SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your product, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing good content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and using social media ads.

With the power of popular social media sites, the brands can deliver their brand voice and connect with their audiences. But it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Social media marketing requires an effective strategy built upon business goals and vision.

Is Social Media Marketing Important?

Well, Social media marketing plays an important role in the development of business. Here are the reasons why social media marketing is important these days.

- Increase Brand Awareness

Due to a huge number of people using social media platforms, a brand can lose the opportunity to reach millions of potential customers. According to research, 54% of users use social media platforms to search for their desired products. A good social media strategy helps you to build a positive image of your brand and communicate well with your audience. A brand should maintain high-quality accounts on different social media sites which will help them to connect with the right audience.

- Drive Traffic

A good social media campaign helps you to divert visitors from your social media platform to websites, which might end up buying your products. Maintaining a good quality social platform will across different social media sites help to better connect with your audience.

- Generate leads and customers

Posting regular content, live stories, and fun facts related to your services or products will help you to better connect with your audience, generate leads and boost conversion. Add different features on posts like direct messaging, call to action button, and appointment booking capabilities. This will help you to connect with your audience, who are following your account.

- Regular interaction with your target audience

According to research, an average person spends 2.5 hours on different social media sites. This will give an amazing opportunity for your brand to connect and build a lasting relationship with your audience. You can do this by responding to queries of your customers, and interacting with them on your post.

-Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a top priority of any brand. Social media marketing is a great way to know the experience your customer has with your products or services through reviews, likes, and comments. In the past decade, many companies spends millions of dollars to get feed from their clients in form of surveys and questionnaires. If you got positive reviews it will help you to attract more clients and incase if clients are having a bad experience you can contact them immediately and solve your queries.

-Competitor’s Analysis

Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others. Keeping a sharp eye on competitors in your arena can save you a lot of money, time , and resources. Learning from the failure and success of your competitors can put you ahead of the game and makes sure your brand stands out. You will get a lot of ideas about what strategy is working for them or not or what are the latest trends in the industry. You can use these trending topics in your niche to discuss with your audience, thus increasing your engagement. Regular interaction with your audience will help you to collect direct feedback from your client and improve your marketing campaigns.

PLATFORMS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Here we are discussing top social media marketing platforms used for different types of businesses and including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Linked In, and Snapchat. These social media sites have users belonging to different generations having unique behaviors. So you have to design your content around the likes and dislikes of your target audience. Here we are giving you a quick overview of each platform

FACEBOOK

According to web statistics, Facebook has 1.9 billion active users around the globe while most users belong to Generation X and Millennials, and Baby Boomers. It is one of the largest social media platforms and launched in 2004 and is best for brand awareness and reaching local and international clients. Small brands can Facebook to connect with local and new customers by joining Facebook groups and forums,finding and visiting nearby businesses.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram has a user base of more than 12 billion which is growing fastly as compared to other platforms because of its visually strong stories and posts and advanced e-commerce tools. A customer can buy a product without leaving Instagram. This app is mainly used by Millennials and Gen Z because of its diverse content format including stories, IGTV, lives, and Reels. Most brands use influencer marketing to reach their target audience

YOUTUBE

Youtube has 315 million active users belongings to all age groups and genders mostly impacting the Business 2 Business and Business to Consumer industry. A brand can use this platform to post tutorials on how to use their products and services creating brand awareness.

SNAPCHAT

Snapchat has more than 332 million active daily users while more than 5 billion snaps are created daily. The reason behind their huge fan base is that they are pioneers in implementing virtual reality into daily life with the help of filters and lenses. Brands can use this platform for brand awareness and local and app-based marketing.

Pinterest has a huge fanbase with 444 million active users all around the world which mostly consists of MIllennials,Generation z,x, and Baby Boomers. A Pinterest is like a visual storyboard where users pin their inspiration and photos. Pinterest acts as inspiration for people starting a new project and also a free advertising tool for a new eCommerce startup.

