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by Manon Im on Jun 13, 2022 9:00:00 AM
Contents
- What is Social Media Marketing?
- Social Media Marketing Platforms
- Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- How to Create a Social Media Marketing Basic Strategy
- Social Media Metrics
Social media marketing is a necessity, not an option, now that everyone, from large companies to small business owners, is passionate about marketing. According to one study, as of October 2021, 4.55 billion people were using social media. With over 53% of the world's population using social media, an effective social media strategy is critical to reaching your target audience for your business. So let's dive in from the definition of social media marketing to marketing strategies and metrics.
1. What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing refers to the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote products and services, build target audiences and communities, and drive business traffic.
Social media marketing is constantly evolving with new features and multiple platforms appearing. Social media marketing takes place where the target audience is and drives communication between brands and customers or between customers. Therefore, it is necessary to select a platform mainly used by the target customer and to approach the customer by establishing a strategy suitable for the characteristics of each platform.
2. Social Media Marketing Platforms
Before we dive into social media marketing in detail, let's take a look at the types of social media platforms and their characteristics.
- Users: 1.9 billion daily active users worldwide
- Audience: An even spread of Generation X and Millennials
- Industry impact: B2C
- Best for: Brand awareness; advertising
Facebook is the largest social media platform and the most established. Since its launch in 2004, it has become an invaluable tool for B2C businesses, offering advanced advertising tools as well as organic opportunities.
TikTok
- Users: 1 billion active monthly global users
- Audience: Primarily Gen Z followed by Millennials
- Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- Best for: Short-form, creative video content; user-generated content; brand awareness
When you think of the short-form video, you probably think of TikTok. The platform rose in popularity in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down. It's one of the best platforms for community building, with marketers ranking it in second place behind YouTube.
- Users: 1 billion monthly active users
- Audience: Primarily Millennials
- Industry impact: B2C
- Best for: High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising
Instagram was just launched, but the platform's impact took the world by storm. It is a platform that brands often use to share visual content. Another factor that sets Instagram apart from other platforms is its specialized e-commerce tools. Instagram users can search for brands, find and purchase products and services from within the app.
- Users: 211 million daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Primarily Millennials
- Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- Best for: Public relations; customer service; community building
Where Instagram focuses on visuals, Twitter focuses on text. Twitter started with a 140-character tweet, followed by audio-based Twitter Spaces, Twitter Communities, and Twitter Moments to share interesting content with followers. It has grown into a platform that can do it.
- Users: 774 million active users worldwide
- Audience: Baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials
- Industry impact: B2B
- Best for: B2B relationships, business development, and social selling
LinkedIn can be described as “the career version of Facebook.” LinkedIn is a platform with more clearly defined users than Facebook or other platforms. LinkedIn is designed for working professionals who are networking and looking for new opportunities. This makes it an ideal platform for B2B companies looking to discover key decision-makers in their businesses or build industry-specific communities.
YouTube
- Users: Over 315 million daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
- Industry impact: B2C and B2B
- Best for: Brand awareness; long-form entertainment, and how-to videos
According to one statistic, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world. Also, marketers say YouTube is the best platform to build a community. Not only is it a hugely popular platform today, but it's mostly characterized by long formats of content, making it ideal for users to stay longer and share educational content.
There are many other social platforms, including Pinterest and Clubhouse. To achieve the business goals of the enterprise, it is necessary to consider the target customers and select and utilize the platform for the purpose of use.
3. Benefits of Social Media Marketing
There are so many reasons why businesses should do social media marketing, but the most obvious are:
Increase your brand awareness
When social media isn't running, businesses miss out on their potential to reach thousands or even millions of customers. In fact, it has already been proven that social media can increase brand awareness by engaging users. Social media users can comment, like, share, repost, save, and more, while also getting publicity done. Social media also helps increase brand awareness by driving traffic directly to your site.
Generate leads and boost conversions
By promoting and sharing your products on social media, you are exposed to customers who have chosen to follow your account and engage with your business. So, social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, increase conversions, and increase sales.
- Plan events that visitors and followers can participate in.
