When it comes to marketing your business in modern times, there is no doubt that you can’t afford to ignore social media marketing.
It is one of those few marketing strategies that can deliver the highest ROI regardless of the industry to which you belong.
From local stores to some of the world’s biggest brands – all advertise and market themselves on social media. If you too want to get started with it but don’t have any idea about where to begin, don’t worry.
We’ve got you covered because in this article we’re going to tell you everything about social media marketing from its benefits to things you should care about to the steps that should be followed for ensuring the success of your SMM campaigns.
There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
There are many benefits of the social media marketing that you can’t find in other marketing methods. Some of the major ones include:
- Increased brand awareness: The first benefit of social media marketing is that your brand becomes much stronger than it would be in its absence. That is because people spend a lot of time on social media, so your brand gets more chances to interact with them. And as they interact more and more with your posts, they start seeing more of your posts in their newsfeeds, thus multiplying the reach and influence of your brand. No other marketing technique can increase your brand awareness so much with so little effort and resources.
- Build stronger relationships with customers: Next, it allows you to develop stronger relationships with your customers. Many brands communicate with their fans and followers on social media and allow them to raise complaints and receive support. This fosters a stronger brand relationship with the customers, and you too can leverage the same strategy.
- Research on your competitors: Social media platforms also provide a great medium to check and analyze what your competitors are doing. You can spot not only their frustrated customers and their pain points but also what strategies they’re using in their marketing campaigns. It’s not as easy as that in other methods of marketing.
These are a few of the many benefits that come with social media marketing.
With that in mind, now let’s take a look at some simple steps that you can take to draft your SMM strategy.
The 3 Cs of successful social media marketing
When it comes to running successful social media campaigns, the recipe boils down to 3 Cs: Content, Customers, and Competitors. Keep a watch on them and you can almost always craft a marketing strategy that works wonders for your business. Let’s see what each of them means:
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- Content: social media marketing relies to a large extent on the quality of content that you share. Therefore, you must ensure that you understand what type of content is liked by your audience and how can it be made in a more effective manner.
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- Customers: The second thing to keep in mind is your customers and potential customers (i.e. the customers of your competitors). Keep an eye on their comments, feedback, pain points that they find in your as well as your competitor’s products, and other things that they may not necessarily say or realize but would love to be improved in your offerings. It’s easy to spot such things on social media.
- Competitors: Lastly, keep an eye on your competitors. Carefully analyze what they’re doing that is making their social media marketing success, and what they’re doing wrong that’s making their customers frown upon them. Sometimes you’ll be able to spot the things that can be turned into meaningful product features or marketing campaigns to attract new customers that are not happy with your competitors.
Now let’s go through the 8 steps that can help you ensure the success of your social media marketing campaigns.
8 steps to ensure successful social media marketing for your business
While the list can be long and tedious, we’ve decided to keep it short and simple. The 8 steps outlined below can be more than enough to help you generate the maximum ROI from your social media campaigns. Here they’re:
#1. Research on your customers and create their persona
First of all, you should research your prospective customers and figure out who they are. Once you’ve found them you should create their personas, so you and all your team members can understand them better.
In case you don’t know what a buyer persona is, it basically means a profile of your target customer that includes various information about them that can help you in crafting your marketing campaigns (i.e. their professions, age groups, their likes and dislikes, their entertainment preferences, etc.)
#2. Find out where your ideal customers hang out
The next step is to find out where your ideal customers spend their free time, so you can target them from those relevant places and marketing channels.
For example, if your target customers are readers of a well-known industry magazine, you can do a partnership with that magazine to promote your products through their social media handles.
That’s a simple example to give you a basic idea of how having an understanding of the time spending habits of your customers can help you craft your social media marketing strategy.
#3. Create and test engaging content
The next step is to create and test engaging content for your marketing. It’s no secret that your competitors are also chasing the same customers whom you’re chasing on social media, and it’s also no secret that your potential customers can easily visit their pages without you coming to know about it.
So it’s important that your content stands out and connects more deeply with the needs of your customers. Market research about the needs of your customers can be a good starting point to figure out what content you need to create.
You can also look at the content being created by your competitors to create your unique content strategy that differentiates your brand from your competitors.
Once you find a certain type of content that performs well among your audience, create more content similar to it and share it periodically on your social media profiles — social media scheduling tools can help you do that at the optimal time.
#4. Organize contests and giveaways
Contests and giveaways help you increase your reach among fans and followers. Posts related to contests receive greater engagement than other general posts that you make, it’s important to incorporate some event giveaways and promotional contests in your marketing strategy.
And while you do that, keep in mind that you should also not overdo it because organizing a contest every now and then can not only inflate your marketing expenditure but also reduce the credibility and craze of your contests among your followers.
#5. SSL certificate security
Protect your website with a Cheap SSL Certificate. This step, as you can see, is not necessarily related to the marketing of your website but to the security.
However, it’s such a visual element of security that anyone can use it to check website reputation easily and perceive your website as insecure if this element is missing.
The Websites which are not protected with SSL certificates are marked as ‘Not Secure’ by Google Chrome and other web browsers, which means that your visitors who land on your site from social media will find it suspicious and hit the close tab button before doing any business with you.
That’s why you should include SSL protection for all your domains and subdomains in your social media marketing strategy.
#6. Post on different times
Posting all your content on various social media platforms at the same time may seem like a convenient strategy, but it may not generate the best possible engagement for all your posts.
The best way to ensure that your posts get maximum engagement is by posting at different times to figure out the time when your posts generate maximum engagement.
For some businesses that sweet spot of time will be early in the morning, for some, it may be at the noon during lunchtime and for some others, it may be a late night, depending on the nature of their customers. The idea is to find out the best possible time slot for your posts so you can schedule your critical posts (i.e. contests, giveaways, content with virality potential) around that time.
#7. Include your social media handles in all your marketing material
All your fans and followers don’t come from social media alone. Many of them also come from various other sources. For example, some of them may come from your packaging material, some may come from newspaper ads or TV ads, and so on.
However, that will happen only if you mention your social media handles in all of them. That’s why it’s important to include your social media handles in all your marketing material.
#8. Measures your results, and repeat what works
Measuring your social media marketing results is just as important as it is measuring the results of any other type of marketing.
You should track the impressions, clicks, media engagements, the traffic sent by various social media profiles, and all other relevant metrics to gauge the success of your marketing campaigns.
And as you realize what’s working, you should repeat it to extract the most ROI while excluding everything else that is not generating the best results.
Final Thoughts
So that was a simple guide explaining how you can create a successful social media marketing strategy for your business. We covered everything from the benefits of social media marketing to things you should care about to individual steps that can be taken to boost your social media fan following.
Hopefully, this guide will help you navigate through the maze of various technical terms used in marketing and achieve the best possible ROI through your SMM campaigns.
But if you still have any questions about it, feel free to shoot them in the comments and we’ll try our best to answer them.
Harness your skills and continue learning more social media marketing tips to skyrocket your business performance in no time.
