Social Media Marketing (SMM) is leveraging social networks’ power to promote your brand, products, and services. For instance, if you are a restaurant owner, you can post information on your website or blog about upcoming events or specials.
If you are looking for a means to increase the number of clients and boost sales, you need to use social media marketing. It is because it is cheap and fast. You can reach a wider audience if you use this kind of marketing technique.
You just need to focus on making your presence known on social media sites. You can create a Facebook page or build a LinkedIn group. You must ensure that your posts are interesting and helpful to your audience. You can also share your blog posts and articles on your social media platforms.
If you have a YouTube channel, you should add videos to it. You can also use other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and other websites to market your business.
How does social Media Marketing work?
Social media marketing aims to connect with customers and increase the visibility of the company. The goal of social media marketing is to find the target audience, locate them and suggest their products to them. People can also easily communicate with brands and companies.
Social media marketing is based on five pillars by which you can choose the best way and techniques to reach your goals.
1.Social Strategy:
Developing strategies for your business is one of the crucial steps while organizing and establishing a business. It may include the following:
∙ Determine your goals
First, set your goals. What do you need the most and foremost? Whether you want to increase traffic or make high revenue.
∙ Choose platform
There are many social media platforms. Decide which platform would be the best among all for marketing. All platforms have a strategy of marketing. For example,
on TikTok, you cannot share your pdf files. If you want to advertise your products, it will be done solely through videos.
∙ Form of content
Decide which type of content you are likely to opt for marketing. Either through writing blog posts or posting pictures of selling products. You can go for mixing all types of content.
2. Planning and Publishing:
Publishing is the next step in developing a strategy. It is very simple. It is just like posting a blog post or article on your website.
But, posting regularly on your channel will make a difference to your revenue and traffic. Smaller businesses do not regularly post their updates, which causes trouble in engaging the audience because whenever you post something on your channel, it will appear on people’s newsfeeds and in the suggestion section.
For this purpose, many tools have been designed, such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Hubspot, which help businesses to regulate their posts.
3. Listening and Engagement:
People start interacting with you when you have gathered traffic on your posts. They begin to write comments and send you messages to consult any problem or place any order. Now it is the time for your customer care services to be active, help people regarding their concerns, and suggest possible solutions to their problems.
People do not tag you or comment on your posts every time, but they may talk about your brand and your services in their chats and groups. Some SMM tools are designed to help you get informed whenever you are in their chats, such as Brandwatch, Sprinkler, Netbase Quid and Google alert, a free tool.
4. Analytics and Reporting:
Now, this is further an important part of marketing. By checking analytics, you can estimate accurately which post has maximum views and from which demographic region your audience belongs. You can take further actions to maximize the production of the most liked and sold items.
5. Advertising:
Most of the advertisement on social media is free. However, tools are paid for. But you can do advertisements with the help of different social media influencers.
The fact is, people are crazy about celebrities and tiktokers these days. People copy whatever they do or whatever they wear. So you can easily reach out to influencers for paid promotions of your brand with the help of social media platforms.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing?
Marketing through social Media is trending nowadays, and it will never go old. Most of the reach and revenue are made by Social media marketing. Whether a person is a small business owner or running a large brand, if you stalk them, you probably find them, which means they know the worth of this type of marketing.
Here I listed some advantages which you can get by SMM:
Get a wider Audience:
You might have noticed that if your friend follows a particular brand, you will also get its suggestions. You will be likely to see posts of that brand even if you are not following it, but once you get attracted to their posts, you will surely go to follow it, and then you will notice a lot of similar posts and similar brands will try to reach you.
They even send you “follow requests”. After this, your other friends will also be reached by such tactics. That is how it works.
Customer Satisfaction:
With the help of social media, you can sift people’s interests and demands. They contact you for their queries, and your customer satisfaction service helps them out. It is the most common method used by customers to reach you without visiting your store.
Budget-friendly:
It is quite budget-friendly. You don’t have to spend money on making a physical public-facing store in an area. Instead, you only need a warehouse. By applying all strategies correctly, your marketing team will determine this strategy is more cost-friendly.
