Have you ever visited Oreo’s official brand account on Instagram?
With just over 764 posts, Instagram has successfully acquired more than 2.6 million followers.
A normal post launched by Oreo on Instagram easily scores around 20k to 30k likes easy.
Everything that Oreo posts on its Instagram account are brand-related, highly-creative and aesthetically pleasing. You will find consistency in all of their images, they contain the same filters and each caption is carefully written using short/concise sentences with appropriate hashtags.
All such social media practices are all part of a perfectly designed social media marketing strategy.
I am sure the success story of Oreo’s social media presence really aspires you to explore questions:
- What is social media marketing and how important it is for your business?
- Why should you spend time creating social media accounts for your website?
- And how should a brand actually build a social media marketing strategy?
Let’s answer all of these questions so you can build the perfect social media presence on the Internet.
What is Social Media Marketing?
The art of creating such content that helps promote a product or a business on social media platform is called effective social media marketing. There are various social media platforms on the Internet. To name a few, we have Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Content that is specifically written with the idea of attracting customers from these platforms is what creates the foundation of a good social media marketing. As a social media expert, it is your job to create unique content which is custom-tailored to attract visitors. It has to be original and it has to be shareable.
In short, your content on social media should help you boost conversions alongside brand awareness.
Increasing Benefits of Social Media Marketing (SMM) for Your Business
As per why your company should consider getting a social media marketing strategy in place, there are countless benefits. Here are a few benefits to help you understand why you need a good SMM.
Social Media Help Increase Brand Awareness
May I ask what is the primary focus of considering social media as a source of reaching out to customers? Let me help you answer that question. The major purpose of using a social media channel is because you want to create excellent brand exposure for your digital business. Back in 2018, estimates represented that there are almost 3.2 billion individuals who are accessing social media. Such numbers are good enough to explain why you believe it is necessary to put your business there.
Besides, it is proved that social media contributes to brand awareness through effective engagement. What are social engagements? All kinds of likes, shares, comments or interactions associated with a brand are termed as social media engagements. Social engagement pushes your website links in front of more audience and hence, your website observes a good amount of incoming network traffic.
Social Media Help Generate Leads & Boost Conversions
Why it is a great platform for generating leads and boosting conversions? It’s because social media allows you to create your own specific loyalty clubs. Each brand acquires its own number of followers which gradually increases in time and in return help generate potential leads and boost conversions.
Wondering how social media marketers leverage the power of social media to generate leads?
- By creating shareable content which allows followers to participate and contribute to your brand.
- By hosting live videos about a new product/service which your brand has recently launched.
- By implementing an effective social media marketing campaign on each of your channels.
- Direct selling of products through brand social profiles by initiating shop sections and features.
Social Media help Manage Perfect Relationship with Customers
Another marvelous thing about social media is that it allows you to connect, interact and engage your target audience. It helps you to understand the pain points of your target market and then make necessary recommendations accordingly. What’s more? It can help you respond back to their questions and comments and provide them with whatever help you may need. By staying in touch with them, you can also ask them questions about your products and offer them potential giveaways.
It will altogether contribute to building a trust factor for your brand among your sacred individuals.
Social Media Can Give You Better Insight on Customers
Another interesting factor of using social media is that it gives you better insight into your competitors. If you are running a business online, knowing about your competitors is a must. It can help you in understanding their social media tactics, their product promotion strategies, study their social media campaigns, and what they are implementing based on their level of interactions.
With social media, you can learn what may work best for your business and what may not work at all. Good social media strategy helps you decide what you should be doing in terms of social approach. It helps you to review up your competitors and can help you make sure your marketing stands out.
How to Build the Perfect Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Now, since we are all well aware of the benefits, it is now time that we move down to social media marketing strategy. Let’s learn the best way to move forward with social media marketing.
When we talk about strategy, there are five steps to ensure your social media marketing plan works.
Step # 1: Identify Your Buyer Persona And Segment Your Audience
The first step for an effective social media marketing strategy is that you understand your buyer persona. By understanding the buyer persona, you can become more capable of meeting their needs.
To understand your buyer persona, think deeply and imaginatively about your target audience. Think!
You have to decide what your audience will look like and why are you reaching out to them? You will further have to decide how you can classify this audience into potential groups?
