Social Media Marketing: How to do it, Types, Tools & Tips

Social Media Marketing Guide Definitions

Content

Context

For instance, you might have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, very few people are likely to see it. On Twitter, however, that same joke as a tweet might crush it.

The opposite is also true. Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead. And that brings us to hashtags.

Hashtags

By now, you probably know that hashtags are a very common tool that people use to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark it as part of current trends.

Engagement

This is a general term referring to how people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a reaction, a comment, or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.

1. Set Your Goals

You might have an ecommerce website, and your main goal is to boost sales. Or, you might own a blog, and you need traffic from social media. Or you just want to be top of mind and increase brand awareness.

a. Increase sales

For an ecommerce business, the most important goal can be to increase sales. Remember to be specific. Go for an approach like: “Increase sales that come from social media by 30% in 2021.” You can also split this main goal into smaller goals to measure the performance of each social media platform.

Take Vans, for example. They created a social media marketing campaign and offered seven days of exclusive deals for all their members. Of course, once you join, you’ll probably get them in the future too, increasing their sales and making you happy at the same time.

b. Generate leads

Successful social media campaigns that focus on lead generation are the first step to selling your services on social media. Setting up a lead generation goal makes sense for B2B businesses or SaaS companies.

Here’s an example that never fails: you can create lead-generation Facebook ads and get your users curious so that they will enter and download what you’re offering. Like Wordstream did with their Customizable 2021 Marketing Calendar.

c. Increase brand awareness

To achieve that goal, you need to focus on a group and create a social awareness campaign to become top of mind. You can start by targeting your competitor’s customers using campaigns that address them.

d. Increase engagement

desigual engaging instagram post

e. Increase web traffic

To increase the web traffic from your social media campaigns, all you have to do is create a social media content plan and share valuable content. Choose an image that makes users curious or intrigued about the content you want to share and invite them to learn more on your website, like in the example below.

Once you decide what goals you will pursue with your strategy, the next step is to determine how you will measure the goals you set. This will help you manage the best social media campaigns that bring results.

Forget about measuring vanity metrics like the number of followers or likes and focus on tracking meaningful metrics for each of the goals you have set. You can shift to measuring metrics like social media engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.

Create a spreadsheet where you analyze and track metrics that matter the most to you. Depending on your business’s size or the number and impact of your campaigns, you can update the spreadsheet daily, weekly, or monthly.

Social media marketing tips

Create diverse content

Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. This includes:

Stay consistent

Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether it’s friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay consistent.

Don’t just post—participate

In other words, don’t just log in once a month to schedule out all your posts. Social media channels are communities. You need to pay attention to who’s engaging with your content and engage back—respond to comments, like, share and comment on their posts, run live streams, post polls and real-time questions to spark discussions, and repost others’ content.

Use content creation tools

Don’t let anyone tell you that Instagram is the most visual social media platform. They all are! If you want to stand out in a person’s feed, you need to accompany your posts with attractive visuals—photos, illustrations, text turned into art. Content creation tools like Canva have templates and features that allow you to quickly create visuals that look professional, have your logo on them, and are consistent with your brand.

Repurpose, repost, recycle

Repurpose: Create a Facebook post from a customer review, splice up a blog post into a series of Tweets, distill a case study down into a customer spotlight on Instagram; turn a webinar deck into a carousel post on LinkedIn. The possibilities are endless.
Repost: To be done in moderation, but a great way to fill gaps in your content calendar. Repost on Instagram and retweet user-generated and influencer content. You can also curate content from authoritative sources and share those links in your posts.
Recycle: Post your TikTok videos and Instagram Reels to YouTube; re-share your top-performing blog posts every month to get in front of new followers; add your Facebook Live recordings to your YouTube channel.

Curate your own feed

We’re always looking for ways to show up in others’ feeds, but we forget that there is value to be derived from our own. Follow your competitors so you can keep tabs on them, get ideas you can adapt to your own strategy, and identify gaps you can fill. Follow influencers to stay on top of trends and educate yourself. Follow brands that share your values or that have great content strategies for inspiration and outside the box ideas.

Measure success with analytics

You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your most triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them. And be sure to use the analytics within each social platform for even more insight into which of your social content is performing best with your audience.

