There’s a revolution in social media networks that are the ways to interact with each other. However, tons of people are using social platforms to increase their brand awareness. Needless to say that where there is more traffic engagement, you’ll get more sales and promotions in your business. You can drive more traffic into your website by publishing unique content on your social platforms.
So, everyone knows about the explosion of social media platforms. But many of us get distracted after starting social media marketing for their business. So, where’s the problem and how to solve them? You know, without proper social media marketing tips and strategies, you can’t grow your business. Now, the questions is about do you know what is social media marketing? Whether you want to build your empire on social media, why not give a read to the following guidelines?
What is social media marketing?
To get started, you need to sense the meaning of social media marketing. When you want to start your online business campaigns, you need to come up with a proper strategy. Yes, social media platforms are great sources of traffic where you can advertise your products to specific consumers. Moreover, by branding your products or publishing content on social media, you can drive traffic into your websites. And you know, it will increase your sales. Yes, that’s the ultimate goal of an owner.
In previous days, people would like to publish their content on social media for generating traffic to their websites. But over the time being, social platforms have revolutionized beyond being just a place to promote content. Nowadays, business owners use social media platforms in several ways. They can monitor their users’ reactions, what they think about their brand, and also response according to the customers’ requirements.
Moreover, a business can analyze how it’s performing on social media by monitoring its engagement, reach, and sales through analytics tools. If you come with specific products, you can highly set your campaign for specific customers that is called social media advertising.
How to do social media marketing?
If you are looking for a place for marketing then social media would be the best place to do so nowadays. There are more than 50 billion businesses on social media. Among these 50 billion-plus businesses there are many which are running in more than one social media site.
Don’t be hopeless seeing some of the social media businesses remaining less popular or having limited engagement. They just do not know the right way to do it. We are here to guide you with the best path step by step so that you can understand social media marketing clearly.
Step 1: make a Start Building a Quality Following
In step 1, you should focus on creating a quality following. Of course, it matters whom you are attracting through your products or services. When you have a low-quality following then two things may happen. You may have very poor engagement.
Your posts will get 1-2 likes which are very odd to experience. This leads you to get very fewer comments and for your kind information, comments are the main sign of a disengaged audience. On the other hand, even after getting the engagement, you don’t get any review. People may love your post but you will not be benefitted.
Now, in order to create a quality following make a list of your target audience. As you are starting, so it would be better if your target audience is limited. It would also work as a trial and you will get feedback on how your service attracts them. Don’t try to lose any of your customers. Make them influenced to come back again. While posting anything, keep your targeted audience on your mind.
Step 2: Create a Budget
In the 2nd step, you need to set your budget to run your business on social media. Try to find out the exact place where you should spend your money. And then find out the amount you need to spend. You may feel that advertising on social media is free, yes it is free.
But the output you get without spending a penny will not go too far as you have to spread your posts as much as possible. Understanding all these will determine your success. Without a proper understanding, you may have to overspend. Apart from the issue of overspending, a business without a planned budget cannot identify the reason for something’s not working.
They just waste the money by throwing it without any limitation. Marketing on social media is strategic. Don’t think that it is just random sharing and hoping for the best. It is efficient and always targeted. So it is very important to create a budget for social media.
Things should be considered under the social media budget:
1 – Content making & management: – There can be various types of content for your social media marketing. It can be a short video also pictures. You need to fix a budget for that. In the making, you will need a better camera, editor, etc. Sometimes you may need employees too for running your online page. They will be in the duty of uploading posts, videos, memes, etc. You will have to pay them and this money should be considered under the budget of content creation.
2 – Research: – It is very essential to run some researches regarding the upcoming plan of yours. There can be many trials to understand each of the things clearly. Thus there you need a budget for the research purpose.
3 – Automation: Automation improves consistency. It also reduces repetitive and monotonous tasks.
4 – Advertising: You cannot think about building a strong following without any paid advertising. It is almost impossible. So you need to pay some money after posting anything. After uploading a video, post, or meme, anything you have to boost them. Boosting will help you to reach a good number of people as well as it will help you to gain a good number of followers. So, you should keep a good budget behind advertising.