- In the profile description section of your profile, including a website and a link to gather leads.
- Start with live video to give product announcements, updates on interesting news from the company, or useful details.
- Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
- Sell products through social profiles by activating the shopping function provided by each platform.
Strengthening relationships with customers
With social media, customers connect with your business by following them and build lasting relationships by engaging with your business. Businesses can reach customers by answering their questions and providing help. You can also build trust and show how much you value your customers' opinions by asking your followers about their difficulties in using a product or service, or by creating a giveaway.
Insights from competitors
Social media is a great way to learn about your competitors' social media marketing tactics, the products they are promoting, the campaigns they are implementing, or how much they are interacting with fans of your brand. Social media can help you decide what works and what doesn't in terms of your company's approach by seeing what works and what doesn't with competitors you already have experience with. Finally, reviewing your competitor's social accounts will help you determine how attractive and unique your current marketing is.
4. How to Create a Social Media Marketing Basic Strategy
Social media is constantly evolving, but social media marketing strategies usually follow the same steps as when you develop a marketing strategy and narrow it down to a specific channel.
1) Buyer persona and target analysis
The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy is to determine who your buyer personas and audience are, so that you can properly target their needs and interests. To do this, companies need to think about their target audience, why they chose them, and how to break them down into specific groups. Consider your buyer persona when deciding which content to use to attract which types of followers and customers. You also need to plan compelling content that will keep your target audience interested.
2) Decide which platform is right for you
Social media marketers need to decide which platforms to share their content on. There is no right or wrong answer when choosing which social platform a business will use. It is more important for companies to understand and select the needs of their customers and the tendencies they spend their time with. You need to keep an eye on your customers' behavior so you don't waste time on a platform where your target audience isn't active.
3) Establish your metrics and KPIs
Regardless of your goal or industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Instead of focusing on futile metrics that don't help measure business performance or health, dig into data that directly aligns with your goals.
Representative indicators for measuring social media marketing results are as follows.
- Reach: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
- Clicks: This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign are essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
- Engagement: The total number of social interactions is divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
- Organic and paid likes: Beyond a standard “Like” count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
4) Competitor Research
Do your market research to get to know your competitors and take the time to understand what they are doing well or are not doing well. Competitor research will give you a good idea of what the industry expects of you, so you can set your own social media goals.
5) Create engaging content
With so many companies around the world doing social media marketing, most social media users have probably seen content from relevant businesses. So, you need content that makes users want to hit the “Follow” button and receive news about your brand.
6) Organize a content calendar
Create a social media content calendar for planning content uploads, tracking published content, and collaborating with multi-departmental teams. The social media content calendar is even more useful if you manage multiple social media accounts. A social media content calendar lets you efficiently do the task of publishing content, managing content across platforms, and deciding what content to post to each account.
5. Social Media Metrics
It is also very important to see how social media marketing has been done and what results it has produced to meet your business goals. To figure this out, you need to track every post on every social media you're using. Social media marketing metrics are data related to the content's success and the impact that content has on customers across multiple platforms. The important metrics to track on social media are many other than the ones mentioned earlier, and may vary by platform.
- Engagement: This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your social media posts. There are also platform-specific types of engagement such as "Saved" posts on Instagram and "Pinned" posts on Pinterest.
- Reach: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
- Followers: This is the number of people you have on your profile who have clicked your "Follow" button and regularly see your content in their feeds.
- Impressions: This is the number of times a post from your profile or page is seen, whether or not your audience members click on it. This is often what happens when someone is scrolling through their newsfeed, but not clicking on anything.
- Video views: On Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views each gets.
- Profile visits: The number of people who have opened your social media page is your number of profile visits.
- Mentions: This is the number of times your profile has been mentioned by audience members in their posts.
- Tags: This is when your audience adds the name of your company's profile or your hashtag to another post.
- Reposts: This is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.
- Shares: These are the posts your followers and audience take from your profile and share with their network.
Just like generating marketing leads and increasing conversions, social media marketing can also create content with appropriate strategies according to the purpose, and check the metrics to determine the effectiveness of the content.
If you're still unsure of what to do, talk to a consultant.