What Is Social Media Marketing Strategy
“If a business decides that social media marketing is a necessity for it, then it will need to know what it is”.
What is Social Media Marketing (SMM): Social media marketing involves the use of various social platforms, particularly Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest etc. to reach out to your target audience.
“It is the most significant change in marketing in the past decade and has transformed marketing from a cost center into a profit center,” says David Friend of Forbes.
We will discuss the below mentioned topic for our better understanding on SMM:
- Difference between marketing and advertising
2. Why businesses need SMM ?
3. Types of SMM
4. Mistakes by bussiness in SMM
5. How to tackle mistakes in SMM ?
6. How to make money from SMM ?
7. What is a SMM agency ?
8. Role of SMM agency in your business
9. Key players of SMM
10. Final words
Difference between Marketing and Advertising: While advertising gives you a huge reach and a platform to be seen by a huge number of people; Social media marketing aims to reach a targeted group of people who are active on social platforms.
Why Social Media Marketing Matters to a Modern Business: The following points will signify the importance
(1) Reach and the Audience Size — It may not be that the person viewing the advertisement visits the company website and buy the product/service, but they at least give a glance at the advertisement. In other words, you are also able to convert the people who view the advertisement into people who visit the website.
(2) The Way you Market It — On one hand, it is working in a way that is a little similar to advertising, but on the other hand, it is much more dynamic. This means that you can send out multiple messages and attract a different set of people to your website.
Different Types of Social Media Marketing: An effective social media marketing campaign provides you with a greater sense of social relevance, boosts your brand visibility, and ultimately helps you to generate more leads. The most common social media marketing strategies are:
(1) Micro-Blogging: Micro-blogging is a great tool that allows to share short, easy-to-digest content that keeps audience engaged and interested. Used by publishers to showcase their journalism, this involves social media users following or interacting with a specific handle and posting articles on the social network.
Example — One of the best tools you can use in this space is the “Twitter hashtag”. It enables you to share your content and boost your reach. If you use a hashtag that is relevant to your industry, you will find that this tool increases your social following. However, keep in mind that users will search for your hashtag on Twitter. You should find a hashtag that is relevant to your industry so that it is easy for your audience to search for your content.
(2) Audience Targeting: Social media users are specifically targeted by advertisers based on the platforms they use to engage with audiences and the content they publish on these platforms.
Example — Facebook provides brands with a way to target their audience by providing custom audiences, offering useful tools like the Social Ads Manager and the Audience Insights. This allows you to ensure that you are following your audience members based on their profession and interests.
(3) Product Reviews: Social media users read reviews written by real customers and customers who post these reviews have an opportunity to interact with the reviewers and share their views with the rest of their followers.
(4) Social Media Engagement: It helps increasing the exposure of your brand, and can help to create a sense of community amongst your followers. A great way to boost engagement on social media is to focus on your brand or the keywords you want your audience to search for.
Example — People can easily find a running shoe brand on Twitter if they are searching for “running shoe”. By creating a brand account on Twitter, you can use the “tweet to follow” feature to invite your followers to share their opinions. It is important to create a sense of community on social media so that your audience members feel like they are a part of your community.
(5) Sales and Marketing: Social media allows businesses to interact with their customers, both in real-time and non-stop, thereby providing a platform to provide customers with solutions for problems they encounter.
(6) Share your Marketing Plan: Various social media platforms enable you to build relationships with your audience and build a brand.
Example — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Snapchat.
(a) Facebook offers various services including social targeting, ad serving, and customer data analytics that allows businesses to reach out to potential customers.
(b) LinkedIn provides businesses with the opportunity to build a profile and find qualified customers.
© Pinterest allows businesses to create interesting content and display relevant products to their audience.
(d) YouTube provides a platform to showcase your product and share your knowledge with your audience.
(e) Instagram allows businesses to build relationships with their audience through curated images and stories.
(f) Snapchat is a free app that allows you to send messages that self-destruct in 24 hours. It allows businesses to provide Snapchat filters to their audience, as well as live capture of events for sale.
Common Mistakes by Businesses on Social Media Platforms: Marketing experts say that one of the biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to social media is failing to differentiate between marketing and advertising. Marketing experts also say that businesses tend to spend a lot on advertising while neglecting to do all the necessary marketing required for their products.
How to Tackle the Issue/Common Mistakes: There are numerous ways in which you can attract new customers and engage your existing customers. These include:
(1) Social Media Contests: Setting up contests for customers to win a product or an experience will help your business build a good brand.
Example — A Facebook contest can offer prizes or a free product or an experience to the winning customer.
