SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING(SMM)
- MOHK SAINI
- Apr 24, 2021
- 7 min read
"When it comes to social media marketing, you don’t have to post 3 times a day. It’s never about how often you post but the quality of your content." - Janet Benson Amarhavwie
Business in today’s day and age is dominated by customers and their demands. People prefer to see referrals, reviews over Google search results, or a website before purchasing a product. To stand by the flow, we need to learn what people say about us. You need to actively participate in relevant communities to interact and influence masses. You need to engage with social media to manage your online reputation. Social media marketing is a must to target a wider customer base and expand your business.
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analysing your results, and running social media advertisements.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram are commonly used to execute social media marketing.
BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. I’ve created a list of the four most beneficial reasons to consider.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagement includes things like comments, likes, shares, and re-posts. Social media also helps you increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.
2. Generate Leads and Boost Conversions
Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.
3. Foster Relationships with Customers
By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you’ll be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and providing them with any help they may need.
4. Learn from Competitors
Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.
Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach. Lastly, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.
HOW TO DO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?
Over 50 billion businesses are on social media channels. Many are on multiple social media sites.
But just how many of these social media accounts sit dormant with limited followers and engagement? That’s because just being on social networks doesn’t attract even existing customers to follow you or share your posts. They may love your staff, services, or products. But if you don’t give them a reason to engage online, they won’t do it.
Steps on How to Do Social Media Marketing
Step 1: Build a Quality Following
Step 2: Set a Social Media Budget
Step 3: Have Clear Goals
Step 4: Leverage Paid Social Media
Step 5: Know that Engagement Is a Two-Way Street
Step 6: Create Content Your Followers Love
Step 7: Automate to Maximize Your Time & Performance
Step 8: Boost Posts to Maximize Returns
Step 9: Be Consistent
Step 10: Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Step 11: Turn Social Media Engagement Into Revenues
Step 12: Use Analytics to Improve Your Performance
Let’s Study all these Steps in Detail
Step 1: Build a Quality Following
If you have a low-quality following, one of two things happen.
One, you get very poor engagement.
Two, you get the engagement. People seem to love your posts. But it’s not translating to increases in revenue.
How to build a quality following?
To get a quality social media following, get clear on who your target audience is. It’s not everyone on Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, or Snapchat. It’s a relatively narrow group of people. Build each post with these people in mind.
Step 2: Set a Social Media Budget
Do you want to know how to create a sound social media marketing plan and get results?
Social media marketing is strategic. It’s not just random sharing posts or tweets and hoping for the best. It’s efficient and targeted. Create a social media budget for your marketing campaigns to know exactly where the money’s going and why.
These are the core components you should include in your social media marketing budget.
Content is and always will be king. And as such, it should account for a significant portion of your budget. Many social marketers spend more than half of their social media budget on content creation alone.
2. Software and tools
SEO and keyword research
Content hosting
Editing tools
Project management systems
Social media management platform
Marketing automation
Analytics tools
3. Paid advertising
All social media strategies should include organic content and—if your budget allows—paid advertising. Every social media channel offers marketers ways to boost posts or run full-fledged campaigns.
4. Training
There are lots of free social media training resources out there, but it’s always worthwhile to invest in training for your team.
6. Management
Social media managers or teams must oversee:
Social media management (scheduling, publishing, listening, engagement)
Audience research and growth
Strategy and analytics
Content creation
Community management
Campaigns and promotions
Step 3: Have Clear Goals
What do you want social media networks to do for you? “I want it to increase my profits”, you might say. But just like anything in business, you need a clear path to get there. To increase profits, you need to take some incremental steps.
Step 4: Leverage Paid Social Media
While social media may look like a free way to reach your audience, few companies find any success without putting some money into paid social media advertising.
Just like social media marketing, social media advertising helps you meet your major social media goals.
Step 5: Know that Engagement Is a Two-Way Street
Many businesses that are trying to figure out how to do social media marketing find themselves “talking at” people. “Check out our blog post”. “See our new products”. And so on. While some of this is okay, it’s important to realize that social media is first and foremost a place where people come to be social. If they feel like your brand is “talking at them”, they’ll tune you out. You’ll lose followers or never gain them. You’ll have low engagement.
Step 6: Create Content Your Followers Love
What kind of content wows your audience? What makes them want to engage with you? How does this content further your business goals?
Creating a content calendar that people love and that aligns well with your brand isn’t that easy. It all starts by making sure you know who your customers are. Research who they engage with? How do they engage? Where do they engage? What kinds of content are they engaging with?
Step 7: Automate to Maximize Your Time & Performance
A lot of businesses are running their social media management very inefficiently. They don’t even know it. You don’t have to be one of them. And that gives you the competitive advantage.
They don’t realize that there are automation tools that can cut hours or days off their work. Since time is money, this is costing them a lot more money that they could have spent on an automation tool.
Commit to learning to use the software to get the most out of it. Or work with a digital marketing agency that will already have state-of-the-art automation and know-how to put it to work for you.
Step 8: Boost Posts to Maximize Returns
If you have a post that got a lot of engagement among your followers, you may be sitting on a gold mine. If you have a high-quality following, these followers are representative of your target audience. Make the most of this by boosting posts that your fans really liked.
If the post had 1,000 impressions and received 20 engagements, imagine what can happen if you boost it to 10,000 impressions!
Step 9: Be Consistent
Social media can seem overwhelming. There’s just so much content and so many people. Because of that, it feels like you can just get lost in the crowd. You may think people won’t really notice if you post a lot one week and then disappear for a couple weeks.
Step 10: Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Where are you placing your focus? If you’re a brand-new business it makes sense that you’d be spending more time and money acquiring new customers. But once you have begun to attract new customers, you need to know how to do social media marketing to retain those customers. You’ll want to explore how to get them to buy again sooner.
Existing customers are much more likely to buy new products and buy from you again. But if you’re not focused on retaining these customers and re-engaging them, they will likely go elsewhere.
Step 11: Turn Social Media Engagement Into Revenues
To turn social media engagement into tangible revenues, some of your social media posts should lead back to your website. Once on your website, you can more easily turn a visitor into a paying customer.
Add links to blog posts in your social media posts.
To turn social media engagement into tangible revenues, some of your social media posts should lead back to your website. Once on your website, you can more easily turn a visitor into a paying customer.
Add links to blog posts in your social media posts.
Step 12: Use Analytics to Improve Your Performance
Google Analytics and the analytics on the social media platform will be your guide. They tell you what’s working and what’s a waste of time.
Every audience and industry is a little different. It’s important not to make assumptions. Blindly following online gurus who tout impressive results from doing “this one thing” isn’t how to do social media marketing. After applying any strategies you learn online, watch the results.
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