Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to engage with your audience to grow your brand, boost sales, and direct website traffic. This involves publishing relevant content on your social media handles, interacting with and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media ads.
The most common social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
There are also a variety of social media marketing service providers that help businesses to get the most out of social media platforms. For example, at Slideck we help you grow your business with social media marketing, right from content creation to designing the posts to running ads to reach your target audience, we are here to see you succeed.
Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Strategy
Before you go ahead and post something on social media, let us take a step back and plan on how you are going to go forward. The first step is to plan your social media strategy.
What are your goals?
Some businesses use social media to increase their brand awareness, and others use it for directing website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you create a community, generate engagement around your brand, and work as a feedback channel for your customers.
Which platforms do you want to focus on?
The most common social media platforms mentioned above are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube. When starting, it is better to pick a few platforms that your target audience is on than to be on all and sundry.
What kind of content will attract your target audience?
Is it vector designed images, videos, or blog links? Is it informative or entertaining content? An excellent place to start is to create a marketing persona, which will help you know the answer to these questions. And this does not have to be fixed forever; you can always adjust your strategy according to the results of your social media marketing.
2. Planning and Publishing
Social media marketing for small businesses usually begins with having a consistent presence on social media. Close to three billion people are on social media. By being present on social media platforms, you allow your prospects to identify with your brand very easily.
Publishing on social media is just like sharing an image, a video, or a blog post on social media. But you must plan your content meticulously and in advance instead of randomly thought creation and impulsive posting. Also, to maximize your reach and visibility on social media, you need to publish your content in a manner which appeals to your audience.
3. Listening and Engagement
As your social media following grows, deliberations about your brand will also increase. People will tag you in their social media posts, comment on your social media posts, or message you directly.
People might even speak about your brand on social media without you knowing. So, you will want to check social media conversations about your brand. If it is a positive comment, you get an opportunity to surprise them. Or else you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets more serious.
4. Analytics
Whether you are posting content or engaging on social media, you will want to know the outcome of your marketing efforts. Has your reach increased considerably since the last month? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their posts? How many mentions do you get a month?
5. Advertising
In correspondence to your budget, you can consider social media advertising. Social media ads enable you to reach a wider audience other than your current followers. Social media advertising platforms can specify precisely who to display your ads to. You can build target audiences based on their interests, demographics, behaviors, and more. At slideck, we help you analyze your target audience and run ad campaigns to your target audience.
If a brand aims to succeed it cannot avoid the platform offered by social media marketing in today’s world. Social media is a wonderful place to make your brand globally visible. Making optimum and judicious use of social media is the key to create and sustain audience interest.