Step 3: Set Clear Goals
Now, find the exact goal of yours on social media regarding your business. Find out what you want to do on social media. You need to have a clear path to go with your business on social media. In order to increase profit, you need to take a few certain steps. Let us bring some basic things that social media addresses:
1 – Increase Reach: Try to reach as many people as you can. Don’t let anyone miss the offer among your targeted audience. Those who are likely to be your customers, catch them and let them know about your brand as well as its worth. Think about tackling the goal if none is seeing your profile or business.
2 – Create Brand Awareness: It’s your decision about how people are going to see you, remember you. You will have to find out how your brand can be especial from the perspective of your customers. Try to offer as much as you can keeping an eye on the revenue.
3 – Engagement: You need to get your audience engaged to make your social media business worked. The more engagement you get, the more your business on social media will shine. When a good number of people will comment on your posts, you will be having a good engagement. And a good engagement will make the marketing on social media easier.
4 – Generate Leads: If you are selling a costly product you should generate leads that can be nurtured in a more personalized way by your email marketing or salesperson.
5 – Quick Sales: If the product you want to sell doesn’t have any planning, then you should go for a quick sale. After doing one or two, it will be much more effective.
6 – Customer value: It is not too tough to guess the value of customers. When your service and product will be liked by them, they will come back when they will need any product or service to buy that matches with your interests. Just like you can see it written on most of the bags you find in the shop.
Step 4: Use Paid Advising
Social media advertising is very important as it helps you to reach your targeted audience quickly. Otherwise, it takes a huge amount of time. By then, you may even lose interest in online business. So, it is better to put some money into the advertising of your product or service. Social media advertising helps you to reach your goal. However, you can pay in:
1 – Building your following
2 – Increasing engagement
3 – Generating leads
4 – Making quick sales
5 – Re-engaging existing customers
Step 5: Learn All the Things about Engagement
To do business on social media, you have to be social enough to be accepted gladly by the audience. However, you should remember that engagement is a two-way sheet. Either you gain or you lose. Once you start getting good engagement, you should remain careful to hold that.
One silly mistake or something that your audience thinks that is talking at them can be a big problem in the growth of your business. You will have low engagement again. Whenever doing something, you have to be sure that your product or service includes such a price tag or offer that attracts the people so much that they even talk about your brand in public.
You may also have the possibility of having a loss in the beginning as you will be taking a few but giving much. This is how you will be able to introduce your brand with the people. This is the way your audience will keep you on their mind as well as on their conversations. Besides that, having the ability to make a good interaction with the audience will also help a lot.
Most importantly, don’t wait for your customers to contact you first. Go with your brand towards them. Make a good interaction and that will help a lot. Try to remain active on social media’s business site as much as possible. Don’t be late on replying to your customers’ comments. Try to answer any of their inquiries. Here are some tips that can help you understand the way of starting a good interaction:
Like As:
1 – Interact with followers. Anything that aligns well with your brand like, comment, and even shares that. If they follow you, follow them back.
2 – Keep a conversational copy
3 – Answer to the messages quickly
4 – Respond to the comments of your followers. Let them know how interested you are to make a deal with them.
Step 6: Produce Ideas Your Followers will Love
Which type of content has many possibilities to wow your audience? What will bring them to remain in touch with you? What can lead you towards the goal that you want to achieve through social media marketing?
However, it is not that easy to create content that matches the vast interest of your audience. First, you need to know exactly who your customers are. Research their engagement with whom and were. Most importantly, what kind of content they will love most. A research firm named GlobalWebIndex has found that there are three basic reasons why people use social media. They are:
1 – News/Events
2 – Passing time
3 – Sharing own pictures/videos
The most important result of this research that should be noted that nearly 29% of the people spend time on social media in researching brands and finding staff to buy. So any of your doings should clearly relate your brand. Sometimes, sharing a funny meme can help you to gain a lot of likes and share. It will be very helpful for you and your brand. But of course, they are not furthering your brand goals. So it is better to mix up the things you are sharing. The much better thing to do is, you can create anything that relates to your brand. It can at least help you to reach a lot of people. Even if it is not any topic regarding your buy and sell.
