Social media marketing is the use of social media websites and social networks to market a company’s products and services, in other words, it is the process of creating content for social media platforms to drive engagement and promote and make people aware of your brand.
It is about connecting with your customers and helping them understand your brand, product & service. Social media marketing success largely depends on your ability to find and make your target audience online happy so that they like your brand and share your stories with others too on social media.
Today's audience directly browses social media when they want to know more about an organization, service or product. 75% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are able to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
Benefits Of Social Media For Business Marketing
1. Effective price
Social media marketing can be done by anyone even without investing in expense costing. You can sign up or create new accounts for free of cost on almost all social media platforms. Being low cost is key as it helps you accomplish a greater return on investment and provide you with a massive audience.
2. Positive Customers
One best benefit of getting your business on social media is that your target audience is already spending time on social media platforms nowadays so you can easily interact with the audience and can directly convey your brand message, on a personal level and establish your business in the market.
3. Promotes Brand Loyalty
Having social media accounts makes it easier for your customers to search for you and connect with you which will help in improving customer relationships and loyalty. Social media doesn’t have any limits to just introducing your product or service in the market, it can also be used for promotional campaigns. A customer can also service channels and provide a guide & tour about the product where they can directly communicate with the other business.
4. Increases Website Traffic
One of the best benefits of social media is that it helps to increase your website traffic by just sharing your content on it, you are giving users a brief about your work or product etc. The more quality content will be and the consistency you maintain on your social account, the more inflow traffic you will generate while making conversion opportunities.
5. Improve Search Rankings
In calculating rankings, it has become an essential factor in social media marketing. The algorithm that assures a successful ranking keeps evolving period. Nowadays, it is not enough to simply optimize your website and update your blog content regularly.
6. Increase in Exposure
As when people start liking, commenting, and sharing your social posts, your content will get exposed to new audiences, their friends and followers and the flow will go on. Going viral takes this concept one step further to grow your brand. As people tend to share your content with their networking site, automatically your content spreads across the internet, getting thousands or even millions of shares, likes etc
Social media basics you need to get right
1. Research Your Target Audience
Different audiences prefer different social media platforms. The target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or a myriad of other factors. Depending upon what you sell, your target audience might be a niche or broader you have to choose your social media platform according to your business.
Identifying your target audience and their preferences, and tendency helps you pick the right social channels you can get your business presence on the four biggest platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn
These channels are used by millions of people so you will get to analyze things according to your preferences.
2. Create social media Accounts For Your business
You must create separate social profiles or accounts on each platform you prefer. Your main focus here is to maintain outstanding brand identity and post quality content. You want to keep your company account updated to attract customers. Add your professional business details. Use a real phone number, address, and website to increase credibility and create loyalty in the audience
While creating an account you should use a professional design logo, colors and content in your profile will establish consistency and make lasting impressions on all prospects.
3. Post Content Regularly
Posting content regular basics should have some terms to follow
Type of content
How often you’ll publish new posts on which platform
When to share your posts(Timing)
How to interact with your target audience on different social media
Content in different forms example: images, videos, or written
Keep trying new forms & terms for content you will find what is working for you and what doesn't
4. Analyze Your Progress
Checking progress is very important for marketing strategy. You should know if your content is working to drive the best results and if not then how you can improve it.
The most metrics you should keep track of for social media marketing are:
Post reach/impressions
Post engagements on all the social media platforms where you have an account
Account tags
Views
5. Goals
Without goals, it’s hard to know exactly how well your social media strategy is performing and whether your plans continue moving forwards or chuck somewhere in the middle.
Goals in marketing are important because they give the marketing plan and business direction, purpose and vision to work. By setting measurable goals, social media marketing teams can determine whether their campaign was effective and what type of impact they had on sales, performance or engagement.
When should you create your social media strategy?
Once you are done with your planning, goals, your audience, and your social media account, you can start your social media content strategy. Creating outlines of what content will go out on each platform during a set time. Creating a format works best for you, but spreadsheets are pretty common while using social media for marketing.
Blog posts, case studies, videos, images and infographics are great strategies you can reuse on different social media platforms.
Don’t forget about your goals and your target audience while making your strategy. There should be quality & quantity of content which will help your audience to know about your product & service and help them to use it in their lifestyle.