For example, if you are selling custom made shoes, you might want to classify your target audience who is interested in purchasing custom made products. They can be the modern-day millennials who like to wear stylish apparels. They can be athletes since they like to stand out from the rest of the crowd. All of this information will help you to understand your buyer persona so you can reach them.
Step # 2: Identify the Social Media Platform Where You Want to Market
Just as much as building up a buyer persona is important, it is equally important that you know which platforms you’re going to choose to share your content. There are several social media platforms which can give you a major breakthrough in the Internet world. But, it is up to you to decide which platform is the best one where your target audience resides. It can be Facebook or it can be Twitter.
For that, you will have to perform your own research.
If you know what your audience needs and interests are, you will know on which social media platform are they more likely to spend their time and perform business. For example, if you are a business skilled in selling custom made shoes to millennials, your target social platform should be Instagram.
It’s where you will find most millennials spending their time.
Here are some other social media stats just to develop your understanding.
- Snapchat: Generation Z makes up the largest portion of the 300 million users.
- Facebook: Millenials make up the largest portion of the 2.2 billion users.
- Youtube: Millennials, closely followed by Generation Z, make up the largest portion of the 1.9 billion users.
- Twitter: Millennials make up the largest portion of the 335 million users.
- Pinterest: Older millennials and younger baby boomers make up the largest portion of 250 million users.
Step # 3: Content is King! Henceforth, Make Quality Content That Matters
There is a strong chance that people visiting your social media account have previously visited your competitors in the market. So, they are more likely reading the same marketing gimmicks which others have already posted on the Internet. What they are now looking for is something unique!
Henceforth, it is increasingly important that you make sure the content you publish is of great quality. Spend time investing your budget in hiring the most professional content developers who can create marketing headlines to win your audience in just a blink. You need people who are highly creative.
You can even use your current customers and promoters to help you generate user-generated content.
For example, if you’re running a custom shoe business, make sure that your brand has a unique logo and a tagline that sets it apart from the rest. Each of the posts that you are sending out is unique and special in its own way. Double-check if you are using the right hashtags and your captions are perfect.
Above all, pay special attention to wording and context. Your grammar should be perfect too.
Step # 4: Organize a Periodic Schedule to Post Your Social Media Posts
Knowing when is the best time to post your social media posts is what really makes or breaks a business. There are several markets and each of them comes online at different times. You need to identify which of the posting times are the best times to send the word out to your desired audience.
For example, if your custom shoe business is running in the African region, it is important that you should do detailed research on when average Africans come online on your desired social channel. If your research indicates that they are available during the evening hours of the day, then make sure that you schedule your social media posts and automate them to send it out every day at the set time.
There are several tools which can help you organize your social media for effective management.
- Sprout Social – It is a great tool to organize and plan out content creation. It will help you manage campaigns and schedule posts. It also provides you to review content and send perform analysis.
- HubSpot – It is a great tool to publish and monitor your content. It helps you create powerful new connections in your niche. With Hubspot, you can schedule and publish content in advance.
- HootSuite – It is a great social media management platform which helps you to find, manage, schedule and report on your desired content. The tool is great for measuring the ROI on a social media campaign.
Step # 5: Lastly, Analyze the Impact & Observe its Results
How would you know that the practices you have instilled are the right practices? You won’t be completely satisfied unless your efforts don’t complement your successes based on the objectives.
To analyze the results, you will require a way to keep track of all your posts on every channel. And it can be best done by keeping track of all the important social media metrics.
What are social media metrics? It is the data accumulated by businesses to measure the success of a post performing on social media. It helps marketers measure the impact of a post on the target audience. It may include information on user engagement, likes, shares, follows, comments, etc.
To measure social media metrics, one must use the following software
- Twitter Analytics
- Facebook Analytics
- Instagram Insights
There are countless social media networks which allow users to put forward their businesses in front of over a million people every day. Sending out a word in front of your target audience may sound all tricky, but planning what to share on which platform and when to share it decides how well you perform. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and if you want your social media to be sizeably profitable, then you have to be manageable and more effective. You need to understand social media before you step down into the mud pool. Hopefully, this article is good enough to enlighten you on the power of social media.