For Example:
We would like to give a perfect example. Suppose, you usually sell dresses both for male and female. The name of your brand is “A”. Right now, you have given a 30% discount on your sale a particular dress such as Punjabi.
You can create a meme and for that suppose you pick a random guy, make him wear one of those Punjabis. Take a photo of him. Then sit calm and start making a meme. On one side of the picture 2 friends are talking about happiness asking, “Do you know what happiness is?” On the other side of the picture keep that guy wearing your Punjabi and he is replying, “Happiness is getting A’s Punjabi on 30% discount.
You can upload this meme with a caption like, “Hurry, Time is limited”. It will take the attention of almost all of your customers. Because you are not just selling your products. You are also giving your best afford to draw the attention of your customers. It seems like the guy wearing that Punjabi is talking with the customers. You never know, these spread faster.
Step 7: Maximize Your Time and Performance Using Automation
Many of the businesses on social media you see are running their business inefficiently. They are not even aware of it. Of course, you shouldn’t be one of them. And also we would like to add that, they are not even nearly your competitors.
You need to compete with them who are very good at maximizing their time and performance in social media marketing. For your kind information, there are automation tools through which you can cut hours or days of your work. You shouldn’t be unfamiliar with the line that says “Time is money”. Here time a big money. Automation tools work as:
- Automation makes sure that you are posting your content at the best time.
- It generates an idea. Suppose, you are looking for something to post on the social media but it’s being tougher and tougher to find out, automation lets you set parameters so that you can get the best ideas to use.
- Multiple posting platforms at once. At a time you can share your post in all the social Medias such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
These are not all. There are lots of ways left to mention that automation can be used. It is very important to do all the needed researches as well. If you face trouble learning using the software, you can work with a digital marketing agency and you will be able to know the usage.
Step 8: Start Boosting
Boosting is the best way to reach potential customers. Mark them as strangers, so boosting is the medium that introduces you and your business with those strangers. The main thing to focus on is it actually a post that can bring a lot of engagement. Getting a thousand impressions is less important than getting 20 engagement. However, boosting can take the number to double, triple, or any multiplication. There are some rules that you have to follow strictly before boosting:
1 – You should not be stuck in getting the appreciation from the existing customers only. You always have to target the best to bring out. So try to pick as many strangers as you can. Boost those posts which can bring out a lot more engagements than your expectation.
2 – Avoid boosting posts that link other sites. Of course, you are not paying the money in boosting for someone else. We mean, this is meaningless.
3 – As the number of customers you are targeting is important, so it is better to narrow it always. If you are running a local business, you should only target local people. As your local business cannot benefit any outsider or in other words, an outsider won’t be benefitted by your service. So, nearly it’s going to be a waste to bring them on the list.
4 – While boosting, consider those look-a-like customers.
Step 9: Keep the Consistency
Being consistent is the key to success in the social media business. It may seem like you are getting good engagement, a lot of followers. But to be honest, it won’t last if you don’t be consistent. You need to come back again and again, you need to run the advertising and all of it. If you show your absence in the comment section or at the inbox, your customers will start losing interest in your brand. Try to plan your time as accordingly as possible.
Step 10: Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Acquiring customers is the most important thing you need to be fully focused. Spend the money and time behind this. Once you will start getting good attention from your customers, you will also have to learn how to retain them. Don’t lose any customer by all means. In many cases, many business holders consider customers as God. Customers always love to buy from a place that they trust. So existed customers are game-changer here. The number of existed customers puts a very important role in revenue.
Step 11: Turn Engagement into Revenues
Well, by now, if you have both quality following and good engagement, then your waiting is over. It is time to turn those engagements into revenues. However, achieving such a number of engagements and followers is not that easy. So as you have done the tough part, it is time for you to enjoy the revenue. We have mentioned earlier about the importance of existed customers, so do not do anything silly which helps them to be disappeared. We can give you a lot of examples where a well-established online business fell because of some number of mistakes.
