Social media marketing is not only a great tool for businesses but also a great tool for marketers. In this post, we will discuss how to use social media as a tool for marketing. We will also talk about some of the most important aspects of social media marketing. First, let’s learn
What is social media marketing?
In simple terms, social media marketing refers to all the marketing efforts done by using social media. Social media is not just a great tool for publishing your content, it can be utilized for running marketing campaigns, advertising, and even managing relationship with customers.
Do you need social media marketing for your business?
Now you might be thinking that you already have customers, so why do you need to social media marketing? Is it even worth the effort?
Well to answer that question let’s look at some numbers, Facebook has 2 Billion, Twitter has 330 Million and Instagram has 500 Million active users around the world.
At this point, the number should speak and you should realize that social media has become a part of people’s daily life, and it’s not going away anytime soon. By people, it means that your customers are spending a significant amount of their time hanging out on social media. It’d be foolish to not go live on social media losing the opportunity to acquire more customers.
Besides all these social media companies also provides proactive marketing tools and features that marketers other than that there are also multiple social media management tools as well to make your marketing activities even easier.
Why do you need a strategy and How to come up with one?
Social media is like a vast ocean. This means there are ample amount of opportunities for your business but it can also turn into a huge threat as your competitors are also there, also negative publicity AKA a digital wildfire can easily spread. Besides you also have to consider the rules and regulations given by these social media. So, in order to swim through these troubled waters, you must come up with a good strategy.
In this section, we’ll discuss the 8-step process of coming up with the right kind of strategy for your social media marketing.
Step-1: Set goals while keeping the marketing funnel in mind
Yes, you heard it right set goals. If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve your marketing is vague. So you gotta ask yourself why do you need to be on social media and answering this question will help you define the variable for the next few steps.
Your goal will depend on each stage of the funnel. So, understanding the funnel should give a clear idea about what you’ll be working on and how you can create content and run campaigns to archive these goals according to the funnel stage, and below are the all the funnel stages and the goals for them are defined to:
- Awareness: The Top of the stage of the funnel is awareness, at this stage, you wanna build brand awareness and increase traffic to your company website or press coverage. The primary goal at this stage is to make people aware of your brand’s existence.
- Engagement: At this stage of the funnel you want people to actively interact with your brand and start talking about it. The goal here is to increase conversations about your brand.
- Consideration: At the middle of the funnel is the consideration stage and the name defines the goal here. Your primary goal here is to make people consider your brand when purchasing a product and you wanna increase their consideration as much as possible.
- Conversion: Now we’ve reached the bottom of the funnel the conversion stage or otherwise known as the action stage. Here customers finally decide to buy a product or service after getting all the information and education from the previous stage and your primary goal here is to take action towards your brand and purchase from you.
- Loyalty or advocacy: The very bottom stage of the funnel is Loyalty or otherwise known as the advocacy stage. Here your customers become something more than just customers. Advocacy or loyalty happens when the customer is much more than just customers, they become fans at this point. So at this stage, your primary goal is to create a community around your brand and give your customers a place to speak proactively about your brand and spread that word of mouth. Because the voice of your customers is more valuable for your future customers than your own brand’s voice.
The goals you set for each stage of the funnel will help you determine the content you’ll be developing and the type of campaign you wanna run.
Step-2 Create your buyer persona
To become successful with a Social media marketing strategy you must successfully understand your customers. If you say that everyone is your customer let’s stop right here and clear this misunderstanding. Let’s use examples. For instance, the trend of wearing ripped jeans, Its probably the most popular among the Millennials and Generation Z, and if you offer ripped jeans to these generations they’ll most likely buy them depending on their taste, but if you’re trying to sell these same blue jeans to someone who’s 50 – 60 years old their generations clothing practice and taste doesn’t match with the idea of wearing Jeans that’s also ripped, and they’ll most likely not buy. This is just an example but you get the idea right! Your product or service may not be for everyone and this will be the case most of the time and that is why you must understand who your target audience is.
One way of trying to understand your target audience or customers is to build a number of audience profiles. Now, what is an audience profile? It’s a set of information about your audience that defines your ideal audience. This may contain:
- Personal Information: Age, location, education, marital status, family size, income.
- Activities: Their interest or hobby
- Pain points: The problems they’re facing, how they’re thinking of solving them.
- Use of social media: How they utilize social media and for what purpose.
Step–3 Understand the metrics to measure your goals
Now that you have set your goals and target audience it’s about time you need to understand and set how you’re going to measure your goals. Common misunderstanding people have about this is that people and marketers tend to use “likes” or “Reactions”, and “Retweets” as metrics to measure the goal. In the world of digital marketing these are called vanity metrics, having them is good but using them to measure your goals is not the best idea. Because the end of the “likes” or “reaction” doesn’t bring in new business.
To actually measure your goals you should use the following metrics
- Reach: How many people have seen your posts, and how many people viewed your ads.
- Clicks: Basically how many people clicked the link that is provided on your post or ads.
- Engagement: How many people engaged with your post or ad and left a comment or shared it.
Social media such as Facebook, and LinkedIn provides the sort of metrics that you’d want to measure, in fact, they also provide specific metrics that you should use to measure specific goals, and other than they also give your reports of these metrics so you get to know how you’re performing. You can also use Google Analytics for this purpose.
Step-4 Understand your competitors and what They’re doing
Now before diving deep into creating content you should understand what type of content is working in your industry and you don’t have to just create every type and format and execute them to figure out which one works.
Here’s a cheat code for you. Go ahead and look into what your competitors are doing and what results they’re getting. The catch here is that you don’t always have to start from scratch and learn from your own mistakes and successes you can just take a look at someone else’s and do better than them.
Yes! You heard it right “do better than them” not just copy what they’re doing. This you’ll give a better insight into what your customer is seeking, and you get a better idea of what’s working and what’s not. So you can optimize, and improve existing strategies.
Step-5 Start Creating Engaging Content Consistently and Publish them regularly
At this step, you start executing. You’ve set your goals, you know your customers, you know how you wanna measure your goals, and also know what type of content is favored by your audience. So it’s about time you start creating.
Your content on social media must hold these 3 characteristic
Engaging: Your content must appealing enough that be share-worthy or becomes a topic of discussion, this gives a boost to reaching your goals and also brings in new users to engage.
Consistency: Your content must possess a theme that represents your brand and convey a consistent message. Inconsistency may and will create a negative experience because people tend associate personality with brands, so establishing a brand voice by publishing trustworthy and consistent content will add authority to your brand and better experience for your audience.
Regularity: To get a space for your brand in the audience’s mind you must post regularly. Even posting very frequently may cause annoyance. So you wanna come up with the right frequency and balance it out.
And another thing to keep in mind is that while creating content you can’t just rely on one specific format or type of content, experiment and try out different types of content starting from Text-based content to Image and video or even audio.
Also, try scheduling them to keep a constant flow and publish content in a planned manner
Step-6 Be responsive
Don’t just start creating and publishing content like a machine. Evaluate the feedback your audience gives and respond to them.
Social media was created and is for people to communicate with each other. Your brand is not people. So you need to display as many human qualities as possible to successfully connect and win your audience.
Step-7 Asses the results and optimize
You’ve researched, you created and you executed so naturally, that the next thing to do is measure the results using the metrics that you set. At this point, you’ll understand how fruitful your efforts were by measuring the results, and based on the result you can improve how can yield even better results in the next attempt.
Step-8 Report the results
Well, social media is a great channel of marketing for many businesses, the superiors of your company may or will be interested to know how the marketing efforts in social media are working out.
Therefore communicate the result based on the metrics you set and share the ROI with the superiors.