Try paid social

Among the many reasons to advertise on social media is that it is a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach. If you play your cards right, you can get your content and offers in front of a huge audience at a very low cost. Most social media platforms offer incredibly granular targeting capabilities, allowing you to focus your budget on exactly the types of people that are most likely to be interested in your business. Below are some tips and resources for getting started with paid social media marketing:

Social media marketing services

As free and easy as each platform may be, a solid social media marketing strategy requires multiple platforms and often a mix of organic and paid methods. This can be resource-heavy, and while it’s a good problem to have, the more you grow your audience using social media, the harder it will be to keep up. Social media marketing services come in all kinds of shapes and sizes to help businesses get the most out of social media. For example:

Social media management software: Social media management platforms like HootSuite and Sprout Social use proprietary technology to help more experienced social media marketers streamline their processes and get advanced analytics.
Social media marketing agencies: Some agencies specialize in social media marketing only, like Akvertise or even just paid social advertising only.
Digital marketing agencies: Just as one platform doesn’t do it for social media marketing, one channel doesn’t do it for overall marketing. Digital marketing agencies can help you to incorporate social media marketing into your broader strategy that includes email, website, SEO, and more.
Hybrid services: Some offer a mix of the above. For example, LOCALiQ’s social advertising offerings use proprietary technology to manage your strategy and allow you to focus on social alone or as part of a broader plan.

Sources:

https://neilpatel.com/what-is-social-media-marketing/
https://www.creatopy.com/blog/social-media-marketing-strategy/
https://www.wordstream.com/social-media-marketing
Social Media Marketing: How to do it, Types, Tools & Tips

Increase reach—social media can reach millions of people worldwide.
Direct messaging—communicate directly with your customers.
Enhance branding—connect social media users with your business’s online channels, products and services.
Build trust—social media posting helps create transparency and legitimise your business.
Growth—social media can rapidly grow brand awareness through your followers sharing your posts with their audiences.
Target audiences—many forms of social media allow businesses to target specific groups, often in particular locations or demographics.
Free or low-cost entry—many forms of social media are free for business, and paid options are usually low-cost.
Personal—social media allows you to communicate on a personal basis with individual customers and groups.
Fast—you can quickly distribute timely information to many people.
Easy—you don’t need high-level skills or computer equipment to participate in social media. Anyone with a computer or mobile device can effectively use social media with planning and the correct information.
Trackable—most social media platforms offer analytics so you can measure the success of your posts and content.

Risks of using social media

Strategies to manage social media

Choose 1–3 platforms to focus on instead of having a small amount of content across all sites that doesn’t work as effectively. The overview below will help you decide which platforms are best for your online business goals.

Secure your business profiles

Your business will benefit from creating a business profile on all social platforms, because you will then own all the spaces that could reflect your business and fully control your branding and presence online.

Your business profile is your hub or landing page where your customers will find you. It will display all the information about your business. For example, a business profile may be represented by pages or accounts on:

Even if you do not intend to use a social media platform for your business, you should still secure your business profile as a placeholder. This will stop others from creating unauthorised profiles representing your business to deceive customers or ruin your brand.

Social media platform overview

Social media demographics

To effectively target your content to customers on different social media platforms, it is helpful to understand the platform demographics or characteristics that apply to the users.

Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

There’s no doubt about it: these days, your business needs to be on social media, and you should concentrate at least some of your marketing efforts (and budget) on your social media strategy.

1. Strategy

A sound social media marketing strategy is the backbone of your social media presence. Without a strategy, you’re wasting time, unlikely to achieve your goals, and will most likely struggle to reach your target audience.

2. Planning and Publish

3. Listening and Engagement

4. Analytics

Once you have all this, you’ll know with certainty what works and what doesn’t. That way you can spend more time on what does, and waste less. In turn, analytics will inform the decisions that you make for future campaigns—and highly influence the success rate.

For example, if you’re a small business, your followers are most likely going to be family and friends who will love the personal insight and celebratory posts because they care about you and your successes.

Producing high-quality content that your audience isn’t interested in will mean that engagement levels tank. You need to work on making sure your posts appear in people’s feeds before you start feeding through those insightful industry blogs.

5. Advertising

For anyone looking for an audience, social media advertising is worth exploring. With approximately 2.89 billion active monthly users on Facebook alone, that’s an incredible amount of prospects.

Provide Support

Social platforms have successfully broken down barriers between companies and their customers. Now, instead of calling a customer service line, many people turn to Facebook or Twitter to solve problems or find information.

Social media is a crucial part of your business marketing, but it doesn’t have to be stressful to manage. Take the first step, create a profile, and start engaging with your customers.

As it continues to weave itself into the daily patterns of our lives, more consumers will go to new and upcoming social platforms for purchasing decisions. Those who have a strong social media presence and branding will increase conversion rates, while those without active social media campaigns could lose potential customers. Which company do you want to be?

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