What Is Social Media Marketing?

It has become extremely essentials for brands to be on Social Media Marketing Platforms. Technological advancements have enabled almost every user in the world today to throng on Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

If you’re not already focusing on such a platform you’re missing out on a major chunk of the audience which can help your brand reach that next level.

Marketing on these platforms can help you create success stories for your brand. From earning brand-loyal followers to up-ticking leads and sales, everything can be impacted significantly.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing or SMM revolves are your organic social media activities as well as paid social media advertising. Marketers create synergy between these two main aspects of Social Marketing and try to achieve marketing as well as branding goals.

Apart from Paid Advertising, SMM includes Content Sharing and Engagement building activities which include Image Uploads, Videos, Statuses or anything that upticks engagement.

In this blog, we’ll further talk about Social Media Marketing along with some tips on improving your overall brand presence. Also, some beginner guides on social media marketing to help you understand how better you can work on it.

Our aim is to help you develop your very own social media marketing strategy for your brand and increase its presence on social media networks.

Taking the First Step: Curate a Plan

Before you draw that awesome social media marketing plan, it important to identify your business goals. Your business goals help you identify appropriate KPI which you need to measure and you’re able to see the picture more clearly.

Every business has a specific objective to achieve on Social Media, it’s important to ensure that your strategies are aligned towards that specific objective.

Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:

Do you know your Target audience?

• It’s important to know your audience beforehand so that you don’t end up attracting the wrong set of audiences who won’t add value to your business goals.
• How will you interact with your audience?
• Once you know who your audience is, it’s important to know how can you tap them and interact with them. What sort of message will you use? How will you add value for them and more?

• How Social media marketing can add value to your objective?
• It’s important to identify how social media marketing can add value to your overall marketing objective. Think it like this: Will it make sense to put efforts when they can’t add value to your brand’s goal.

Strategize

Once you’ve answered these questions it’s time to curate a killer social media marketing strategy. Your Social Media Marketing is based on five pillars as described by Buffer:

Strategy

Apart from everything mentioned above in the questions, another thing is to ask yourself is which platform you’re going to use? Social media marketing is currently dominated by Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat.

Planning and Publishing

For any brand, it’s important to have consistency on their social media channels. This can be achieved by having a proper plan in place for consistent content publication. Your content could be anything like text, image, video, infographic or even podcasts. Listening and Engagement

One of the biggest tools in social media marketing is social listening.  Once you start publishing and engaging consistently, people do talk about your business and brand. It’s important to ensure that you’re able to hear everything that is said about you or your brand.

Appreciate and thank them when they are lauding you and offer support when they have a problem or any issues.

Reports

You cannot have a successful social media strategy without proper analytics. It’s important to know metrics about each and every piece that you put out there on Social Media. Whether it’s reaching to correct audience?

If it is, does that audience is engaging with your content? If not, what can you do to improve this?  Are they getting shared further?

Advertising

Once you’ve your strategy in place and you’re ready to expand further, advertising plays an integral part. Advertising lets you connect with more people apart from those who are already connected with your brand.

With advertising, you can choose exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

Hack Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ready to kick off your campaign? Before you rock social media with your killer strategy, here are a few things that you need to keep in mind:

Plan Your Content

As discussed previously, building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience. Put a content calendar in place (we recommend having a content calendar for 26 weeks in advance) so that you can track your progress and measure success against each piece.

 Social Content

Great social content consists lot of value proposition. This helps users to connect with your brand better and engage at the same time.

In order to drive this, it’s essential to post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your customers find helpful and interesting.

Test different types of content viz: Images, Text, videos, infographics and more and try to establish which type of content resonates the most with your audience.

Brand Image Consistency

Social Media Marketing enables you to project your brand at different social media platforms. Each platform has its own set of audiences and it has its own unique ecosystem.

In order to have consistency in brand image, it’s pivotal that the brand speaks one single tone at all social media platforms.

Social Media for Content Amplification

Social media marketing is a perfect channel for sharing your best site and blog content with readers. Once you build a loyal following on social media, you’ll be able to post all your new content and make sure your readers can find new stuff right away.

