What is Social Media Marketing? How is it done? (Detailed Guide) - ARTICLE GATE

Social media marketing, in its simplest definition, involves using social media channels to promote and sell the brand's products and services.

If you don't have a social media presence yet, you're missing out on very important opportunities for your brand. Considering that 74% of people use social media when making purchasing decisions, you don't want to miss the opportunity to encourage them to buy your products. However, if you are not familiar with social media marketing, this process may be a bit difficult for you.

Why should you use social media?

Before we dive deep into social media marketing, let's explain why you should use social media for your brand:

1. Social media marketing helps you build relationships

Social media is the perfect place to build relationships with potential customers who are interested in the products and services you offer. It gives you a medium to interact with potential customers one-on-one through features such as direct messaging and commenting on content posts. Building relationships and communities are valuable in helping your business grow online.

When people know your business and trust your brand, they are more likely to choose you when it's time to buy.

2. Social media helps you increase brand awareness

Brand awareness is essential to helping you gain leads for your business. When people connect with you on social media, they learn who you are and what you have to offer. Social media allows you to put your brand in front of potential customers.

You can publish content that appears in your followers' news feeds and encourage your followers to share your content with their followers. In this way, you can reach a wider audience.

3. Social media helps you increase traffic on your website

Social media is a valuable way for you to increase traffic to your brand's website. You can share links to your website on your social media profiles and encourage users to visit pages on your site. As a result, more people may visit your website to read your blog posts, check out your products or learn about your services.

What are social media platforms?

The next step in our social media marketing guide is social media platforms to choose from. There are hundreds of social media platforms you can use to grow your brand online. We won't cover them all here, but we share some of the most popular social platforms you can use to grow your business:

• Facebook : Although not its former popularity. Facebook is still one of the largest social media in the world. This platform is ideal for sharing multiple types of content with your potential customers. From photos to links to content and polls, you can create a multitude of content types to engage and inform your audience.

• Instagram: Instagram is a popular social media platform for retailers, especially with its shop feature. This platform is ideal for selling and giving your followers an idea about your brand's products or services with photos and videos.

• Twitter : Twitter is a popular platform for sharing brief introductions, blog content, news about your company online. It is not sales oriented. However, you should definitely use it as customer service. The vast majority of consumers tweet about a brand when they have a complaint. On Twitter, as elsewhere, you can post content such as photos, videos, and surveys to help your audience become familiar with your brand.

• Pinterest: Pinterest is another visual social media platform that lets you share photos, videos, and GIFs with your audience. It is used extensively to get ideas, especially in the field of home decoration. It provides quality website traffic. This platform allows you to create content boards and edit them to provide a seamless experience for your audience.

• LinkedIn : If you want to make professional connections, LinkedIn is the platform for you. This platform allows you to connect with industry leaders and businesses to share useful information about your company.

• YouTube : This video-based platform is the perfect place to share useful content with your audience. From how-to videos to informative videos, you can provide your potential customers with the information they are actively looking for.

• TikTok : The rising star of the last era, TikTok is perfect for short and entertaining videos. TikTok marketing may include different tactics such as Influencer marketing, TikTok advertising and organic viral content creation. The difference of TikTok from other social media is; TikTok gives marketers a level playing field when it comes to reach and engagement. Unlike social media platforms such as Instagram or YouTube, TikTok accounts with zero followers can get millions of views in a new video thanks to the viral nature of the algorithm.

Social Media Goal Setting

Successful social media marketing starts with a strategy or roadmap that helps you determine where you want to go and how to get there.

Everyone wants more fans and followers, but why? Your social media marketing goals should not be just followers or more likes. Social media marketing goals should serve your business goals in the long run. A deep understanding of your social media goal will improve all other decisions going forward.

Some of the most common social media targets include:

Increasing brand awareness

Key metrics for measuring brand awareness are:

• Number of followers: “How many people can you potentially reach?”
• Reach of your social media posts: “How many people reach each day/week/month?”
• Mentions, shares, and RTs: “How many people are talking about your brand or sharing your social media posts?”

Website traffic:

Key metrics for measuring traffic are:

• Traffic from social media: “How many visitors come to your website from your social media channels?”
• Share of overall traffic: “How much of your total traffic is social media?”
• Bounce rate of social media traffic: “What is the quality of traffic from social media?”

Generating leads

Key metrics for potential customers are:

• Personal information collected through social media: “ How many potential customers have you collected through social media?”
• Participation: “How many people participated in your social media contest or events and shared their information with you?”
• Clicks on your lead-generating social media posts: “How good are your messages on these posts?”
• Lead conversions from social media: “How good are the leads from social media?”

Income increase

Key metrics for tracking revenue growth include:

• Records / Revenue: “How many sign-ups or revenue does your social media channels bring?”
• Income from ads: “How much income does your social media ads bring?”

Effective social customer service

Metrics to monitor your customer service activity:

• Number of support questions: “Is there a social media customer support request for your company?”
• Response time: “How fast do you get back to your customers?”
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): “How satisfied are your customers with your service?”

Organic and Paid Social Media Marketing

As you learn more about the basics of social media marketing, you will find that you have two options for reaching and engaging with potential customers: organic marketing or paid social media marketing. So which one is better?

