Social media marketing is whereby brands create content and post them on social media platforms for their audience to read and engage with their products online. It directs clients to businesses’ websites.
Most used Social Media Networking Sites
There are over 200 social media sites. The most used social media marketing sites are:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. LinkedIn
5. YouTube
6. Pinterest
7. Snapchat
8.Messaging tools
Let's discuss this in detail-
1. Facebook
Facebook has approximately 2.2 billion users. The number includes a broad demographic internet user. Many people are using Facebook as a social hall for meeting new and old friends. Networking and interaction in these sites have boosted brand awareness.
2. Twitter
Twitter is a social media site for approximately 335 billion people who have mostly millennial audiences. It is best for customer service, public relations, business to business, and business to customer relations.
3. Instagram
Instagram is the best site when it comes to sharing of knowledge and entertainment with the use of images and videos. There are more than one billion users that are using Instagram as a natural-looking media, behind the scenes teaser, user-generated content, and advertising. It is for businesses to interact with their audiences and customers.
4. YouTube
YouTube has over 1.9 billion users that stream every day. It is for brand awareness, entertainment, and guidelines.
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social site, more like a professional home ground. Several companies use this site for networking and brand social presence. Six hundred forty-five million users use LinkedIn for business to business interactions.
6. Messaging Social Sites
Businesses and customers need a bridge to allow them to communicate with each other directly. WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat are the sites mostly used for messaging. Over one billion users are using these sites; therefore, it is easy for building a brand presence.
Top Social Media Marketing Strategies
To be successful in digital marketing, there are several strategies that you can put in place before posting any content on social media. These strategies involve:
1. Set realistic Social Media Marketing Goals
These goals act as the marketing objectives of the brand or company on social platforms. The aims and objectives can answer the questions of why does your business want to be on social media. Some of these objectives include driving traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.
2. Research Intensely on your Target Audience
Every brand has a particular audience that follows and also purchase their products both online and their physical stores. Researching on your target will be able the answer the 5W and 1H questions. Create a market persona for your business and create a profile using that character.
3. Establish essential Metrics for your Performances
Establishing important metrics on performance will make it easy for the brand owner to know how their audience is interacting with the content shared on social sites.
These performance metrics will offer a clear view of insights. Insights are the reports from posts shared that report the number of people that the content has reached, the number of clicks present, conversions, and the engagement percentage.
4. Analyze Possible Competition
Social media marketing tool creates an open platform for all brands to showcase their products. Analyzing your competitor and how they package their brands will be a step ahead strategy in the marketing campaign. You will be able to create and advertise your brand in ways that will make your competitors want to order from you.
5. Create Engaging Content
Images, videos, and posts shared should be original and brand based. They should be probably both formal and humorous to make it easy for the users to read and understand. These posts should also have room for the audiences to ask questions and also comment on particular topics or themes posted by a brand on social media.
6. Communicate with your team on the Success and Challenges
Teamwork makes marketing strategies more productive and successful. When creating a marketing strategy, you should consider methods of communicating with your marketing team. These are the people that will be handling the marketing campaigns by sharing content and communicating directly with the audience.
Discussing the success and challenges the team experience during marketing will provide a better solution for the best marketing strategy to work. The team will be able to gather all the information brands need from the users that may need to improve the marketing campaign and the impression rates.
7. Optimize your Results
Results are always the priority of many businesses. Creating a strategy that enables the brand managers and marketers to see the progress of the marketing campaign is an added advantage. Some of the tools used are ads that come along with insight tools. These tools can measure impressions, clicks, and conversions.
These tools will able to make the brand creators aware of how the audience is interacting with their content and what their interests are. It will make it easy also to know where their brand recognition has dominated and which locations require more content pushing.
8. Make timing a top priority
Timing is critical when it comes to social media marketing. People use social media sites at different times. Posting various content on social media for marketing purposes can be very annoying to your audiences. These several posts posted after intervals are better than once.
It is also advisable to understand the best time that your target audience uses their social media sites. It will work best to post most of the vital information at the appropriate time that most people could be using social media. Frequently published contents make brand awareness improved; thus, the audience will always see your posts most of the time they use their social platforms.
Top 10 Benefits Of Social Media Marketing
Some of the major advantages of Social Media Marketing are-
1. Increased Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the ability of people to recognize and relate to your brand in any given environment. Social media has a large number of internet users that use these platforms for different reasons. Choosing social media as a marketing tool will increase the rate of brand recognition because tons of people will be able to interact with it.