Step 12: Use Analytics
Google Analytics is a good choice as they will tell you what is perfectly working or what just a waste of time is. Stop yourself from making assumptions and every individual, every individual and industry is different. However, analytics will tell you whether you are on the right track or not. So as we were speaking about Google Analytics, let’s discuss what you need to see in Google Analytics:
- The Source of Traffic – This makes you understand which way you should be headed more. The more traffic you get from one media, the better is to go with that. So the source of traffic is very important and you can see it through Google Analytics.
- What happens when people reach you – You will find many options like time on page, bounce rate, etc. Bounce rate stands for the percentage of the site visitors just enter and leave without clicking on anything.
- It is also important to notice that where are those people finding a way to enter on your site. Find out the source where they found you most.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
There are huge benefits of social media marketing. Most of them are already known to most of you. But being specific is always a good thing to make the people understand. So here, we are trying to be specific enough to let you know about all the benefits. However, we have found a few benefits which are by all means can be considered as actual benefits.
1) Brand Recognition
You can increase the recognition of your brand using social media. As it is not so tough to understand the difference of the way of spreading anything through social media and traditional media. A lot of people use social media and 29% of them use it just to search for various brands or buying important products or services.
So Social media is a great platform to create brand recognition. Pay full attention to your display pictures and cover photos. Your logo is one of the recognition of your brand. Put your logo in both of the places. This is a very healthy tip to create brand recognition soon.
2) Generate Conversation
Generating conversations are very much easier through social media. And the benefit of it is huge. While you post about anything that brings people in your comment box to start a conversation, is definitely good. It can be anything which is not related to your products but still, it will work great.
Suppose you sell dresses and you came to know that, most of the followers you have love Messi a lot. Post something good about Messi, something that can never be missed from the eyes of a die-hard Messi fan. You will get a lot of conversations and thus, you will be benefitted.
3) Connect through Social Listening
Social listening is a great thing to be benefitted from the social media business. All you need to do is, just pay some time, and listen to the people. The people who are your quality followers. It may need some time but making a perfect routine can hurry your research. Then you will be able to know their way of talking, their interests, and how they react. Always try to follow the trend. Trendy people talk much about the trend. So, you know what’s going on in the real world. To be more specific, you will be able to know, what is exactly going on the places cover your business. Then following that, you just need to make a plan to catch the attention of your followers. Find the word “most”. Which will be preferable most? What will be accepted most? What will be able to attract the customers more? Thus you will be benefitted.
4) Tell Your Brand’s Story
The story that your brand has or the story you want to share about your brand with the audience is easy to be reached through social media. As it is not unknown to any of you that a great story can create much impact on the mind of the audience. However, the story can be anything, real or made. You just need to hit the mind of the audience. For example, the story of KFC, Ali-baba, etc. These stories stay almost permanently in the mind and the audiences remember the name of the brand.
5) Collect Data from Audience
This area is similar to social listening. It knows the keywords that the audience use, so it can search for those keywords. However, it is more focused on any of your specific product. Social media is there to provide information. You can view the reach and insights of your every post on Facebook and Twitter.
6) A Better Customer Service
Customers are now used to be guided by the providers through their choices. So you need to make sure whether you are delivering your best service to ensure better customer service. In another word, you will have to please your customers. Social media have made it easy to provide better customer service.
7) Gain Customer Loyalty
Social media allows you to gain customer loyalty for free. Yes, this is obvious that customers in most of the time go with their favorite brands. But 53% of customers usually follow their trustworthy sellers. So you can be their trustworthy business through social media.
8) Its Almost Free
It is free to create a social media account and post. Now the starting and most of the processes are free for you on social media.
9) Retargeting the Audience using Social Media
You cannot expect more than 2% of your customers who will buy something on their first visit. You will have to make sure that they come back again and again. So retargeting is a great thing that should be focused on. Social media carries that retargeting tool.
10) Let Your Cause to Go Viral
Social media are the best place to viral something. If you are already heading towards advertising your site or page or posts, social media is the easiest platform to make them viral.
11) Promoting the Content
Promoting the content is equal to promoting your product. Social media are the best place to promote your content.
12) Usage of Hashtags
Hashtags are very important in social media marketing. If you notice on Twitter or Instagram, there is a huge use of hashtags. Hashtags become counted later, such as twitter’s top trending posts. If you post on a well-known topic, then you can just write hashtags before the topic. Try to use hashtags and select some great topics which are already trendy.
