Social Media Marketing is an excellent tool in your business toolkit. It can significantly increase your chances of acquiring new customers, as long as you know your stuff. You need to pick your channels carefully. Create solid plans and catchy messages, all whilst staying updated with the latest trends. So, you want to nail Social Media Marketing for your business? Here’s how to make it work for you!
What is Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is a branch of Digital Marketing, connecting your business with a global community of social media users. As such, Social Media Marketing offers significant opportunities to promote your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. It’s the practice of creating and sharing content that shares meaningful information and facilitates two-way conversations.
Furthermore, engaging in Social Media Marketing provides purpose-built data analytics. These tools allow you to track your performance and find more ways to engage your audience.
Why is Social Media Marketing So Awesome?
Connection
A great advantage of using Social Media Marketing is its ability to connect you with customers over an infinite distance. Whether it’s video sites like YouTube, social hubs like Facebook (Meta), or micro-blogging on X (formerly Twitter), you’ve got a bunch of cool options to weave Social Media Marketing into your game plan.
Interaction
Like, share, subscribe – Social Media lends itself to dynamic social interactions and the potential for word-of-mouth recommendations. Your existing customers can become brand ambassadors, sending you new customers free of charge! Furthermore, Social Media Marketing is invaluable because these interactions can be measured.
Customer Data
Whether passively scrolling or actively participating in an online community, Social Media Marketing lets you collect data on your audience.
That’s because to do Social Media Marketing right, you need to create a plan. And an essential aspect of forming a plan is identifying your goals and understanding what success looks like.
Social Media Management tools can gather user information and sort data into insightful market analysis. You can then use this measure campaign performance and fine-tune social media strategies.
How Social Media Marketing Works
Social media has transformed how people connect and interact with friends, family and colleagues online. And amid these interactions businesses have vast opportunities to interject, get exposed and collect valuable data.
Social Media Marketing lets you to seize such opportunities through the creation and promotion of content. Content designed that’s designed to be meaningful and resonate with your audience which drives engagement. Actions that in turn allow you to extract geographic, demographic and personal information necessary for refining messaging and campaign performance.
But, this must all be done amid the business models of social media companies and how they work. Since social media users do not pay to use such services, how do social media platforms generate revenue? The simple answer to that lies in the adage that ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product’. Social Media platforms want to keep user attention for as along as possible, allowing them to serve more adverts. In this sense, social media platforms are akin to advertising agencies. This is great if you want to pursue a paid Social Media Marketing strategy.
Nonetheless, this is also something to be aware of when pursuing an unpaid social media market strategy… and where the coveted goal of going viral comes up. Traditionally, businesses and marketers are told to focus on the target audience. But when pursuing an organic social content marketing strategy the opposite is true. Social Media users want to be entertained when they are online. This is something social media platforms are keenly aware of.
Social media users can be split into six populations when considering what counts as ‘entertainment’. These populations are Fun, Feelings, Facts, Values, Imagination, and Action. You don’t need to target all of these populations. The key takeaway is that you need to engineer your content for mass appeal. This will help your content earn more likes, shares and saves. And the more interactions you get, the more likely it is for social media platforms to continue serving your content.
If your content resonates and gains more interactions, you might discover that one of your posts has gone viral. At which point, you can congratulate yourself for a job well done!
Social Media Marketing Action Plan
The effectively execute Social Media Marketing in your business you need to design a rigorous and targeted action plan. When creating your plan, here are some of the aspects you need to consider and address:
- Identify business objectives and make sure Social Media Marketing goals align.
- Learn as much as you can about your target audience. Develop customer personas that account for Demographic, Profile, and Psychographic data.
- Conduct competitor analysis. Assess what has worked for them and what hasn’t.
- Audit your current Social Media Marketing activities (If any). Consider what’s working and what isn’t.
- Create a calendar for the delivery of social media content. (Consider using a social media management system like Loomly or Sprout Social.)
- Create best-in-class content that resonates.
- Track performance and adjust your strategy as needed.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
When you stack Social Media Marketing up against traditional marketing, it’s clear that Social Media Marketing has some cool perks. For starters, it lets you connect with customers in two awesome ways: customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer interactions. So, instead of just checking how much people are buying (like in traditional marketing), Social Media Marketing dives deeper. It tracks customer value not just through their purchases, but also user sentiment and through product recommendations.
Tracking Metrics
When it comes to social media metrics, you need to track what matters to your audience. Focus on engagement, like those likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Look at impressions, which are how many times your post pops up. Consider reach or impressions, which accounts for how many times your post is seen. Check the share of voice to see how much your brand is being talked about online. Referrals show how people find your site. And lastly, track conversions to know when someone actually buys something from you.
But, there’s also a super important metric for your business to stay on top of: response rate/time. This measures how often you respond to user comments/messages and how long it takes for you to do so. Ideally you should respond to as many as you can, and as quickly as possible.
Need help managing your Social Media Marketing?
An essential part of managing successful communications is communicating with customers where they are at any given moment. And this is something Social Media Marketing excels at. Getting your brand in front of customers through social interactions and paid ads, enabling two-conversations with brands.
If Social Media Marketing for business is something you need in your communications strategy, reach out to Pipsqueak Media. Book your free consultation today!
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