There are multiple different ways to market your brand. Social media marketing is only one of them. But, today it is one of the most effective. This is because of the popularity of social platforms and the amount of Americans who use these platforms daily.
This marketing strategy is easy to get the hang of. Though it could feel overwhelming with the amount of platforms to choose from, and how to market on each one. In this blog post, we are going to get into further detail on social media marketing!
Social Media Marketing Breakdown
Like anything, social media marketing started off simple, then grew into something more complex and mature. So it was eventually broken down into five core parts. Look at the following as steps to the perfect social media plan.
1.Strategy
Before you jump onto a platform, take a step back and think about your strategy. Creating a strategy is an important process, so you need to start with highlighting your goals. What do you want the end result to be? Why are you bringing your advertising to social media?
Once you know your goals, and you should already know your audience, you can choose some platforms to focus on. It is best to only choose two or three to begin with, and you can grow from there. If you focus on too many at one time, your strategy will not be as effective. These platforms must contain a large portion of your audience.
Finally, with your strategy, you must choose what types of content you are going to post. What types of content will attract your audience the best. Remember that your strategy can always be tweaked and fixed at any time. You can try new forms of content, new platforms, and you can try to attract a larger audience.
2. Planning and Publishing
Posting to social media is simple. Although you must still plan out your posts and how you are going to promote and monitor them. Creating a thorough strategy is the beginning of your planning, but it doesn’t stop there. Before you go on to publish on social media, plan out your posts.
3. Listening and Engagement
After you publish your posts on social media, your audience will start talking. More people will gather to see your post and they will interact with your post with or without you knowing. It is important that you continue to monitor your posts and interact with comments and messages. Don’t forget to check your notifications, and if you can’t, there are engagement tools that you can utilize.
4. Analytics and Reporting
Monitor your posts and how many people are engaging with them. Social media platforms will give you the bare minimum analytics, but there are more measurements that you need. There are many analytics tools that you can use for this as well. Use the data that you collect from your posts to modify and update your strategy if needed.
5. Advertising
Social media advertising is the final step in your marketing strategy. When you have enough funds to grow your social media marketing further. Advertising through social media will help you reach a larger audience. If you move on to social media advertising, it is smart to consider the use of an advertising tool.
Benefits
There are multiple benefits that come with social media ads. This is one of the best advertising strategies that you could use. The following are five of the most common benefits of this strategy.
Increased Brand Awareness
Compared to other digital marketing strategies, social media is one of the most cost effective. It is used to increase your brand awareness and visibility. Coming up with a social media strategy will increase your brand recognition among your target audience. This is because you will be engaging with a lot of people. Social media is a large world with multiple different platforms and millions of users.
Beginning your social media strategy starts with creating your profiles, and sharing your content. The next step is to interact with your users on all platforms. Each post that you share will be introduced to a new audience, which will help attract more new customers to your brand, increasing your brand awareness.
More Inbound Traffic
Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. Users who search for your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. Without using social media for marketing, it may be more difficult to reach new customers. Every post you make is a new door to customers outside of your loyal circle.
As we mentioned above, social media is a very large world, filled with multiple different demographics. With all of these different ages and backgrounds comes different needs, which brings up the need to syndicate your content. Syndication just means that you must post the same content on multiple different platforms. This just helps increase organic traffic to your brand. For example, if you post the same blog link to Instagram, and then again to Facebook, you will reach teens as well as older social media users with the same link.
Improved Brand Loyalty
A main goal of most businesses is to develop loyal customers. Customer satisfaction as well as brand loyalty go hand in hand. So, it is important to engage with your customers on a regular basis. That will help you build a deeper bond with your customers. Along with improving your brand loyalty, you will also be improving your brand authority. When customers see your company posting on social media. Replying to customer and posting original content are two things that increase your credibility.
When you satisfy your customers, they will often post about your business on their social media. Having this happen to your brand will help to advertise your business, and can be a factor in increasing your brand authority. Buyers are posting, and other social media users are noticing, and hopefully give you a chance to impress them.
Improved Search Engine Rankings
Posting on social media is sure to get your website noticed, and hopefully increase some sales. But, there needs to be more effort than that in order to improve your search rankings significantly. That being said, although posting does help, SEO is what will get your webpage ranked at the top.
SEO, search engine optimization, is the process of getting web pages to show up in search engines like Google. Searches will be preformed with keywords that relate to the topic of their search. It is done to increase the visibility of a website in search results. It is an extremely important process if you want your webpage noticed. In order to give your webpage the best chance at ranking well, make sure that the content you are posting is original, high-quality, and focuses on your keywords. Think of what your consumers are likely to search when looking for products that you offer. Utilize those keywords and key phrases when creating your content.
Better Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is so important as well. What better way to increase your customer satisfaction than by interacting with them as much as possible. Social media makes it easy to do that. It also makes it possible for you to promote yourself as interactive with your customers. For example, when advertising your products and your website, mention the ability customers have to talk to an employee over social media accounts. Ensure that someone is constantly checking comments and messages in order to help customers when needed.
It is also important to comment back to your users. For example, if someone comments on your post, and they are upset about a product they received from you recently, you can reply to that comment. One of the most efficient ways to do that is by actually taking their problem to direct message. Maybe comment telling them to check their dm’s, where you have already reached out, acknowledged the problem and offered a great solution through the company. Social media is an amazing way to stay connected to your buyers and handle any problems they have head on!
Cost-effectiveness
Finally, as we have mentioned above, social ads are cost-effective. Signing up for platforms and creating your profile is free. Of course, you will have the opportunity to sign up for paid promotions, which is one way you can advertise your brand through social media. But these promotions are not something you must try out, and even if you do, they are not expensive. Being cost-effective is an amazing benefit to any digital marketing strategy. In the end, you will have made a profit while keeping your budget small and practical.
Conclusion
This marketing strategy is important to use for your brand. There are so many benefits to this strategy, and it is worth practicing. We hope to have helped you understand the basic points of social media marketing. Some of these points we have covered in other blog posts as well, so check those out on our website.
If you have any questions, contact us here.