What is Social Media Marketing?
Any marketing aims to connect with the target audience. Marketing for social media links with the target audience, and you benefit from:
• Increasing brand awareness and
engagement.
• More visitors to your website, staying longer
and returning.
• More sales to new and repeat customers.
Social media marketing involves publishing content and running ads on social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
As well as creating and publishing content, it is vital to study how the social media audience receives that content. You need to listen and engage with people to build relationships and deliver what delights and attracts them. You track your marketing plan for social media with reports and analytics generated by you and the social media platform.
What Is Social Media Management?
What Is Social Media Management?
Social media platforms attract an audience and millions of daily interactions. No marketing strategy is complete without knowing how to manage and present your online presence. Before marketing on social media, marketing wisdom said: Social media management is the process of influencing and controlling your appearance on social media platforms.
Why You Need to Hire a Social Media Management Company?
Why You Need to Hire a Social Media Management Company?
Maintaining a social media presence on one platform, let alone across all of them, is a time-consuming job that needs attention, creativity ad perseverance. Your team has these qualities but focuses on your business activities, instead of social media for a business. Hiring a social media marketing company leaves your expert team, focusing on your business activities. A social media marketer provides a professional team with the time, skills, and expertise to focus on your social media presence.
The benefits for you are:
• Time and cost savings by not diverting staff time into this activity.
• Consistent and relevant updates on your social media accounts.
• Better marketing as your offers and promotions get listed and noticed.
• Better customer services with prompt responses to queries and feedback.
• Representation and presentation of your brand and its benefits.
• Increase the pool of potential customers finding your website.
• Better recruitment by promoting job opportunities to a broader field.
Social media is where everyone looks for and talks about products and companies. If you are not in the market, social media feeds promote your competitors. Hiring a social media company keeps you in the game, performing at the top and generates valuable market information in addition to all the other benefits.
What Does Social Media Management Include?
What Does Social Media Management Include?
You know you need a professional social management team creating and enthusing your social media fans. Paying a company to manage social media is your best option for proven expertise, but what is social media marketing, and exactly are you getting for your money?
What Do Social Media Agencies Like Ours Do For You?
What Do Social Media Agencies Like Ours Do For You?
We tailor social media management for each client, so they get a bespoke arrangement that fits their needs, but the following areas form the core of the service:
• Defining and researching the target audience because it is all about the customer.
• Creating a strategic plan for marketing social media with target KPIs.
• Setting up and shaping your social media accounts to reflect your brand personality.
• Creating high performing advertisements that work across different platforms.
• Continuous activity throughout the year with meticulous calendaring.
• Creating and publishing platform-specific content with audience appeal.
• Engaging with your followers and answering their questions and queries.
• Getting you noticed and building the range of your influence in the social arena.
• Collecting the data, monitoring, and reporting on impact and achievements.
Everyone in the world is not your potential customer or business partner. The people you need to attract on social media are ultimately the ones that increase your bottom line by joining your organization, influencing buying decisions, and purchasing products and services.
You already have or can get plenty of information on your current customer demographics, location, and other useful defining characteristics. You can collect information from your website and more from your social media accounts.
Defining your ideal target audience into specific categories gives the first stage in creating a social media presence that attracts those people. As your activities expand, you can track success in increasing engagement and collect more data.
Part of researching your target audience is establishing:
• Preferred social media platforms for your target audience.
• Checking out your competition’s social media presence.
• Understand what your audience wants from its social media activity.
When you understand your audience, you can create a social media marketing strategy to reach them.
Strategic planning covers the basics:
• Goals – what you expect to achieve and the benefits.
• Actions – What you are going to do to achieve the goal.
• Tracking – set the criteria for successful outcomes and monitor
them.
To know where you are going, you need to know where you are starting with a social media audit. The audit establishes your baseline and the gap between what you have now and the place you want to achieve.
