First things first, why should you even have a social media presence if you’re a business? Why is everyone investing in social media marketing? And what is even social media marketing? We’re here to answer all these questions – step by step. Let’s start with what social media marketing is.
When it comes to Social Media Marketing, everyone has their own definition (which is also the beauty of it). For some, it’s a platform for promotion while for others it’s a place to broadcast content as an optional marketing channel and that’s where many tend to go wrong.
Social media marketing is a great opportunity to find your target audience and connect with them by creating content that is tailored to them and the platform that you are holding them on, in order to drive user engagement and sharing.
It is not an afterthought and requires a great deal of listening and responding. After all, it comes down to being ‘social’ and anything social assumes an investment of effort and skill. This is why merely broadcasting content across all social media platforms becomes spamming. In order to grow your social media presence and leave an impression, you need to create content that works well with the platform and the audience you are targeting.
Therefore, it is important to bet on the right platform for your brand as each requires a different strategy. The goal for any brand is to make their content go viral and that requires an understanding of the platform and the algorithm. The key to winning at creating ‘viral’ content is to make it so engaging that people want to tell all their friends about it.
Choosing the right platform, again, takes center stage as for some – pictures are the highlight while for some videos are the star. Having a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter account is a great place to start with as these platforms have already shown to be effective in terms of marketing and finding target audiences.
Having a strong social media presence requires tying in social media marketing with social media management. They are not the same and cannot be interchangeable. Therefore, it’s important to understand the distinction between the two.
Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Management
Social media management is simply engaging. It involves creating and distributing content through the social media platforms you have an account on. Managing engagement with your audience is considered a form of customer service and includes responding to comments, direct messages, maintaining your profile information, and customer inquiries on social media. The focus here is to effectively use your social media account and the goal is to be intentional and authentic.
The two provide different functions and can be separated by their intent:
Social media marketing is used to market and grow your business using strategies to generate leads through your online presence. The purpose here is to build brand awareness, generate leads and sales.
Social media management, on the other hand, is used to uncover valuable insights about your buyers and how they view your brand, products, and services. Engaging with your target and existing customers directly shows them you care, breaking an invisible barrier and developing a stronger value proportion. It also helps in eliminating/rectifying concerns (such as customer complaints) that may leave a negative mark on your brand if otherwise not addressed.
Let’s understand why practicing Social Media Marketing for your brand is important in the first place.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
| How Social Media Marketing Can Help You Achieve Your Goals | |||
| Vector | Vector | Vector | Vector |
| Cost Effective | Learning from Competitors | Increased Brand Awareness | Generating Leads |
| Cost of promoting your products on these sites is relatively low.Yields a greater return on investment.Gives an almost immediate feedback.Great for small businesses too as you can test the waters by starting off slowly and increasing your budget as you gain more confidence in your approach. | Amazing way to find what your target audience likes and interacts with.See what works, what doesn’t and decide how to devise your approach in the most impactful way. Gives you an idea of what the audience expects from that kind of field that you are in.What level of engagement can be expected.What kind of language your target audience interacts in. What kind of copy resonatesMakes sure you plan in a way where your brand can stand out and offer something unique to your potential customers. | 80% of Instagram users follow a business account.No matter what you’re selling you can find your audience already on/using these platforms.Users are much more likely to resonate with your brand if it comes through means that they are already familiar with. | Promoting and sharing your products through your social media page is a simple way to improve lead generation and in-turn increase sales.People who are following your brand on social media already show interest and connect with the kind of content you are posting.Can generate leads by selling your products through your social profiles & capitalizing on their features. Facebook’s shop section or Instagram’s shopping tab.You can get as creative as you want with ideas such as exciting contests, giveaways, announcements, sales, etc. |
How To Choose The Right Platform For Your Intent
By effectively utilizing all the opportunities each social media platform has to offer you open your business to a wider variety of consumers.
Firstly, there is no right or wrong social media platform to market your brand on. A dentist can have a successful Instagram handle. And a dog trainer can utilize the power of Linkedin effectively. All that matters is that you know your audience, your business, and how social media can boost your digital reach.
Now, each platform caters to a different kind of audience. Therefore, it’s important to answer these questions in order to choose a social media platform to market your product/service on:
- Who is your target audience and where can you find them?
- What type of content do you plan on posting? and,
- What do you hope to achieve by being on social media?
As undeniably big a phenomenon as social media is right now, we need to remember that it’s only just begun, therefore businesses have a lot more pull to gain as social media becomes an integral part of people’s lives.
Which brings us to certain factors that we consider essential to successfully market your brand on social media:
Strategy
The first thing to think about when it comes to publishing on social media is a social media strategy. An effective strategy is one that effectively covers the following:
Define Your Goals:
Clearly defined goals help you get the most out of your social media strategy. It’s a great tool for generating leads or increasing your brand awareness in general. Whatever your objective may be, you can pick a social media platform and start planning accordingly. Social media is also a great tool to get feedback on and track the progress of your goals.
Pick the right social media platform to achieve your goals:
When it comes to social media you have a ton of options to choose from and it may seem like you have to establish a presence everywhere but what’s important to remember is to go where your target audience is.
This could be more mainstream platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Or smaller platforms such as Tumblr, Clubhouse, Anchor, etc. Each has its own benefits and features to help you reach your goals.
Define & Plan Your Content:
It’s easy to plan the kind of content that would best attract your target audience when you have a user persona. You can plan content that best suits their needs and give them the kind of message they want to hear in the most engaging form for them. This could include images, videos, blogs, articles, external links, etc.
The best part is that you never have to stick to one plan; you can keep testing and changing based on the stats and feedback you see.
Planning and Publishing
Social media for a brand is all about finding and nurturing your audience. This means planning and creating content that is tailored to their needs in the form they like the best. Therefore, a consistent social presence on social media can go a long way.
This, however, doesn’t mean you can post the way you would on your personal profile, which is why planning is such an integral step in the process. You need to plan your content in advance and publish the same at a consistent rate to ensure that you’re maximizing your reach. An often forgotten step is to check when your target audience is most active on social media to form the basis of your schedule.
With over 290 million active users on a platform like Facebook in India alone, you are bound to find the right audience for your brand to engage with.
Listening and Engagement
Your social media conversations will only start to grow when you consistently post engaging and targeted content. These are people that follow you, have heard of you or interacted with you previously and may choose to interact with you either directly or indirectly through comments, direct messages, by tagging you, etc.
This is where effective social media management comes in. These conversations are what boosts your engagement and even brand recall. Whether positive or negative, listening and engaging is always appreciated. In fact being prompt with replying to negative messages as well builds an overall positive impression of taking initiative and resolving the issue your customers are facing. Therefore, it’s important to monitor these conversations.
Oh and also, there are several tools that come into use here, making tracking and replying a whole lot easier. You can check them out here.
As brands are still only starting to utilize the full potential of social media, these guides can help you set your page apart.
So that’s it! Social Media Marketing is a vast subject and now that you’ve understood why you need it to grow your business let’s go in-depth to look at how you can create an effective social media strategy for your brand.
