The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms have experienced exponential growth since 2004. Despite almost half of the world’s population being active on social media, it still has not reached the peak of its popularity. With users spending an average of 3 hours on social media per day, businesses are experiencing countless opportunities to reach their audience through social media marketing.
Social media provides businesses with a low-cost alternative to traditional marketing methods. It also allows brands to interact, communicate and build brand loyalty with their audience. In doing so, they can build their brand, increase sales and drive website traffic.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- Drive awareness:
Consumers will gravitate towards brands they recognise; social media allows for cheap, effective and easy brand building. Effective social media strategies will stimulate conversation about your brand and get fans talking.
- Build customer loyalty:
A strong investment in customer service can build meaningful relationships between your company and your customers. Social media allows for immediate interaction and customer feedback. Businesses can also respond to their customers right away.
- Low-cost:
Creating social media profiles is completely free. Sharing quality organic content can often be enough to boost your brand on social media, however paid promotions will often expose your brand to a wider audience. Most social media platforms base your ad promotions around a budget, meaning you can adjust it depending on the extent of promotion you want to achieve.
Build a Social Media Strategy to Boost Your Brand
- Align your social media strategy with your business objectives:
Set realistic goals that are in line with your overall objectives. This could be to raise brand awareness, generate leads, increase community engagement or to build traffic to your website. Once you determine which of these goals (or combination of these goals) you would like to achieve, you can develop your social media framework around achieving them.
- Define your target audience:
Create a profile of your ideal customer. By knowing their demographic, behavioural and psychographic similarities, you can develop content that will be directly relevant to them. This will also assist in creating ad campaigns that can be targeted to this target group. If you are struggling to come up with a profile, examine your social media insights to learn about your followers.
- Conduct a competitor analysis:
By evaluating your competitor’s social media strategy, you will gain insight on how brands in your industry are conducting themselves. From this, you can establish what is working for them and what you could improve on; ultimately to inform and adapt your own social media strategy.
- Analyse your current social media profiles:
If your brand already has social media profiles, investigate what is working and what is not. Understand which posts are performing well and which posts are not connecting with your audience. Are your profiles up to scratch with those of your competitors? These are the questions you should be asking when conducting an audit.
- Set up and optimise your accounts:
Determine which social media platforms are relevant to your brand and create them. Try to keep usernames consistent between each platform to ensure ease of access for your consumers. It is likely that a separate strategy for each network will be required. I.e. Tutorials on Instagram and customer service on Facebook.
- Plot and schedule your social media content:
The social media rule of thirds is a common strategy used to develop content. One-third of content is to interact with your audience, one-third is to build your business and the final third is sharing content from other businesses or accounts. Once you have the content prepared, place these pieces into a calendar to schedule consistent and frequent posts.
- Evaluate and improve your performance:
There is no single generic strategy that will work for all businesses. Some areas of your strategy may work very well, others may not. It is important to constantly adapt and develop your strategy with the assistance of analytics and data parameters to distinguish how you can optimise and maximise the use of social media marketing.
Building a solid social media strategy is imperative in today’s marketing climate. With approximately half of the world’s population active on social media platforms, this method of marketing provides businesses with a low-cost alternative to traditional methods. For more information, please contact us here.
