Social Media Marketing
(SMM)
What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The use of social media sites to connect and interact with your audience to develop your brand, boost sales, and drive organic traffic is collectively known as social media marketing. This activity entails creating engaging content for your social media accounts, listening to and involving your fans, examining your results, and running social media ads. Facebook, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat are the most popular social media sites at the moment. Here’s everything you need to know about Social Media Marketing:
How can Social Media Marketing help your business?
Today businesses use social media extensively to promote their content and boost sales. Social media has evolved into much more than just a platform for sharing information. New-age entrepreneurs are leveraging it in a variety of different and productive ways. For example, a company concerned with what people are thinking about its brand can track social media interactions and respond to specific campaigns through social media listening and engagement monitoring tools. A company that wants to understand how it's faring on social media can evaluate its scope, communication, and sales with an analytics tool (social media analytics). If a company wishes to reach a specific section of people on a large scale, it can run highly targeted social media advertisements (social media advertising). These are sometimes referred to as social media management as a whole.
Boost Brand Recognition with Social Media Marketing
Over 3.7 billion people use social media. Because of the sheer number of people who are constantly signed in to these sites, it's easy to see why ensuring your company is posting content related to your products/services, apart from relevant information about your business through one or more platforms, will help you boost brand awareness.
Social media has also been shown to increase brand awareness by boosting interaction rates. Comments, likes, shares, and re-posts are examples of social engagement. It can also help you raise brand awareness by driving traffic directly to your website. Be sure to include direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and articles to encourage this.
How to start Social Media Marketing
Before jumping straight in and posting something on social media, to get the right strategy for Social Media Marketing, the first thing you need to do is take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What are your business objectives? What role can social media play in achieving them? Some enterprises use social media to raise brand awareness, while others use it to boost website traffic and sales. The power of Social networking can also be leveraged to help you build a community around your brand and act as a customer service platform for your users.
On what social media mediums do you wish to concentrate your efforts? Facebook, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Tik Tok, and Snapchat are the major social media sites where you can establish a presence. Tumblr and Anchor are also examples of smaller, up-and-coming portals on social media platforms. When you're first starting, it's better to concentrate on a select few channels where you believe your niche audience is active rather than trying to be all over the place.
SMB Tip:
Need some help finding the most important social media and review platforms for your business? rankingCoach 360 conducts a full digital marketing audit of your website and offers professional step-by-step video tutorials that tell you which local directories, review and social media platforms your business needs to be in.
Get my FREE digital marketing site audit now
Developing a strategy for Social Media Marketing
To develop an effective social media marketing strategy you need to ask yourself these questions:
- Who is my target audience?
- What kind of content would be most appealing to this audience?
- Does the content have to be informative or entertaining?
- Which medium of content should I use? Will videos or written content be the most likely to create engagement?
Creating a plan for Social Media Marketing
The first step in developing a social media marketing plan is to identify your customer personas and intended audience so you can cater to their specific needs and interests. To do so, consider who you're trying to meet and why, as well as how you'd categorize them as a group. Suppose you sell trendy yoga pants and joggers. In that case, you might classify your target audience as millennials who enjoy wearing fashionable athletic apparel regularly — a style known as athleisure. You must decide which content will be the most appealing to this audience. Creating relevant content for this audience will keep them engaged and coming back for more.
Creating schedule for Social Media Marketing
Using a social media management solution is one of the simplest ways to ensure that your content is shared as intended. You can use these tools to write captions, spruce up raw images and videos, and plan posts ahead of time. They also help you to share your content regularly, keep track of all your past interactions, and to measure engagement. Social media management software helps you to maximize the effectiveness of these activities whilst saving you time.
Sharing a blog post, a picture, or a video is all it takes to publish content on social media. It may feel very similar to your personal social media pages, but you shouldn’t use it in the same way: producing and publishing content on the spur of the moment, you should prepare ahead of time. You must strive to publish quality content your audience enjoys at the right time and pace to ensure boost your social media reach. This will also save you time.
Choosing the best social media platform for Social Media Marketing
As a social media marketer, you must decide which channels you will use to distribute your content. When it comes down to deciding which social media channel you should use, the answer will depend on your business and its target audience, for instance, LinkedIn is very good for the B2B market and recruitment companies. Up and coming social media channels like TikTok are great for marketing products that appeal to a teen audience.
Creating engaging social media content
With billions of people using social media around the world, there's a good chance that at least some of your fans — or those who are viewing your profile — have seen your rivals or other businesses in your industry's material. That's why you need engaging social media content to make your business stand out and give people a reason to click the "Follow" button and engage with your brand. Get your existing clients and partners to help through collaborations, re-posting and mutual tagging. Make the most of the special features of each individual social media platform offers. For instance, you can use Facebook Live to share the most up-to-date information about a product release or to launch a giveaway. Also, don’t forget to monitor what your rivals are sharing to stay ahead of the latest marketing trends in your industry.
