There are millions of online forums, Facebook groups, video marketing channels, and other places where you can share your unique marketing efforts. In this article, you will learn all you need to know about social media marketing and how to get started with it.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM) is a set of practices intended to accentuate a business’ social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Social media marketing builds awareness about brands, products, and services through various social media channels with original content.
These days, doing this effectively often requires paying for advertising on these channels or hiring en expert in social media marketing (i.e., earning engagement through creative blog posts and discerning your targeted audiences). Marketers can encourage people to engage with a brand by creating any type of content online that reflects the image the business wants to assume on social media networks.
What are the different types of social media marketing?
These are examples of different types of social media marketing content that are employed to create brand visibility, engagement, and generate traffic:
- Blog posts
- Video sharing
- Photo sharing
- Social network content curation
- Social media advertising
Blog posts
Blogs are perfect to create visibility and increase the success of your social media marketing campaigns. You can use blog posts to share your business’ original content and valuable information to reach your target audience. Blog posts are also vital for search engine optimization to make your website rank higher in the search results pages.
When searching online for valuable information, how many times have you consulted the second page of a search engine? The majority of Internet users limit their search online to the first page that pops up on their screen, which explains why it’s imperative to secure your business’ place on that first page!
Video sharing
You should promote your business on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok. As most people prefer to watch videos rather than read text, it is considered a powerful way to market your brand on social media channels. A well-produced video can make your social media presence skyrocket.
Photo sharing
If you want to promote your brand on social media, then photo sharing is also one of the best ways. Share photos of your products or services with their short descriptions on photo-sharing sites like Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
Social network content curation
These are platforms that offer social media management tools to organize plans for all the activities on your social networks to schedule content publishing and post updates. These websites will also recommend when it is the best time to share your content with your audience for maximum visibility.
By using new semantic analysis technologies, marketers can detect buying signals, such as content shared by people and questions posted online. Understanding buying signals can help salespeople target relevant prospects, and marketers run microtargeted campaigns.
Social media advertising
It allows you to reach new audiences by targeting specific demographics with ads based on their location, age, and interests. These ad opportunities are controlled by the social media channels themselves and are easy to access.
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Tips to get started with social media marketing
A social media marketing strategy summarizes everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. Here are expert tips to get started:
- Conceptualize a plan
- Set measurable goals before starting
- Build a social media team
- Research your competition
- Find your voice
Conceptualize a plan
A social media marketing plan can help you figure out what to post on social media and how to make it a lot easier. You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint, would you? Neither should you create a social media marketing strategy without one!
To help establish what your business wants to get out of social media channels and how it can achieve it, take the time to write a social media plan. When creating your plan, consider things like:
- Which networks are right for your business?
- What kind of content will you share?
- When should you post?
- Who will manage your accounts?
You should have a different plan depending on the social media platform you are approaching with your marketing efforts. Even if they all fall under the umbrella of social media networks, some of them have a much younger audience (TikTok) while others are almost solely employed by adults (LinkedIn, Facebook).
Set measurable goals before starting
When getting into the nitty-gritty of social media marketing, it would be reductive to say it only serves to generate visibility. As data is progressively becoming the new gold, social media marketing strategies have an objective to generate and control new data.
Here are different types of measurable goals social media marketing campaigns can have:
- Build brand awareness
- Manage brand reputation
- Increase traffic to your website
- Improve community engagement
- Boost conversion or sales
- Generate leads
- Optimize customer service
- Gain marketing insights with social listening
Build a social media team
To create original content with valuable information, you need to build a social media team or contact external professionals. To have a relevant social media presence, it’s important to follow the trends that are currently in vogue on the different social platforms and to understand the online culture of social networks. Failing to create original content that captures the Zeitgeist of a particular social platform can make your marketing efforts fail.
Research your competition
This will help you see what others in your industry are doing on social media sites, so you can learn from their successes and mistakes. Just as market research enables you to better understand the economic reality of a certain sector, studying the social strategy of your competition can be a source of inspiration for your own social media presence.
To accurately research your competition’s marketing efforts, you should not just browse through their content. You should single out some of their marketing campaigns and observe the data traffic they generated. This is how you’ll know the type of content you need to emulate authentically!
Find your voice
This is probably the hardest decision your social media marketing team will be faced with. As mentioned above, authenticity is important to generate original content with valuable information. The tone and demeanor of your brand must be carefully conceptualized to capture the attention of potential customers while still being representative of your current customer base.
The layout of your business’ website is implicitly a form of communication, consider it as the virtual body language of your brand. Having a quirky 2000s aesthetic with slow navigation speed between pages does not reflect well on your company!
Social media marketing services
A company that does not interact with customers or that has not considered its social media presence strategy is missing out on achieving its true potential. Social networks are now part of society and a staple of daily life; you only need to do a 360° in public to see a smartphone on one of these social network platforms.
The social media marketing experts from Publi Web Media can help you navigate and tap into all the opportunities and marketing tools available online. Not only will we generate online traffic toward your brand, but we will also give you a road map of what can be done with the pertinent data you’ve accumulated by establishing an online presence. Publi Web Media is here to make you a 21st-century firm.
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