“I use social media as an idea generator, trend mapper and strategic compass for all of our online business ventures.”
– Paul Barron (@paulbarron)
When it comes to working on social media, marketers are changing the way they’re advertising their products/services and are focusing more on increasing their brand awareness.
With the increasing popularity and demand of social media, brands struggle with creating engaging content and reaching their target audience.
(Don't forget to get your free resource of Social Media Marketing Calendar!)
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating content for social media platforms where you can promote your products/services, build community with your target audience, and get more traffic to your business.
With new platforms and features emerging every day, social media marketing is constantly evolving.
While social media marketing as a whole is incredibly valuable and beneficial for every business, strategies differ based on which social media platform your audience spends their time on.
Social Media Marketing Platforms
Users: 1.9 billion daily active users worldwide
Audience: Even spread of Gen X and Millennials
Best for: Brand awareness, Advertising
Users: 1 billion active monthly global users
Audience: Primarily GenZ and Millennials
Best For: Creative, short-form video content; brand awareness; user-generated content
Users: 1 billion monthly active users
Audience: Primarily Millennials
Best for: High-quality images and videos; advertising; user-generated content
Users: 211 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials
Best for: Customer service; community building; public relations
Users: 774 million active users worldwide
Audience: Baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials
Best for: B2B relationships, social selling, and business development
Users: Over 315 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primary millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
Best for: Brand awareness; how-to videos, and long-form entertainment
Users: 306 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Gen Z
Best for: Advertising; brand awareness
Users: 444 million monthly active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily millennials with a solid audience in Gen X, Gen Z and Baby boomers
Best for: Inspiration; visual advertising
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Increase Your Brand Awareness
With the increasing number of people on social media, you tend to miss out on the potential to reach thousands of people if you don’t have an online presence.
Social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagement includes comments, likes, reposts, saves, and shares.
These activities help you to increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your website.
Generate Leads and Boost Conversions
Promoting and sharing your products/services on social media is one of the easiest ways to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you advertise to people who have chosen to engage with your brand by following your account.
Some of the ways to use social media to generate more leads -
Create contests
Include links to your website and offers
Host live videos
Implement a social media marketing campaign
Sell your products and services through your social profiles
Foster Relationships with Your Customers
When you will connect and engage with your social media followers, you will end up creating long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Interact with them on your posts, respond to their questions and comments, and provide them with any help that they might need.
You can ask your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their inputs.
Learn From Your Competitors
Social media is one of the best ways to keep a tab on your competitors’ activities, like what approach they are taking to interact with their customers or what campaigns they are implementing.
Social media allows you to take a lot at what is and is not working for your competition, and therefore you can decide what should or should not change in terms of your brand’s approach.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Although social media is constantly evolving, the foundational steps to the success remain the same. Essentially, you follow the same steps you would take to create a marketing strategy and narrow it to a specific channel.
Step 1: Research Your Buyer Persona and Audience
The first to create a social media marketing strategy is determining your buyer persona and audience so you can target their needs and interests accordingly.
Step 2: Determine Your Social Media Platforms
There is no necessary right or wrong answer when it comes to deciding what social media platform you must choose. What matters more is the needs of your target audience and where they spend most of their time.
Step 3: Establish Your Most Important Metrics and KPIs
No matter what your goals and industry are, your social media strategy must be data-driven.
It’s the numbers that speak for you and your brand.
Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, you can dig into data that aligns perfectly with your goals.
Some of the metrics are:
Reach
Clicks
Engagement
Hashtag Performance
Organic and paid likes
Sentiment
Step 4: Get to Know Your Competition
A competitive analysis helps you to understand who the competition is and what they are doing right and what it is that they’re doing wrong.
This gives you a good sense of the expectation in your industry, and it will help you to set social media targets of your own.
Step 5: Create Unique and Engaging Content
It is of utmost importance that you create engaging social media content that stands out and makes your target customer click that “Follow” button and interact with your brand.
Step 6: Organize a Schedule For Your Posts
One of the easiest ways to make sure that your content goes live as planned is to use a social media management solution. There are tools that allow you to write captions, prepare pictures and videos, and schedule posts in advance.
How to Analyze Your Social Media Marketing Impact and Results?
One of the important aspects of social media marketing is to make sure that your efforts are translated into numbers.
To determine the numbers, you must keep a track of all your posts, on every channel.
Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics are data related to the success of your posts and the impact that you create on your audience and customers on several platforms.
Here are ten of the most important metrics for you to track -
Engagement (clicks, comments, likes, saves, and replies)
Reach
Followers
Impressions
Video Views
Profile visits
Mentions
Tags
Reposts
Shares
You can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile by using the same tactics you use to increase leads and boost conversions.
Conclusion
You can utilize the guide and our Free Social Media Content Calendar to manage your social media accounts with your own touch. But remember, the guide is not static, it needs to be constantly growing and evolving. The fast social media and trends are changing, your strategy needs to evolve to fit your business goals.
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