SMB Tip:
If you are a small business owner, you almost certainly don’t have enough time to run your business whilst tracking your brand and its social media presence across the internet by yourself. Fortunately, there are automated social media monitoring tools like those found in rankingCoach FREE and rankingCoach 360 which track your brand and its competitors' presence for you and always keep you updated.
Get your FREE competitor social media tracking tool now
Listening & Engagement with Social Media Marketing
As you increase your business’s following on social media following, you will also increase the number of people talking about and engaging with your brand. These followers can leave comments on your social media posts, tag you in their posts, or send you direct messages.
They might also discuss your brand on social media without informing you. Consequently, you'll want to keep an eye on what's being said about your brand on these sites. If these comments are positive you should take the opportunity to show your appreciation, this often leads to even more customer interaction and positive feedback that boosts your brand's online reputation and attracts more customers to your business. Alternatively, you can also use it to assist and fix a problem before your reputation and brand are damaged.
SMB Tip:
Successful online businesses don’t do social media listening manually, they use social listening tools to help them. These social marketing tools used to be too expensive for SMBs but these days you can do social media listening for free with rankingCoach FREE. The app monitors your business and its competition across social media platforms.
Get the FREE app for social media mentions of your business
Analytics for Social Media Marketing
It’s important to know how your social media marketing strategy is going, whether you're publishing content or using it to improve engagement. Did you reach out to more people this month than last month? In a month, how many positive mentions did you get? How many people used the hashtag for your brand in their social media posts? The social media sites themselves offer some of this data at an elementary level. You can also use the wide variety of social media analytics tools available to get more in-depth analytics or to compare your progress across different social media channels.
Get FREE social media
performance app
Advertising with social media
If you have more money to invest in your social media marketing, social media advertising is a fantastic option to go with. Ads on social media can be a great way of expanding the reach of your Social Media Marketing. Nowadays, social media ads are so precise that you can target specific ads very effectively. These groups can be made up of a multitude of different preferences, lifestyles, and demographics. You can use these social media advertising platforms to make multiple changes in one go, automate tasks, and optimize several different social media campaigns at once.
Increasing sales with Social Media Marketing
Since you're marketing to people who have chosen to connect with you by following your account, promoting and sharing your products on social media is an easy way to maximize lead generation, clicks, and sales.
Here are 5 ways you can use social media to increase your lead generation.
- Launch contests and giveaways on your social media pages for your guests and followers to enter.
- In the bio parts of your profiles, give links to your website and deals.
- Make new product/service announcements and include updates or information about the exciting news on your business by hosting live videos.
- Run a social media marketing campaign.
- Do you know that your social media accounts can also be used for selling goods? On your Facebook or Instagram, for example, you can unlock the Shop Section or the Shopping feature. It enables your visitors and followers to view details such as price, content, and size by clicking on items you've shared in posts. Visitors can then quickly complete the checkout process on the website and purchase the product directly from you.
Nurturing Client Relationships with social media
You can establish long-term relationships with social media followers by maintaining regular engagement. This can be accomplished by communicating with your social media audience through your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and offering any assistance they might require on a regular and timely basis.
This can also be a great source of crucial feedback for your business. You can use it to reach out to customers to resolve issues and create engagement with promotions, competitions, and offers.
Social Media Marketing & Competitor Monitoring
Social media is a perfect way to keep track of your rivals, whether it’s in terms of their social media strategies, the goods they're advertising, the campaigns they're running, or the amount of contact they have with their followers. Social networking enables you to see what does and doesn’t work for your competitors, allowing you to work out the best approach for your own strategy. Finally, monitoring your rivals' social media pages is a great way of ensuring that your own content is always the best and always stands out.
SMB Tip:
Tracking your competition is a crucial part of digital marketing. Not just on social media but also across review websites and search engines. If you aren’t tracking your competition you are missing out on one of the most important ways of improving the effectiveness of your site’s digital marketing activities. Doing this doesn’t even have to cost you a penny. Digital marketing solutions like rankingCoach FREE allows you to track your competitors across these platforms without costing you a penny.
The final word on Social Media Marketing
As you have seen, Social Media Marketing is a key part of modern Digital Marketing. It is a powerful way of attracting new customers and building long-lasting positive relationships with existing customers. To get the best out of Social Media Marketing you need to create a strong presence that supports the key messages of your brand, you also need to monitor mentions and reviews of your business to encourage the best possible response from your audience. This will bring more customers to your business and enhance your online reputation.
