Want to get your brand noticed online? Start with a social media marketing strategy that sets you up for success
Social media marketing is all about getting your brand or business out there and interacting with your target audience. By using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can connect with potential and current customers alike and build a relationship that will last well into the future.
In this blog post, I'll go over the basics of social media marketing, share some strategies for overcoming social media marketing challenges, and provide a few resources to help you get started. So whether you're just starting out on your social media journey or looking to take your business to the next level, read on!
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to promote a product or service. There are several different types of ways that businesses can use social media marketing, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some things that fall into the category of social media marketing are things like: influencer marketing, contributing to online forums, content marketing, or building a following on popular social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook.
Social media marketing strategies are designed to increase your social media audience and drive awareness and traffic to your website or blog.
What is the benefit of social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a powerful marketing strategy that can be used to connect with potential customers and build relationships. It can be used to promote your business or product, and can be extremely effective in reaching a wide range of people.
Compared to other forms of marketing, social media marketing is cheaper, faster, and more targeted. And it is the only form of marketing that gives you access to track the every stage of the buyer journey - allowing for more personalized and targeted campaigns.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STATS
- As of January 2022, there are 4.62 billion total social media users globally - over half of the world's population.
- The average person bounces between seven different social networks per month.
- The amount of time adults use social media across all platforms is now higher than ever at 95 minutes per day.
Some key benefits of using social media marketing include:
1. Greater engagement with customers
Social media marketing is a great way for businesses to connect with their customers in a more personal way because of the wealth of data that you can gather from each platform. It allows companies to monitor customer feedback and engage with their audience on a personal level, fostering a strong customer relationship. This increased level of engagement leads to higher customer loyalty and retention rates.
2. Improved brand awareness
Not only does social media marketing allow businesses to engage with their customers, but it also gives them the opportunity to create a brand that is recognized globally, due to the fact you can share your message to a wider audience, quickly and easily.
Improved brand awareness through social media marketing is one of the major benefits, as customers are more likely to buy from a business that they know, recognize, and trust. Through social media marketing, businesses can connect with their target audience in a way that is relevant and useful to them.
3. Increased leads and sales
The most important of the benefits of social media marketing is the increase in leads and sales. If you are utilizing all of the tools available on social media platforms, you can easily track each stage of the buyer journey, giving you the ability to find any pain points and address them quickly.
In addition, by using the data gathered from these platforms, connecting with your target market is a lot less difficult. Which makes turning your leads into paying customers a piece of cake.
What are the best platforms to use for social media marketing?
There's no doubt that social media marketing is one of the best strategies for business growth. But which platform is best for your business? Its important to select the right one for your business, based on your audience and your overall business goals. Here's a quick breakdown of the most popular social media platforms:
If you are looking for a social media marketing platform that is user-friendly, Facebook is the one for you. It has a huge user base and is very popular among businesses too. You can create custom ads and target your audience perfectly with it. Moreover, Facebook is great for building relationships with customers. By connecting with them on Facebook, you can build trust and foster customer loyalty.
LinkedIn is the worlds largest professional network with over 800 million members. It provides you with a platform to connect with people in your field, target top-level professionals, and build networks of business contacts.
LinkedIn also offers powerful search capabilities that make it easy to find people you need to connect with. You can also join groups relevant to your industry and share your latest news and updates with others. LinkedIn is perfect for B2B selling, and businesses who want to target top-level professionals and reach out to customers, partners, and other business contacts.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with over 2 billion active users. Thanks to its wide reach, you can measure the success of your campaigns through likes, shares and comments - you'll be surprised at just how effective it can be when it is used right.
Be sure to create a business account as you will then get access to a bunch of other helpful tools like data insights about your posts and your audience.
YouTube
If you're looking for a social media platform that can really help your business grow, then you should definitely consider using YouTube. This popular platform is incredibly versatile and can be used to create videos for your business, marketing your products or services, or simply to entertain. And with video content quickly becoming a staple for any digital marketing strategy, YouTube seems like a pretty obvious choice.
Twitter is a great social media marketing platform for businesses of all sizes. It is fast-paced, easy to use, and allows you to easily connect with customers. By setting up a Tweets Audit, you can track your progress and measure the effectiveness of your social media strategies. Additionally, Twitter offers great marketing opportunities for product launches and other brand awareness activities.
However, it is unclear right now how Twitter may change in the future, given that the company was recently bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion dollars. So maybe don't put all your eggs into the Twitter basket for now.