In fact, you should stay away from this misconception, neither organic nor paid social media alone will not give the desired results. Ideally, you use a combination of both. First, it's important to understand the differences between paid and organic social media marketing to determine how to proceed. Then, depending on your marketing goals, you can choose the best approach that uses both organic and paid strategies.

Organic social media marketing

Organic social media marketing is the process of regularly sharing content on social media where you create an account to build and maintain a community around your brand, increase leads and engage existing customers. The content you share usually only reaches audiences who follow you. Hashtag usage, suggested content, etc. Although the content you share with algorithms will reach people who are not your followers, this rate will be much less than paid social media marketing content.

Paid social media marketing

On the other hand, paid social media marketing allows you to reach new audiences faster to reach social media goals. Paid social media marketing includes promoted posts, website traffic ads, campaigns aimed at increasing followers, sales campaigns and more.

Social Media Marketing: Know Your Audience

A targeted audience on social media is a group of people defined by certain behaviors and demographics. Brands offer curated content based on the needs of their audiences, and in turn, individuals feel more connected to the brand. You should understand your brand well enough to know who your target audience is. These are the people who will resonate most with your products and company ethos. So how do you find your target audience on social media?

1. Start by brainstorming: Start by brainstorming about your target demographic . Who is your ideal customer? Be as specific as possible by specifying age, gender, education, job, income levels, where they live, interests, wishes, and whether they have children.
2. Use local audience insight tools on your preferred platforms: Once you have a general idea of ​​who might be using your products, you can start searching for them online. For example, Facebook audience statistics offer endless research opportunities, and most social media platforms offer custom profiles for businesses that use their platforms.
   You can also search for new audience demographics by looking for pages that your target audience will also engage with.
3. Send surveys or request preferences via email campaigns: Create email survey campaigns that ask your subscribers about their social media preferences. When new subscribers see your email list, you can ask them about their favorite social media platforms and invite them to join you by sharing your profiles.

Tips for creating successful social media content

• “Content” is a very important issue in social media marketing. You know, it is always said that content is king, content is now living the reign. To create successful content on social media:
• Don't Be Boring, Use the Power of Humor
• Arouse Curiosity, Draw Attention to You
• Share Information
• Be Open, Reflect Your Emotions
• Involve Your Customers, Ask Questions
• Be Involved in Life, Don't Be Insensitive to Events Around You

Social Media Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis in social media marketing is an analysis to find out what the strengths and weaknesses of your competition are and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to yours. Knowing your competitors is not the only reason to do competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you information about your own business and target audience.

How to do competitive analysis on social media

1. Identify who your competitors are

• Do keyword research: for this, you can identify your best performing competitors by searching your products and services on Google and social media with hashtags.
• Find out which similar brands your audience follows: Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Analytics can give you some good insights into other brands your audience follows on these social networks. If these brands are similar to yours, it's worth considering them as potential competitors.
• Choose up to 5 opponents to focus on

2. Gather Intelligence : Now that you know who your competitors are, you need to find out what they're doing on social media. Click on the social networks of each of the brands you identify as top competitors and create a social media competitive analysis template. Note the following in the template:

• What social networks are they on?
• How big are their followers and how fast are they growing?
• Who are his best followers?
• How often do they post?
• What are engagement rates?
• What are social voice shares?
• What hashtags do they use most often?
• How many hashtags do they use?

3. Do a SWOT analysis: Now that you've gathered all this data, it's time to analyze it to help you understand where you stand compared to the competition. In a SWOT analysis, you look closely at your business and competition to determine:

S - Strengths
W - Weaknesses
O - Opportunities
T - Threats

• Strengths : List metrics where your numbers are higher than the competition.
• Weaknesses: List the metrics where your numbers lag behind the competition. Remember that for each social network you can have both strengths and weaknesses. For example, you have fewer Instagram followers but higher engagement. like… Be pretty specific here because these distinctions will help you identify your opportunities and threats.
• Opportunities: Now that you can see at a glance where you stand compared to the competition, you can identify potential opportunities to take advantage of. These opportunities may be areas where you think you can improve compared to your competitors based on the information you have already gathered, or they may be based on anticipated or recent changes in the social media world.
• Threats: Like opportunities, threats come from outside your organization. Take a good look at growth numbers or anything that expresses change over time to get a sharp idea of ​​impending threats. For example, a small competitor with high follower growth may pose a greater threat than a large competitor with stagnant growth.

4. Combine the latest data with social media reports : You need to regularly review your social media competitive analysis to keep it up to date. It means making your competitor analysis a regular part of your quarterly or annual reporting and review.

Free Tools to Make Social Media Easier

Social media marketing can be time consuming. Fortunately, many tools can help make this easy, from sites to obtaining free social media images to video creation tools. Still, you should take some time to learn which tools are best for you and how to use them.

Graphic social media tools

• canva
• Pixabay
• Unsplash

Analytics tools to measure your social media results

Analytics is like the body language of social media. It shows how people react to your content so you can adjust and improve it to achieve your goals. While most professional social media managers will want to invest in a full-featured reporting tool, you can start with some simple free tools to start collecting the data you need.

• Built-in Platform Analytics: All major social media platforms have analytics built into the platform as long as you use the right account type. Log in to your business page for Facebook and then select “Insights” . You'll be able to see page views, reach, what actions were taken on the page, video views, and more. Like Facebook, Instagram requires a business account to view analytics data. Likewise twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and others…

Tools to find social media hashtags

• hashtagify
• tagsfinder
• hashatit