Your social media marketing strategy can make or break your business and its reputation, so it’s important to optimize it and make sure it’s effective. Don’t want to be left in the dark about all the latest social media trends? With these seven ways to optimize your social media marketing strategy, you’ll be able to stay on top of all the latest developments in social media marketing and maximize your reach, engagement, and conversions on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Social media marketing is the use of various social media platforms to connect with your audience to increase sales, drive website traffic, and build your brand. This includes listening to and engaging your followers, publishing appropriate content on your social media accounts, running social media and analyzing your results, listening to and engaging your followers, and running social media advertisements.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is using social media platforms to connect with your audience (customers) to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In simpler words, Social Media Marketing is all about advertising & promoting a brand and product on various social media platforms to boost sales, drive more website traffic and build brand authenticity. This involves publishing content on your social media profiles, assessing results, running social media campaigns, and listening to and engaging with followers.
Today, the objective of numerous social media platforms is past exchanging messages with friends. Social media marketing or SMM has become a dedicated online strategy for businesses. Nowadays, there are even companies offering social media marketing services. With the constant rise in the use of the internet and increasing smartphone penetration, marketers cannot risk ignoring the workings of social media to connect with their target audience.
5 PILLARS OF Social Media Marketing
Social Strategy
If you are planning to publish something on your social media profile/s, then the first thing we will suggest is to create a social strategy. To create a customer-oriented strategy, you need to have clarity regarding a few things, like your goals, your choice of social media platform and the type of content that can draw in your audience.
Planning and Publishing
Publishing informative & attractive content can be as simplified as sharing pictures or videos on your personal social media account, but if your objective is to promote your business or product on social media then you must focus on creating a strategy for your posts. You should focus on things like:
- Assessing the reach of your post
- Check if your post is engaging enough or not
- Creating your social media posts carefully
Listening or engagement
In the initial phase, your business page might not have a lot of followers who will interact with you through direct messages and comments, but when you start posting regular and engaging content, you might experience a rise in the number of interactions. When your followers grow, you might notice that they will start communicating with you through comments, direct messages and even tag you in their social media posts. If you are consistent in posting engaging content then there is a possibility that they might even start sharing your content on their profiles.
Always pay attention to your audience by checking your direct messages and comments. If they are facing some issue or have a complaint then try to solve it and if they are giving some positive feedback or compliment regarding your brand and product then appreciate them.
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and Reporting are one of the main metrics of every online marketing channel. If you own a business page and consistently post content on it, you should have knowledge of how a specific post or your page is doing. Every company is in need of some report that can help them analyse the following:
- If their post has surpassed last month’s reach or not
- Cumulation of the number of positive mentions they get in a month
- The number of users that use their hashtag and/or company name
- How many users share, comment or like their post, or in simple words, interact with them
- If there is an increase in the number of followers compared to last month
Advertising
One of the well-known aspects of social media is social ads. If and when you are ready to invest in social media, make use of social ads in order to spread awareness regarding your brand as it will help you increase your reach to the maximum number of users possible and display ads to your targeted audience.
Benefits Of Social Media Marketing
- In a highly competitive business environment, it becomes difficult to stand out which is where social media comes in by helping you develop a dedicated follower base, improve your visibility, and promote your products to them with ease.
- The digital world is borderless by its very definition. With the help of social media marketing, you get access to the global market, allowing you to engage with more than just your local, regional, and/or national audiences allowing you to widen your horizons.
- Finally, social media marketing helps you achieve your business goals by attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, increasing sales, and earning profit.
- Cost-effectiveness is one of the most significant benefits of using social media marketing. Digital marketing is a very affordable tool in comparison with the thousands and lakhs of rupees that brands usually spend on print articles, billboards, and television real estate.
- Since social networking sites, open doors for personalized interactions, tasks like solving queries and getting feedback tend to become untroublesome. You can provide improved customer support and better service quality, resulting in brand loyalty and meaningful customer relationships.
- Social media marketing can prove to be a beneficial tool for bringing more visitors to your company website. If you offer high-quality and relevant content to your audience and potential customers, you will be able to generate more organic traffic without paying extra for digital ads.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Create a personalized experience for your customers
Chatbots are not only beneficial for automating certain everyday tasks, but if implemented properly, your chatbot will enable you to create a more customized experience for your customers. To implement this social media marketing strategy, you must stop linking your advertisements only to your landing pages and create ads that take your audience to a Messenger window with the chatbot.
Start using chatbots
You may have already heard this one but chatbots are in demand right now. It is the one digital tool that can help communicate and solve issues for your customers without the need for any human interruption. Chatbots also include platforms that consumers find more comfortable interacting with via social media. Platforms like Chattypeople make it rather easy to amalgamate an AI-powered chatbot into your social media strategy.
Use brand advocates
Your best tool for promotion is the people who love your brand so instead of focusing all your efforts on finding new customers, you can simply leverage your current ones, which would require relatively lesser effort on your part. In addition to your current customers, you could use your employees. If you wish to implement this social media marketing strategy by using your employees as brand advocates, you must:
- Formulate social media guidelines specifically for your brand.
- Appoint a leader for each section of your social media advocacy plan.
- Track the right data to pinpoint areas with a scope of improvement and those that are doing well.
Create profiles on the relevant channels
Today, people aim to reach as many people as possible by creating profiles on every social media platform made available to them. Unfortunately, that mindset, will not draw in enough of your chosen target audience. This is why it is important that you look at your buyer personas when selecting your social media channels as a part of your social media marketing strategy.
Create a community for your audience
Although “followers” and various other such metrics are crucial, they are not the sole factors responsible for social media success. You need to show personality by inculcating humour and emotions into your posts so that it makes your brand more relatable to the audience and convinced that you are not a robot. If your customers come across the same types of posts, again and again, they will eventually lose interest in what you have to offer.
Establish a social media budget
Social media platforms are one of the many forms of marketing. Allotting the right budget for your social media activities is important to your success. Not just that, making use of that budget with the right strategy in action is the most cost-effective way to reach your chosen target audience. As social media is used on a much more personal level as well, you will also notice that with this social media marketing strategy, you can make a much deeper connection with your customers.
Tell a story by going live
Your content should tell the story of your brand as a whole. You must be confused as to why not provide real-time updates on what’s happening with your audience. Apps like Facebook and Instagram among other platforms, have created their live streaming features, something that is not yet being used to its full potential by big brands.
Brighten up your profiles with a diverse content strategy
People respond to fun videos, good imagery, and some interesting podcasts every once in a while. Choose your content by using these media options regularly. Your pages will look bland if all you post and share is text and no pictures or videos. So make sure to use other forms of media to get your audience’s attention. This is also a great way to add some personality to your brand. Many social media marketing companies can help you with the decision making here.
Businesses worldwide are slowly becoming more preoccupied with collecting customers on their social media platforms rather than their websites. By following the 8 social media marketing strategies outlined above, you’ll not only set yourself up to compete with well-established brands but also create a social media plan that will withstand the test of time.
With all being said, social media marketing is a dilemma with some of the best features. It offers a personalized experience for all customers, while also helping the brand establish international connections. It creates a localised yet contemporary experience in the app while keeping the content conversational globally. This is the best way to increase revenue and investment in this modern world.
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