Your social media strategic plan will cover:
• Target audience
• Preferred social media platforms
• Competitor analysis
• Strategic plan for each platform
• Action plan and targets
• Budget
• Reporting
• Time scale
Strategic social media planning is as straightforward as any other business strategic planning.
Each social media account needs to be consistent with your brand image and personality but needs its defined purpose because they serve different audiences looking for different experiences.
You populate your social media pages with brand imagery and text, formatted to be mobile-friendly, and optimized to increase visibility and presence. This process involves creative styling and technical knowledge of operating different social media accounts.
As well as the initial setting up, we design the style of your social media for marketing campaigns – what content goes on which platforms, cross-linking where appropriate, and keeping the theme and the message consistent and in line with your overall marketing strategy.
Social media advertising uses sophisticated audience targeting to put your business in social feeds. It needs competent design and handling to be attractive and appealing rather than annoying and distracting.
Paid advertising goals include:
• More traffic – promotions and sales.
• Awareness – getting your name out there.
• Get the conversation started.
• Create a buyer funnel.
• Make more sales.
Different ads and different goals suit different social media platforms:
• Facebook – social reach and awareness building.
• Instagram – increase traffic and awareness.
• Twitter – more traffic and conversations.
• LinkedIn – establish a reputation as a niche leader.
• Snapchat – younger audience and brand awareness.
• Pinterest – selling and creating a buyer funnel.
We work with you to style the ads to achieve marketing goals and suit the social media platform and audience for the best return on investment.
A content calendar is an extension of your action plan it lists:
• Dates and times, you are going to post on a platform.
• Content type
The detailed social media planning is to provide consistent and even social media for marketing throughout the year and to make sure your content posts at the optimum time. The best time to post varies across the platforms, the week, and the time of day. Your pool of followers may be more active at different times on different platforms. Your content calendar positions you to post on the best day and at the best time to get notices.The content selection needs a portfolio of suitable content for education, information, and entertainment, along with business goal-specific material. Adding a scheduling tool to the calendar means you can efficiently create content in advance and release it at the best time and date.
What works on Facebook is not the same as the content that works on Snapchat or Twitter. Social media in marketing pays attention to and designs content that suits each platform. Your content needs to speak to your preferred audience. Communication means using the same language choices and cultural references. Humor and culture vary on a small scale from city to city as well as different generations. Not only do you need to speak to your audience, but you also need to talk to the platform’s audience. The same person has more than one media account, but the message they respond to on LinkedIn is different from the one that attracts them on Instagram. The content needs to suit the platform’s audience. Finally, the content needs to suit the platform style and content format.
If you make a presentation to an audience and someone comes you to you and says – I really enjoyed that, do you not make eye contact, ignore their smile and outstretched hand and walk off in the other direction? Of course not, it’s rude, and it does your reputation severe harm. So, when someone reaches out to you on social media? It’s difficult to answer all comments and posts and responses yourself, and there’s no need – a social media management company can manage that relationship by making eye contact, smiling, and shaking hands when necessary. As part of your social media management, they will make sure that the appropriate responses post in a way that grows your brand reputation and increases your engagement. Plus, they will flag up any customer feedback that needs personal attention from you or your staff team.
Growing the depth and size of your social media audience requires a focused strategic approach to each platform. Your social media marketing agency will cover creating appealing and relevant content that hits the spot on each platform. It sounds simple, but content creation is a subtle mix of material that is cute, funny, thought-provoking, attention-grabbing, emotionally arousing ideas and concepts with clever use of words in the ideal format. Sometimes all at once. Social marketing works for a purpose. Your aunt may love lizards in hats and have the number one spot on twitter for #lizardsinhats. Unless she’s selling hats for lizards or photography services to lizard owners, it’s achieving nothing more than giving her joy. Now spreading joy is a worthwhile social purpose but not necessarily making progress to a business goal. All your social media activity (even the lizard in a hat bearing your company logo) aims to increase your reach to achieve your business goals as defined by your strategic plan.