Creating and posting syndicate posts on the business social media sites can boost this initiative. These posts should be clear and be related to the brand. Share these posts with sponsors, employees, and business partners. They will all like and share the posts with their social networks creating a new audience and clients.
2. Huge traffic inbounds to websites
Brands are the hearsays of their customers and community that has heard of their products. Sales, conversions and shares of posts drive the traffic to the brand’s website. How can traffic be generated? Social media marketing has increased the traffic on business websites by posts and links shared on the platforms.
When a group of people talk and share information and testimonials concerning a particular brand, everyone will rush to the brand's website to check out more about the brand itself. These are what we refer to as traffic, later converted to complete sales.
3. Rates of conversions have improved
A business is not complete without a brand, while a brand is not successful without clients and total sales. Social media marketing has grown the conversion rates from mere prospects to complete successful deals. Social media tools have messaging tools that have given businesses opportunities to reach out to their clients and communicate with them directly.
Images and posts have also made the work of business better since they can share what they are offering visually. Some clients chose to purchase and relate to a brand through good visual samples of the brand's work. Social media marketing has brought these clients from different demographics and brands together improving conversions.
4. Improved brand engagement with consumers
Social media platforms offer their opinions concerning particular brands, and also the users share their testimonials. Using these platforms can be an excellent method of reaching out to your significant consumers and even new clients that have been directed by other people.
Posting images, videos, and contents related to your brand provides an open forum for your business and your clients to interact. You will have an opportunity to answer questions asked by your clients and also request for feedback from them. These engagements will boost the trust of clients and also bring in more, thus increasing brand recognition.
5. Availability of Social customer service
The main feature of every business is the customer support. Customer support offers customer service during and after the purchase of a product or service from a particular company. Several online stores and large entities use this feature to reach out to their clients.
Customer service has helped in satisfying their clients’ needs. They also answer any inquiries concerning the purchase of a product and how the product functions. Clients can have after-sale support through social media to report any functionalities issues and provide reviews that will be helpful for both the business and new clients that want to engage with your brand.
6. Increase in Revenue
Every business runs to have its brand recognized and bring in revenue. Social media marketing is a mode of converting likes, shares, and prospects into new business deals. Features of social media such as messaging tools make sales easier by guiding their clients through the whole funnel by answering all their doubts. These clients grow business's revenue by purchasing services a particular brand is offering.
Social media marketing by influencers has also proven to be a 100% revenue generator. Many people trust established brands and social brand influencers. Therefore, they purchase most of the products recommended by the influencers on their social sites increasing revenue to businesses.
7. Search engine rankings have improved
Google has a feature known as an SEO tool. Searches are a significant component in every site to make easy navigation on websites. Social media have search engine features that help their users find the pages they are interested in fast.
When a brand creates content frequently and interacts with its users, more often, their search ranking is improved. Therefore, any search carried out on social media platforms relating to the services offered by your brand will bring up your business page first. Search engines also help to bring in more traffic and new clients.
8. Brand Loyalty
Loyalty is one vital aspect of the image of a brand. A brand that everyone can trust anytime is all that the world needs. Creating a social presence by having an official business page with the company's logo is a way of winning your client's trust. Posting contents, images and videos strictly based on your services and products create a professional marketing persona that makes its interactions trustworthy.
A brand with all these characteristics has an extensive network of clients that trust their brands and can refer these brands to their friends and colleagues because they are loyal to them.
9. It is cost-effective
Cost is a factor that drives the result of the marketing campaign. The use of television, radios, and newspapers was beneficial to a range of people but very expensive. Social media marketing has cut the advertising cost by almost 70%. Social media has its tools that create ads without using a big budget.
Brands can create content using images and product teasers. They will use a small amount of money to increase the number of people to reach. Compared to the standard advertising methods, this budget allows a business to choose their demographics targets and also the number of people they want to achieve then create an affordable budget for them.
10. Generation of new leads
Business is always boosting as its brand is recognized. Social media has people from different places and of different interests. Social media as a marketing tool, brands are still able to bring in new leads every day. A brand that is known by many people and shares its product teasers all the time drive in a lot of traffic to their sites bringing in new clients.
Posts shared by several people concerning a particular brand and its goodwill will make many people want to engage and relate with the brand, therefore. More new people will visit their websites, thus new businesses.