The business employs a virtual assistant called a social media manager to manage the social media site. The social media manager must always be polite, reasonable, and professional.
If you seriously want your brand to penetrate deep and wide in the market, you cannot afford to ignore social media marketing. That's the new goldmine around which all your competitors have pitched tents. Could you be burying your head in the sand as your competitors gain traction?
What is Social Media
Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is about making good use of the available social
media platforms to connect with your target audience to create awareness about your brand, expanding sales or driving steady traffic to your site.
To achieve this efficiently, you must publish high-quality, informative content on your social media platforms and engage your online
customers. Moreover, you must monitor and analyze results periodically to
help strategize for future digital marketing campaigns.
There are management tools digital marketers use to thrive in major
social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram,
Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc. These analytics tools monitor the mentions, responses, or conversations going on online around your brand.
Social Media Marketing: The
Basic Steps
So here are the basic steps social media marketers follow:
1)
Strategy
Before publishing social media content, competent digital marketers
would survey how all these would fit in. Is the market ripe for this product or
service? Is it new or a common product in the target area? If other
competitors are selling it already, how can they be countered?
How should this particular product be packaged to take the consumers' attention away from what they are used to? What are your concerns, goals and business objectives as the business owner?
Do you plan to create awareness, engage your clients or generate traffic
and sales? Would your target audience be interested more in images, links or
videos, or all? Do you want academic, informative or entertaining content?
Where on social media sites is your target audience? Which is the best route to
take to meet them head-on?
Once digital marketers get answers to these questions and more, they
can formulate the best social media marketing campaign strategy.
2)
Proper Planning
and Publishing
After the strategy, it's time to plan with it. What is the right
time to publish the social media content so that most of the target
audience would not miss it? It is all about maximizing the reach.
Digital marketers use scheduling tools to publish content at
desirable times. They go as far as checking the entire calendar to note the
holidays and upcoming events so that future posts could be relevant when
posted around that period.
For instance, social media posts should suit popular periods such as the festive season around December or the Valentine's Day. Social media marketers also take time to develop SEO-oriented content because search engines extend even to social media platforms to determine brand authority and visibility.
This results in high page rankings in the search engine results, leading to increasing returns on investments.
They also roll out PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising platforms as part of
the social media SEO campaigns. Such projects work to improve a business's outreach
across all platforms.
But things are not done blindly; digital marketers have social media
experts and PR specialists who provide microscopic analysis to
track the results of the PPC campaigns.
Virality is another marketing tool in the digital marketers' arsenal. Viral marketing happens when a particular content gains super-publicity than expected. A meme, link, video, graphics, post, image or status that spreads across the social media platforms like wildfire is said to have gone viral.
3)
Interaction With
The Target Audience
Once a business's social media following has picked up, it's time for
direct engagement. The business employs a virtual assistant called a social media
manager to manage the social media site. The social media manager must always be polite, reasonable, and professional. This is because customers
interacting with the business on social media can sometimes be rude and provocative.
4)
Analytic Tools
Social media marketers use analytic tools like Google Analytics to
monitor social media interactions. This is useful data used for auditing
purposes. Has the business expanded its Facebook base beyond last month's? Are
the customer feedback generally positive or negative? How many retweets, hashtags,
mentions, or 'likes' have attracted this month?
Each of these serves a purpose. It informs the digital marketers' next
strategy. This is an ongoing process with re-evaluations along the way. They
discard what's not working well enough and adopt new ideas that could be more
fruitful.
Eventually, the best methods adopted give the business an advantage in
the competitive market. Do you want a social media manager to manage your
social media sites, posting daily, weekly or as you advise?
Get in touch.