TWITTER

While Pinterest and Instagram communicate in form of visuals, Twitter focuses on words, while the primary audience consists of millennials. These days people use Twitter to get news, and community building through a community-building tool called Twitter communities, to follow brands, and for customer services.

LinkedIn is a professional platform where the audience is highly professional mostly belonging to Generation X and Millennials with active users of 774 million around the globe. Professionals use this platform for networking and finding new business opportunities. That,s why it is an ideal platform for B2-B companies.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Now you become aware of social media marketing and its importance in running a business, it’s time to create your own social media marketing strategy and bring it into action. A social media marketing strategy will act as a lighthouse for fulfilling your business goals and finding the right audience. Here is how you can create your own social media marketing strategy

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE VERY WELL

Make sure you have a very well knowledge of ideal clients or create your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of what your target audience looks like, their likes, and dislikes, age, gender, and demographics.For example, if you are starting a kid’s clothing company then your target audience might mostly consist of women. So make sure you have detailed research on what your ideal might look like. This will acts as a strong base for your successful social media strategy as it is built around the ideal audience targeting their needs and interests. This will help in designing your content that will attract your followers and customers.

FINALIZING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

After knowing the age, demographics, likes, and dislikes of your audience you might be able to determine on which social media platform your audience is spending most of the time. Then you will determine the social platform on which you will be marketing.

“It’s important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow,” said Andrew Delaney, former social media marketing manager at HubSpot. “It’s better to be ahead of the curve than behind.“

For example, if you are selling newborn baby clothes then your target audience is young mothers or mothers to be which primarily belongs to millennials. An ideal platform for advertising for young millennial mothers is Instagram and Pinterest which is famous for their strong visual content.

KEEP A TRACK OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

Keep a track of your social media insights and readjust your content accordingly.No matter what industry you belong to, make sure your strategy must be data-driven. A strategy formed after analyzing data determines the success of your social media marketing strategy.
An important tool you can use for this purpose is Google Analytics, it will enable you to adapt or evolve your most efficient social media marketing and also to brush off your content that is not performing well.
And also not forget to attach tags to your campaigns so you can monitor their performance.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITORS VERY WELL

A social media competitor analysis can help you to stay ahead of the competition and spot new opportunities. By analysis of your competitor, you can find out their strength and weaknesses and compare them to your own. Comparing your results among the big brands in your industry can help you to identify new growth opportunities and strategies that are not working well as they should be.

CREATE FRESH AND ENGAGING CONTENT

If you want to make sure that your brand stands out from the crowd and that your audience can connect with you, you must create fresh and engaging content. Engaging content is a piece of text that appeals to your audience and grasps their attention in the blink of an eye and makes them curious to know more about your brand. It is not a piece of cake to form engaging content, it is a process of continuous research, hard work, and brainstorming process.

Here is how to create a worthy content:
1-Know Your Audience
2-TELL A Story
3-Create Content With Intent
4-Lean into Your Strengths
5-Create Content That’s Valuable For Your Customer
6-Connect With Your Audience Emotionally

ORGANIZE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CALENDAR

Running a good social media campaign requires a bit of strategy and a lot of organization, this seems to be a tiring task to post and schedule posts daily. A social media ccontent calendar is a plan that is used to plan and schedule your content in advance among different social media platforms. It helps you to stay organized and saves time by planning out a month of content in one go. With the help of a content calendar, you can craft a customized message according to the need of the social media platforms and audience. This also helps you to keep track of the performance of posts and learn from both your success and mistakes. There are so many social media content schedulers that make your life easy but if you are just starting out, spreadsheets are workable solutions.

CONCLUSION

In the 21st Century, Social Media Marketing is essential for the survival of any business. With the help of various social media platforms, you can connect with your audience and promote your services and products, so they can convert into your loyal customers. If you want MandW Visuals to create your own custom social media strategy, then you can contact us at the following link