13) Remaining Up-To-Date
Social media is the best place to keep customers up-to-date. It is not necessary to happen that your customers are always getting the update about your plans. But in social media, it is way too easy to keep the audience up-to-date. They can easily reach you and also they can know the updates.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing is a good way to take your business forward quickly. But it is also important to know the strategy of social media marketing. To create your social media marketing, these 5 things can be very helpful:
1) Purpose of being on social media
Normally you can have the 8 goals to be on social media. They are:
- increase your brand publicity
- Have traffic towards your site
- You have an intention to generate leads
- To increase signups and sales to grow the amount of revenue
- You want to boost your bran’s engagement
- To provide a social customer service
- You want to increase mentions in the press and others
- To know about the conversations regarding your brand.
2) Your target audience
Your targeted audience can be based on some questions like:
- Who are your targeted audiences?
- What are their interests that you are able to provide?
- Which site do they use particularly?
- When they usually watch the content?
- Why will they consume your content?
- How will they do it?
3) What exactly are you going to share?
The types of content matter less and here you need to be specific to understand. For that, using the word “Theme” is better than using “Content”. You can have more than one theme but you need to make sure that you are using the perfect theme that suits you and your profile.
4) The place of sharing them
You do not have to share your content on all social media. Choose the best one according to the number of responses and feedback. Take your time, give a trial. Wait for the result and then make a decision. Nothing to hurry here, just observe carefully and think before making any kind of decision.
5) The time of sharing them.
The time of sharing your content on social media depends on the type of content. As there are differences based on a regular equation. Such as, sports fans usually remain active in the time of any sports event.
The time is between starting of the event and the ending of it. So, if your targeted audiences are sports fans, then you should select that time to post your content. Travelers usually remain active in the weekends to gather people or to make a plan for the trip. So if you want to target them then maintain the time of posting.
Social Media Marketing Tools
In the list of social media marketing tools, we would like to mention 6 of them which are very effective. They are:
1) Buffer
Buffer lets you share your content on multiple accounts from a single dashboard. It has some unique social media guides and it is very helpful.
2) Social Clout
Social Clout tracks engagement and can eventually calculate social media ROI. It also shows the demographics that have the best engagement.
3) Feedly
Feedly is a great tool that helps you to know which niche people are mostly talking about. Using it, you can share and schedule posts from your dashboard directly.
4) Canva
Canva is a great tool for creating great images for your posts. It allows you to create that very easily. Though it is a free tool but many well-known sites like Buzzfeed use them.
5) Socedo
Socedo is good for doing most of the grunt works. It helps you to find the target leads through various social media channels.
6) Edger
To know the perfect schedule for posting your content, the edger is a useful tool to be used. It ensures the endless supply of posts done at social media automatically.
7) Hotsuite
Hootsuite is a social media operation platform that enables druggies to track exchanges and cover colorful social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Hootsuite has been generally well- reviewed by both druggies and experts.
Social Media Marketing Tips
Reading the rest of the article, it is not that tough to understand the best way of doing social media marketing. However, why not make it a bit clearer. There are some tips we would like to provide you that can help you in the long run. They are:
- Finding the goal
- Find out your target audience
- Look for the best platform in social media
- Make a nice plan for social media marketing
- Create a social media schedule
- Use tools that empower your strategy
- Try to learn a better storytelling
- Improve your business brand
- Learn using emoticons perfectly
- Embrace your mistakes
- Work with your post frequency
- Treat every social channel individually
- Always share quality content
Final words
Hopefully, you’ve got a clear idea about what is social media marketing and how to do it? Social media marketing is not a new thing to discuss. But it has been turned into a common curiosity of the people that how to do social media marketing. From the very beginning, we have tried our best to provide the best information to guide you properly to run your business on social media.
From creating goals to advertising, you can follow each of the instructions if you intend to run your business on social media. However, it may seem a lot of easy work to do without any obstacles. But to be honest, obstacles are invisible here in most of the cases. It may seem easy to follow these instructions, but managing them together is not that easy at all. So you need to be focused and consistent from the very beginning of the process.