SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING 101: THE ONLY GUIDE YOU NEED

March 5, 2024

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING 101: THE ONLY GUIDE YOU NEED

Well, well… What is it about social media marketing that we can share and you don't already know. Right? Wrong. 

If there’s a constantly evolving marketplace that brings in new challenges, it has to be social media and all its channels. Being a part of the daily lives of billions of users, social media can be revolutionary for your business, provided that you leverage it the right way.

Social media is the biggest promotional tool at this moment, and it can do it all. 

Wish to attract your audience by distinguishing yourself from the competition? Easy.
Want to engage the right users and appeal to their interests? A cakewalk.
Desire to grow your presence but feel restricted by algorithms? It can be child’s play for you.

Social media is everything a business can need to be omnipresent. And with today’s competitive business environment and thousands of brands fighting to gain an edge, you need to have a dominating presence. 

Social Media Marketing to Boost Your Online Presence.

Do you know the fastest way to reach your target audience? We think you do, and it is indeed social media. From discerning brand identity to increasing traffic and keeping your audience engaged, social media is the place where it all can happen. 

If you have the right strategy in place, your brand will definitely stand out on social media and leverage it to be highly valuable for business growth. 

  • Heightened Brand Awareness

Your brand needs a personality, a persona that makes it unique. Can there be a better place to do that than social media? Certainly not. 

Social media is continuously progressing, adapting, and becoming a powerful online resource for companies and brands. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can dynamically increase exposure and interest in your product. With the right channels, the right techniques, and the right campaigns, your brand can be a household name. 

  • Better Customer Reach

It’s not mandatory, but it makes it easy to find the people you are looking for.

Creating content that doesn’t reach your audience is wasted hard work. We don’t encourage that! Social media marketing allows you to identify and target posts to your ideal customers and get an understanding of their online behavior.

You can not only categorize and identify the ideal customer on different segmentations like locations, age, and online activities but also determine and analyze your market niche to stay relevant.

  • Increased Traffic

Once you have established your brand and presence on the platform, you will have to connect with potential customers. As the customers engage with the posts and show interest in the brand or products, you’re presented with an opportunity to build a relationship with your customers. 

Social media platforms have an arsenal of tools waiting for you to leverage and get you the traffic you need on your site. #hashtags are one great way to promote your brand and get it trending in days.

The Correlation Between Social Media and Digital Success

Despite what you may think, social media marketing does not mean you have to be on every social network that exists. The focus should be on what works for your brand. 

Thinking about the story you want to tell, your brand image, and where you think you can connect best with your target audience will help lead you to the social media platforms that make sense for your business - it could be one or could be three! 

Whether you're treating social media as a direct line to your support team, a lead generation tool, or everything in between, your social media marketing strategy can help you achieve your business goals. So, choose wisely.

Here are three aspects that can help you.

  • Compel Desire 

Keywords are important, but they are not the most pivotal. When you focus on the real consumer and keep the technical aspects of social media secondary, that’s when you make your brand unique and not just another name on the algorithms. So, create and deliver content keeping a person in mind and make your brand desirable.

  • Exude Approachability  

Ads. They are the best way to approach your audience and make them come to you. The proportion of successful ad campaigns on social media is mind-boggling. There is no denying that organic posts are also successful, but they tend to fade a little when we compare them to paid ones. 

Using ads, you reach more people. With more users you reach, you have the opportunity to tell them the value your brand will give them. And that is the best way to approach social media.

  • Embody Accessibility 

Your online community is the way to succeed on social media. The only way to keep it engaged is by keeping yourself active. With an emphasis on a clear and on-brand tone and regular posts, you can do it pretty conveniently.

The Ladder to a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy 

Social media management isn’t a one-time job. It keeps you on your toes every day. You need to know how to listen to your followers and cater to their interests. 

You have to have a penchant for everything in the online social world; otherwise, social media will become a hassle for you. And we don’t have to tell you how bad that can be. 

Here is a mini-guide to help you create the most optimized social media strategy. 

  • Researching your audience is a good starting point. 

The first step in any social media strategy has to be getting to know your audience, your buyers. The buyer’s persona, as we call it, gives you a direction to go forward and plan your entire strategy. 

Let’s assume you are running an IT solutions company; your goal would be to provide software development services to other companies. So, who would you be pitching to? People who are high up in the hierarchy and have the ability to make key decisions pertaining to the technical aspects of the company. These people could be CEOs, CTOs, Technical Heads, CMOs, or even people reporting directly to them.

Once you have your buyer’s persona researched, you will be ready to start.

  • Evaluating the competition is a close second. 

After your audience, your competitors also play a key role in deciding your social media strategy. This is not to say that you ought to follow everything that is working for them. No. 

You have to assess them and understand the things they are doing right and the things they are not. Learn from the mistakes that have already been made and avoid them at all costs.

Another important benefit of doing a competitive analysis is that you would know the expected standards in your industry and when you know them, surpassing them shouldn’t be difficult.

  • Performing audits is crucial as well. 

In the day and age we live in, there is a high probability that your business has had some kind of social media presence or strategy in place already. That’s the next thing you need to focus on.

Look for things, models, campaigns, and even platforms that have worked for you in the past. Get an understanding of how your audience has interacted with your posts. Evaluate how the level of success you have experienced in numbers. 

If you think you need help with the audit, call us, and we’ll do it for you. Our proprietary APRESP audit will provide you with a clear understanding of your past and future social media strategies.

  • Deciding on social media channels to work on 

If you are targeting millennials and Gen Z, Instagram is the right space. 

If you are looking to impress academicians, YouTube and Facebook can be your platforms of choice. 

If you are a B2B brand, LinkedIn is where you will find your audience. 

You have to know where your audience will be and choose your channels accordingly. A B2B business would not perform well on Snapchat. You would only end up wasting your time, effort, and money. 

  • Not forgetting the data while creating engaging content. 

Creating engaging content that actually resonates with your audience is a given in any social media marketing strategy. What marketers sometimes pass over is that social media is as data-driven as it is content-driven.

Focusing on social media metrics would take you a long way in creating a successful strategy. Evaluating your reach, clicks, engagement, both organic and paid likes, and hashtag performances, everything is crucial. Even customer sentiments on each post, that is, how they have reacted to your content, give you integral insights into how your brand is perceived. 

When you keep the data and metrics at the forefront, you keep track of your performance. And if things don’t look pretty, you can always re-assess and restart before it causes too much damage.

Conclusion 

Social media is a powerful branding and marketing tool that should not be ignored. And we, being social media service providers, cannot let you do that. 

With the help of our social media marketing experts, you can easily determine and analyze your niche market to understand your target customers' online behavior and craft relevant content and ads to engage B2B and B2C users across different platforms. Prioritize social media today and tomorrow.

If you are too focused on your brand's business, you can partner with a social media marketing agency like us to portray your brand the way its consumers would like.

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