen by the most number of people as soon as it goes live, raising its chances of receiving a lot of engagement.
Social media management tools allow you to maintain control over multiple platforms at the same time. You can write captions, prepare your pictures or videos, and assign a time to publish the post. Once the schedule is set, you don’t even have to be around since the tool will automatically share everything based on how you set it up. For more on this, read Social Media Scheduling.
Use Social Media Analytics To Evaluate Your Social Media Strategy
Social media analytics and tracking tools allow you to monitor social media trends, watch what your competitors are doing, and how your posts are performing. Based on the KPIs you set earlier, you can compare your engagement levels, number of new followers, and other stats to determine how successful your social media marketing efforts have been. You can even compare your results to your competitors and industry leaders to see where you are.
If you’re a new company, building a new audience and brand awareness is where you need to focus. If your number of impressions and followers is increasing, then you’re doing well. If you’re a business that is growing, then building trust in your brand should be your focus, and the level of engagement as well as direct messages (DMs) will indicate this.
For an established company, you’ll want to make sure that you’re maintaining the number of followers and engagement levels. If a new product launch is what you’re analyzing, then your number of clicks and DMs will indicate success. Even if your goals are not being achieved, you can use the results of your analytics to figure out where there’s room for improvement. For more on analytics tools, read Social Media Tracking – What Is It and Why Every Business Needs to Manage It?
Need Help With Your Social Media Marketing Plan?
If you need help in the areas of social media marketing, social media management, and social media advertising, then Inquivix is the service provider you need to be successful on all major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more. If you’re trying to reach customers in a market like South Korea, we have plenty of experience in social media platforms developed by Naver and Kakao.
In addition to social media, we also provide a host of other services like search engine optimization, allowing you to get all of your digital marketing needs done with one partner. To learn more about us and our services, visit Inquivix today!
FAQs
Social media marketing is about utilizing social media networks to improve the visibility of a brand, build trust among customers, and increase sales by directing social media users that engage with your content to your website.
There are many popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and more. Which platform to build your brand depends on whether your target market is present on it, how competitive it is, and whether you are capable of generating the type of content that is popular on it.