TikTok
TikTok has become one of the best places for companies to go viral and get noticed fast with great short-form video content. It is the fastest-growing social network right now, with a staggering 105% user growth rate in the US over the past two years. It is a great platform to connect with younger audiences, encourage user-generated content, and partner with relevant influencers.
39% of Gen Z consumers say that their purchasing
decisions are influenced directly by what they see on TikTok.
How to create a social media marketing strategy
Creating a social media marketing strategy is essential for any business. Its important to target your audience and plan a strategy that will help you achieve your business goals. Consider using more than just one social media platform to reach more people with your message. Additionally, create a budget for how much you can spend on social media marketing and stick to it. By doing so, you'll ensure that your marketing is effective and efficient.
1. Set goals that make sense for your business
First and foremost, its important to set goals that make sense for your business. If you don't know what your business goals are, this is definitely something that you need to figure out because it will help give you direction and motivation. Plus, you are more likely to achieve your business goals if you actually sit down and make a solid plan on how to meet them! I suggest that you create goals that follow the SMART framework - meaning that they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
2. Take time to research your target audience
In order to make your social media marketing strategy effective, you need to have a detailed understanding of your target market – their wants and needs. This can be done by analyzing their demographics, interests and habits .By doing this, you will be able to create marketing strategies that are relevant and appealing to them.
3. Get to know your competition
Before you start marketing your business or product online, you first need to understand your industry and the competition in it. This will help you develop a strategy for how to beat them at their own game. Start by doing a competitive analysis of others in the same market to identify their current strategies for marketing, and what is working (and not working). This will also help you identify any gaps in your own strategy, or areas that you might have opportunity for part of the market that isn't currently being served.
4. Do a social media audit
Before you start marketing your business or product online, you first need to understand your industry and the competition in it. This will help you develop a strategy for how to beat them at their own game. Start by doing a competitive analysis of others in the same market to identify their current strategies for marketing, and what is working (and not working). This will also help you identify any gaps in your own strategy, or areas that you might have opportunity for part of the market that isn't currently being served. Hubspot has great step-by-step instructions for how to complete a social media audit.
5. Create and curate engaging social content
This is one the key steps in the process! Be sure to curate content AS WELL AS posting your own original content. You don’t want everything you post to be all about your brand, as counterintuitive as that may seem. But seriously, your business and brand will come off as a lot more likeable if you aren’t just posting promotional stuff about your business and posts bragging about your latest achievements. Don’t get me wrong, those do have a place in your social media feed, but it shouldn’t be the ONLY content that you post.
6. Create a social media content calendar
Creating a social media schedule or calendar is key to the success of your social media marketing strategy. That way you can plan out ahead of time what types of content you would like to share each month, and come up with strategies for how you will be promoting them. It is easy to find examples online for creating your social media content calendar so you don't have to start from scratch. My suggestions would be either the Hubspot template, or you can try using a social media management tool to help you plan and schedule your posts ahead of time. I personally would suggest Agorapulse for this, as it is simple to use but has many advanced features like creating custom client reports, in-depth analytics for all the social media platforms, and content approval workflows for larger teams. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than Hootsuite or Sprout Social, just sayin.
Keep in mind that consistency is key when it comes to social media marketing - if you maintain a consistent approach, your audience will be more likely to follow your lead. Finally, make sure that you are allocating enough time for social media marketing in your schedule as some of these tasks in the beginning may take longer than you originally had thought (at least that was the case for me!)
7. Measure your success and adjust accordingly
With social media marketing, it is important to measure your success in order to find out if what you are doing is actually working! You should be aware of the latest social media tools that can help you gain deeper insights into the data from your social media posts so that you can adapt your marketing strategy accordingly. By measuring key metrics such as likes, shares and comments, you'll be able to track the success of your social media campaigns and make necessary changes. Again, I can't recommend Agorapulse enough here - the detailed analytics it has can help you prove the ROI of your social media content without having to spend hours crunching numbers or using Excel spreadsheets. And who doesn't want that?
How to overcome social media marketing challenges
Challenge #1: Staying ahead of the trends
In order to stay ahead on the trends on social media, it's important to be actively engaged as to what others in the same industry or niche are doing so that you can make sure you are on the same level. You can even try looking at what other accounts are doing that aren't in your niche, as there may be something different or unique that could then be applied to your own posts. Another good way to stay ahead of the trends is to look at what is popular on Reddit. Explore the subreddits that are relevant for your industry and see what people are talking about. Lastly, you can use Google Trends to see what is currently popular for Google searches around the world.