If you are trying to improve your marathon running time, you time your runs. Otherwise, you have no idea if you were running faster last week or if falling over that chair impacted your race time. You can guess, but you don’t know. To achieve your social media goals, you need measurement data and social media KPIs. There are hundreds of potential metrics. Which ones should you measure? Before collecting and reporting on metrics, first establish your business goals. A million followers are great, but is it meaningful? If your business target is 100,000 followers who ride a horse once a week, then the ten in a million is not the best result. For each business goal, choose the social media KPIs that tell you if you are achieving or exceeding your expectations. Keep it brief (two or three per goal) and keep it focused with excellent correlation. We can help you select the right metrics and report in a way that makes sense and tells you the whole story of your social media activity.
How Much Does Social Media Management Cost?
How Much Does Social Media Management Cost?
The cost of social media marketing depends on factors like:
• Budget for ad spend.
• Platforms serviced.
• Number of monthly posts.
• Special services – like boosted posts, trend promotion, optimizing.
Most social media management plans define monthly activity but include all the design, content, and response services. You get named professional dealing with your social media, and you can expect to pay between $1 -2,000 per month before advertising costs.
Marketing on Facebook
Marketing on Facebook
Facebook is excellent for the following objectives:
• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing website traffic.
• Engagement with your audience.
• Customer service
• Promoting products and Apps.
• Promoting visits to stores and offices.
• Paid ads.
• Building an email list.
Facebook appeals to a broad audience (all the demographics) and offers plenty of ad formats, including mobile-only ads, with images and videos.
Most people expect to find your business on Facebook with a regular update of new activities, fun facts, and offers.
Marketing on Twitter
Marketing on Twitter
Twitter is fast and instant from a user’s perspective. Twitter helps with your business objectives of:
• Establishing authority in your industry.
• Link building.
• Image management
• Fast communication for updates.
• Increasing traffic.
• Customer service.
• Collecting opinions.
• Researching trends.
Marketing on Instagram
Marketing on Instagram
Instagram has around 400 million monthly users and is a visual medium for sharing photographs. You can use if for:
Instagram doesn’t let you post links, but it is excellent for showing your products in use with real people.
Marketing on LinkedIn
Marketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is business Facebook with social networks depending on business connections rather than friends and family. Like most social media platforms, the edges between private and business lives tend to blur. LinkedIn helps you:
Recruit new staff.
• Build authority.
• Check out the competition.
• Sell business services.
• Build relationships.
Marketing on YouTube
If nothing else, YouTube is a valuable website tool letting you embed user-friendly content like instruction manuals and demonstrations on your web pages.
More product reviews and buyer’s guides are moving to video rather than static text and images. Video with a real person showing you what they are talking about appeals more to an audience as being more informative and engaging.
Business goals include:
• Increase conversions by demonstrating product usefulness.
• Build authority with tutorials and minicourses.
• Build customer relations with behind the scenes glimpses.
YouTube, with its easily accessible video format, provides marketing opportunities in a different way to the rest of social media and combines with other social media platforms and your web pages.
Marketing on Snapchat
Marketing on Snapchat
Snapchat is a way to reach a younger audience with time-sensitive and location-based events. You get a 24-hour window to display your visual content before it is gone. Marketing on Snapchat covers:
• Relationship building with a younger audience.
• Product launches.
• Sales events.
• Promotions
Marketing on Pinterest
Marketing on Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual medium where users curate the content that interests them. It is also a superb selling tool, and if you are in the online selling business, you don’t want to neglect a market where over 80% of users like to buy something they’ve spotted as a pin.
You get pictures, text, and links, plus great advertising space. Marketing on Pinterest gives you:
Social media platforms attract an audience and millions of daily interactions. No marketing strategy is complete without knowing how to manage and present your online presence. Before marketing on social media, marketing wisdom said:
If a customer has a good experience, they speak to one or two people, but if they have a bad one, they tell ten.
With social media, good or bad, people tell hundreds and potentially millions about their experience. Social media management is the process of influencing and controlling your appearance on social media platforms.