Plus, great blog content will help you build more followers. It’s a surprising way that content marketing and social media marketing benefit each other

Increase trustworthiness

Sharing is an integral part of social media marketing and this inspires sharing content created by others that you think can benefit your readers and followers.  

While using social media for marketing is a great way to leverage your own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also an opportunity to link to outside articles as well. This helps in increasing brand trustworthiness and overall brand value.

Keep an eye on competitors

Competitors can help us with many ways to build the brand. You can analyze your competitors and gauge what is working for them. This can help you to replicate the same audience and strategy to ensure that it benefits your brand as well.

Same way, competitors can provide great insights for keyword research and audience analysis. Keeping an eye on a competitor can certainly add value and track where are you standing right now, which will eventually helps you to improve brand and it’s visibility through out online platforms.

Now when we’ve talked about how you can put a social media marketing strategy in place, let us also tell you, how  social media marketing can help you achieve the number of business goals:

Brand Identity and Association

As we’ve mentioned above and numerous times in other articles, Social Media is one heck of a place to build your brand identity and its association with the audiences and other brands. People  love a brand that keeps their identity consistent on all possible channels

Create engagement channels with an audience

As a brand, with correct social media marketing strategies, you create brand followers and loyal. When you do this, people love to connect with the brand and communicate from time to time.

Social Media proves one easy platform for everyone to work in the same direction. You can create a channel which focuses solely on brand listening and communication with your audience.  

Drive Conversions

Keeping your efforts consistent on social media doesn’t only guarantee amplification but also drives conversions for your business. These conversions help you achieve goals for your business but also help you identify goals that might not be monetary but can help you at multiple levels in the business funnel.

Increased brand awareness

As you consistently market your brand on social media, more and more connect with you and start recognizing your brand. This increases your brand value and awareness about your brand/company. It gets you the recognition that you thoroughly deserve while reaching out to more audiences on the network.

Uptick website traffic

Lastly, social media marketing can give a huge boost to your website traffic. Combining you’re organic and paid advertising efforts on social media platforms, you can reach audiences who are most likely to be interested in your products/services and want to connect with your brand.

This will help you in driving the traffic which you need and see your brand image turning around.

Cost Control

One of the greatest benefits of marketing through social media is that it is cost-effective. Social media marketing is a push medium marketing that pushes content in front of users.

You’ll be amazed to know that you can reach to your already connected audience by spending almost nothing. This gives you more options to reach a newer audience at a lower cost.

Improve organic rankings

Though our efforts are always distributed to take each and every channel to its best potential, sometimes we miss out on the fact that Social Signals at times influence your organic ranking factors (debatable for some).

But yes, it does! Having a proper marketing strategy in place can help you in generating strong social media presence which in return can tell Google how trustworthy and engaging the brand is penultimately helping in increasing search engine ranking for your brand.

Be Preferred

Users hit on social media channels whenever they want to get reviews for a product/service. Having a proper marketing strategy in place can help you garner these reviews and hence increase brand trustworthiness.

This can also help in an increase in word-of-mouth marketing for the brand which still remains one of the powerful ways of marketing. Another good reason is that consumers are more likely to buy from brands that have good recommendations/reviews.

Social Media has evolved a lot in recent years and continues to do so. Today, it has become one of the most influencing channels for any brand. We’re also aware that what sort of power does Social Media to build or destroy brands. There are a lot of brands which have used Social media to turn their image around for good.

On the other hands, there are brands which were trolled heavily for mistakes they committed on Social Media Platform.  In the end, it becomes very important to have a strategy in place for your social media channel which can help you in driving more relevant traffic to your website which in return can help you in achieving your business goals.

Conclusion

In nutshell, if you see Social Media from an aerial view, you’ll realize that it is all about how much can you contribute to a platform and add value to users who are interacting with you. If you do this and stay consistent, we promise that there is nothing that can stop you from achieving almost whatever you want to for your brand.

Just ensure that you’re there for users when they are praising you as well as when they are criticizing you. Social Media Marketing is all about putting these pieces together and ensuring that you do best for your brand. We would love to hear your thoughts, please use the comment box below and let us know what you think about this article and has this added any value to you?