Social media marketing is the act of using social media content tailored to specific social media platforms and achieving a desired result.
Social media marketing is helpful in assisting brands and businesses:
- Improve their website traffic
- Drive customer engagement
- Improve brand image
- Move inbound traffic
- Increase their brand authority
- Achieve higher conversion rates
- Improve search engine rankings
Some of the most popular social media platforms to market your products and services are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Google Plus. Other platforms like Quora, Pinterest, and Twitch are not as popular, but they are still effective at driving traffic and boosting business sales.
How to create a social media marketing plan that works for your brand
- Set your goals. What do you want to achieve? Write your clearly defined goals down. Break these big goals into smaller one so that they’re not only achievable but realistic.
- Research your target audience. Ask yourself questions like, “which social media platform is my target audience the most active on?” and “How do they engage with similar brands like mine on social media?” This will help you determine which social media channels are the best for your brand to focus on and what kind of content will work best for you.
- Find your brand personality. This is another reason why determining and researching who your target audience is so critical: it’s one of the first things you need to do. You need to be able to communicate in a way your target audience can relate to. Remember that your brand personality needs to be consistent across all of the social media platforms you’ll be on.
- Find out what works for your competitors. Consider what your competitors are doing on social media. Learn from their mistakes. Analyze your competitors’ social media pages. You’re not copying what your competitors are doing. You’re getting inspiration and creating your own social campaigns to match your brand personality. It’s important to set yourself apart from your competitors in your own unique way.
- Create engaging content. There are multiple ways to execute content creation according to your brand. You can repurpose old content you’ve created. You can incorporate content themes across your social media platforms. You can break up a single photo into smaller fragments and upload them separately. You can make live videos. Create GIFs and infographics. Share user-generated content to turn your customers into brand advocates. There are no limits to what you can do or share on your social media.
Important social media marketing tips you will love
- Have a well-defined strategy. You can use social media marketing tools to research your audience, competitors, platforms, and content types.
- Maintain consistency across all of your social media platforms. You can create a content calendar to plan the timing and frequency of your social posts. Every platform’s algorithm is different and you can derive best returns if you adhere to their best practices.
- Create targeted content. Social listening tools can help you track all brand mentions and understand their context. Using these insights, you can create more targeted messaging for this demographic.
- Always be on-trend. It’s important that you stay abreast of social media marketing trends that are expected to dominate your target platforms. You can use tools like BuzzSumo and Social Animal to curate trending content and topics for your posts.
- Perform A/B tests. A/B testing or split testing lets you check iterations of your content against set parameters to find out your best option. This extra effort can risk-proof your social content to some extent.
- Focus on videos. Videos are big on social media. They are consumers’ #1 most-preferred branded social content. 93% of marketers claim to have earned new customers due to social videos. And 63% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI they derive from investing in videos.
- Join communities. You get real customer insights by interacting one-on-one with customers in a group. In this way, you get a better understanding of their needs and feedback about existing products. Another benefit is that you can look for loyal customers who can work as brand advocates for you.
- Don’t stress out over algorithm shifts. It’s better to gain an understanding of the rationale behind an algorithm change and modulate your content to align with it. Don’t try to crack the algorithm by questionable methods.