Brand Awareness:
SMM will help you to reach influencers so that they can promote your brands and services because Social Media is all about influencing your fans and audience.
Moreover, people show their engagement by likes, comments and shares when they find your posts valuable enough and when they get to know their favourite influencer collaborating with you.
Producing leads and engaging the public:
You probably have heard the word “give away” on any social media platform. What brands actually do is announce a contest that they have set a target of a certain number of followers, likes or might be commenting on their posts. If any public member makes the most of them, he will get a prize hamper.
They do ‘give away’ some of the hot-selling products, and people started sharing that posts, making likes and comments. That is how you can get more followers and more engagement by making little investment of “Give away”.
There are many other small tactics which are basically psychological games, if you understand, such as
∙ By hosting live sessions and interacting with people, answering their questions and giving a live tutorial on how to apply different products. ∙ You can increase view count and engagement from one platform to another. You are well aware that all social media platforms are interconnected in one way or another. So if you add links to your Tiktok, Facebook or Snapchat account on any other media platform like Instagram, your audience will surely reach you there as well.
∙ Further, by adding shop sections on your social media account, you will analyze that people come to your shop to check the prices and range of their favourite items.
Competing with other brands:
It has become easy for you to explore how other brands are advertising and get to know what is lacking and what is not working in your planning. You will know where you stand in marketing, and you can easily compete with other brands by reviewing their policies, keep practising new modifications in your policies and thus maximize your reach to the public through every media platform.
How to build Social Media Marketing strategy?
Now is the time to follow the roadmap and make your social media work by promoting your business, so do not waste much money on doing the traditional way of marketing, that is, by printing catalogues. Rather, do it by your social media accounts.
So let’s begin with an action plan.
Get to know about your audience:
First of all, get to know about your audience. Analyze their gender, age, geographic and demographic regions.
For this purpose, make a review of what type of audience reaches you and in what product they are taking a lot of interest. For example, if you are selling bags online, then you can determine your audience by analyzing which type of bags have been sold, either bag packs or handbags, school bags or college bags, leather hand clutches or fancy hand clutches.
You can now maximize your production and focus more on reaching your target customers.
Always remain active in competition:
If you do not try to explore what other brands are doing or how other brands are working for advertisement, you will soon be out of the game. So keeping tabs on them can be a good trick to stay in the game.
The best example of this is the 2020 advertisement campaign in Pakistan, when every brand tried to work with Turkish actors to promote their business internationally. In marketing, you must have to follow trends. Even if you are a writer, try to cover trending and ongoing topics to gather more audience for your blog post.
Be regular in posting:
Being regular on your social media is one of the crucial parts of marketing because that is how you can keep your audience stay on your portfolio and keep visiting your shop. You can also schedule your posts with the help of different tools.
Moreover, you also need to provide quick service to your customers because getting back late to the audience cause irritation to them. So being regular and quick will lead to attracting more people.
Have an insight into metrics:
Insight on social media metrics can help make further planning and strategies to boost your sales. Some of the metrics are given as follows:
∙ View count: It is the total number of views your post gets both organically and inorganically
∙ Followers: it is the number of followers you have.
∙ Impression: number of times when your post got seen, not through the news feed.
∙ Mentions: this is when someone mentions your profile in their stories or in captions of their posts.
∙ Tags: This is when someone adds your profile to their post. ∙ Likes: which post got the most likes?
∙ Comments: comments are the immediate reviews you post get under your posts.
∙ Saving posts: how many times did your post get saved, and by whom? ∙ Sharing: it is the total shares your post gets.
Today SMM has become one of the most powerful marketing strategies used by businesses of all sizes. With the help of SMM, companies can target their audiences more personally, build brand loyalty, and engage their customers. The best part is that SMM is easy to implement and cost-effective.
A clear vision of what you want to achieve is the key to success with SMM. You must need to know who you target and what you want them to do.