Instagram has a daily hashtag that can be used to generate an image that users can choose to use to follow your business. An opportunity to win a free movie ticket can be used to attract more customers to your Instagram account.
A Snapchat contest offers a chance to win a Snapchat branded event. It is easy to create your Snapchat contest in a matter of minutes, and it can offer one or more opportunities to win an experience or a product.
(2) Conversion Metrics: A key aspect of a successful social media campaign is customer conversion.
(3) Events: These are media-rich activities that provide customers with the opportunity to win free products, vacations or to attend a consumer convention.
(4) Recipes: These are relatively cheap forms of customer acquisition. Many consumers find them a convenient and cost-effective way of getting products.
(5) Influencer Marketing: These are opportunities that allow a company to gain the attention of influential people in your industry. Brands can get visibility by creating an influencer partnership.
(6) Testimonials: Testimonials are created to showcase what the customers think about your products or service.
(7) Social Media Advertising: This is a popular form of marketing, and it is one of the best ways to reach out to a larger audience. It is also a good way to spread the message around.
(8) Advertising: This form of marketing helps you increase brand awareness. It also allows you to convey a brand’s message to consumers. However, you should avoid expensive ads on social media. It is best to use customer-specific campaigns to focus on building trust with customers and prospects.
(9) Online Coupons: It is best to include discount codes on all of your social media posts.
(10) Campaigns Generating High Returns: In case you want to use social media to promote your business in the right way, certain tactics can help increase your ROI on social media. You can create different kinds of campaigns to ensure that you reach out to potential customers in a way that suits your budget and target market.
How to Make Money off Social Media: Social media provides some users with a unique opportunity to make money while using their accounts. If you have a significant enough number of followers on each social media platform you can follow them and get paid for doing so. You can also monetize your professional accounts to allow people to post content on them for you.
Another way that you can make money is through affiliate marketing. This means that you work with a merchant and promote their products or services for a fee.
What is a Social Media Agency: Social media is all about social interactions. It is created for people to interact with one another. So, social media agencies are experts in creating a platform for social interactions to happen. This is achieved by setting up websites, creating pages, forums, groups, and other social media channels.
The social media agencies are hired by businesses that can’t create social media websites on their own. These companies set up the sites for the businesses while the businesses will run the social media campaigns.
Role of Social Media Agency: It is much like a digital marketing agency. The main difference is that it is meant for a business that is already established. In other words, you will see that there are fewer agencies hired for this service. Another difference is that an agency will take care of all the administrative tasks and infrastructure related to running social media campaigns and engaging with your target audience.
Example — The job of a social media agency is to pay for the Facebook and Twitter ads while it is the job of the business to build the social profiles and create pages for its target audiences.
The agency will also be able to set up an automatic follower of page system, assign social media tags to the audience profiles, and monitor the social media posts and audience engagement regularly.
The other important job of an agency is to promote the social media sites and collect traffic and target new people to your website.
The main difference is that an agency will handle all the administrative aspects, setting up the sites and creating the social media pages for you while the business will need to handle the content creation, audience engagement, and promotion of these sites and social media channels.
As you can see, social media can be either a lucrative profession or a useless one, depending on the way you choose to go about running your social media campaigns. The reason is that every social media user has to pay for the service while the service is provided by social media agencies. A lot of businesses cannot afford to hire an agency for such a big task.
Social Media Platform Key Players:
(1) Facebook — Used for most forms of direct marketing. Offers various services including social targeting, ad serving, and customer data analytics that have helped brands establish and retain an online presence.
(2) Twitter — Enable you to connect with your audience and enhance your business exposure, allows businesses to build a brand and gain visibility to promote their products.
(3) LinkedIn and Instagram — Serve as the go-to platform for the creation of thought-leadership and professional networks. An application used by businesses to promote their products and services.
(4) Pinterest — A visual medium that makes it the perfect platform to reach out to the audience who have an interest in DIYs.
(5) Snapchat — Provides a rich toolset that allows businesses to reach out to their audience through curated lenses and stories.
(6) Google — Offers tools such as Adwords, Adsense, Admob, and AdSense Plus that allow businesses to maximize their advertising spend.
and many more in the list;
Conclusion: Social media marketing is the best way to acquire new customers, as it is cheap and easy to create unique content regularly. In the digital age, social media campaigns have become popular, and they are one of the best ways to grow your business. So, don’t overlook the social media marketing strategies defined above as they can drive your business to a positive direction.
Also Read:
1. Unique Small Startup Business Ideas
2. Factors Affecting Sales Forecasting In Sales And Marketing
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