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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instagram has around 400 million monthly users and is a visual medium for sharing photographs. You can use if for:

• Brand awareness.
• User-generated content.
• Relationship building.
• Advertising

Instagram doesn’t let you post links, but it is excellent for showing your products in use with real people.

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.

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.

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

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:

• Product promotion.
• Link building.
• Relationship building.
• More traffic.
• Increased conversions.