Challenge #2: Quality vs. Quantity
This is one of the oldest debates for those in marketing, which is more important quality or quantity? I think that it is a bit of both - while you want to create enough content in order to stay relevant, you also want to make sure that the content you are posting is of great quality. I think the key thing to remember here is that you need to create a schedule that is going to work for you - if you are pushing yourself to churn out more content constantly, you will end up just burnt out, and your content quality is going to suffer.
It is also important to make sure your posts are offering something of value to your audience. So don't post just for the sake of posting something; think of what your audience would find valuable and interesting. This way, you will ensure that your target audience stays engaged and interested in what you have to say.
Challenge #3: Posting consistently
Social media marketing is all about building relationships with people and keeping them engaged, and as you've learned in this article, being consistent with your posting is key to achieving this goal. It's a great concept, but putting it into practice is something else entirely.
My number one piece of advice for this would be to not overstretch your resources when it comes to creating content - a.k.a. don't bite off more than you can chew. Maybe try starting with one social media platform at first, instead of trying to manage 4 or 5 social media profiles because if you end up feeling overwhelmed you likely won't feel motivated to create content for any of the accounts.
And of course, as mentioned above, be sure to create a social media calendar or schedule, and plan your content ahead of time. Many people even batch their content, and spend one day devoted to making a week or two's worth of content. That way, you won't be rushed and making things last minute, because that can cause your quality of content to suffer. By batching your content it makes the entire process a lot less stressful and also more time efficient.
Three tips to improve your social media marketing strategy
- Humanize your brand
- Interact with your followers
- Use the art of storytelling
The best social media tools for your business
Social media is a great way to connect with your customers and build relationships. However, social media management can become a very time consuming task if you don't know what you're doing. That's where the best social media management tools come in. They make it easy for you to track all your social media channels, post content that is relevant to your audience, and measure the success of your marketing campaigns.
Some of my favorite social media management tools are Hootsuite and Buffer. Hootsuite lets you manage multiple social media channels from one platform, and Buffer lets you schedule posts and track analytics. They're both great options for small business owners who want to get the most out of their social media marketing efforts. You can read more about my favorite tools for digital marketing here.
Social media marketing blogs you need to read
If you're looking for social media marketing advice that is chock-full of valuable information, then be sure to check out Agorapulse's blog. This blog is great for beginners AND experts, and covers everything from the content creation tips and social media strategy to the latest in marketing news and AI tools. Aside from their blog, you can also follow their social media accounts for helpful tips and tricks on how to grow your brand presence on social media.
Social Media Explorer is one of the best social media marketing blogs out there. It provides tips and strategies on how to best use social media for your business.
If you're looking to improve your social media marketing strategy, then Scott Monty's blog is a great place to begin. He covers everything from social media branding to effective strategies for promoting your business on social media platforms. His blog is definitely worth checking out!
Frequently asked questions
How often should I post on social media?
Really the answer to this depends on your particular business and what works for you and your audience. Ideally, for most businesses it is best if you can aim to post 3 times a week (per platform) and that is usually enough to still stay relevant to your audience without overwhelming their feed with your content.
What should I post about on social media for my business?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as social media content will vary depending on the brand and target audience of your business. However, some ideas to start are: offers and promotions, industry tips and tricks, meet the team posts, behind-the-scenes posts, and relevant news for your niche are all good ideas for content that can be used no matter the type of business.
What social media platforms should I use for my business?
Again, there is no cut and dry answer to this question as each business has different goals, strategies and audience demographics that should be taken into consideration. However, some general tips to get started include using social media channels that your target audience is more likely to use (for example, using LinkedIn for B2B selling, and TikTok for targeting younger generations.) Do your research before choosing what to use, and remember that building an audience on any social channel takes time, and doesn't happen overnight, so don't give up too soon!
TLDR?
Social media marketing is a great way to get your business more exposure without much of a financial commitment, but be sure that you utilize it correctly in order to achieve the best results. If you are looking for more information, make sure to check out the marketing section of my blog to get started on your social media marketing journey. If you have any questions feel free to give me a call or email and I will be happy to assist you in growing your business with social media marketing.
References
Gillis, Lynne, et al. IRI, 2021, IRI Report Understand Me, Don't Define Me, retrieved fromhttps://www.iriworldwide.com/IRI/media/Library/IRI-Report-Understand-Me-Dont-Define-Me.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2022.
Sprout Social, 2022, 41 Of the Most Important Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2022, retrieved from
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/. Accessed 13 June 2022.
DataReportal, 2022, Digital 2022 Global Digital Overview, retrieved from
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report. Accessed 13 June 2022.
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