What Is Social Media Marketing?
Here's what we will cover.
Social Media Marketing Is Online Marketing.
The Right Social Media Content Engages Audiences and Drives Targeted Traffic to Your Website.
Here’s Something to Consider as An Entrepreneur, Small Business, Start-Up, Or Personal Brand.
Social Media Marketing Core Pillars.
Business Goals.
Audiences.
Content Strategy.
Planning, Scheduling and Publishing.
Blogging.
Building Customer Loyalty.
Social Media Versus Paid Advertisement.
Social Media Marketing Is Online Marketing
Entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small businesses usually don’t have the time or staff budget to devote to running their social media campaigns.
They turn to social media marketing agencies to tell their story, build relationships, create authority, brand recognition, and monitor their online reputation.
Agencies manage their social accounts and help customers master their online presence. In the online digital marketing and sales space, everybody loves the quick "growth hack".
There are no easy shortcuts. Social media marketing takes time, and an eye for what sets you apart. It’s a long-haul commitment with data metrics to track successes.
Agencies that take on start-ups and small businesses usually have a difficulty getting owners to understand that building campaigns from the ground up, with small audiences takes time and commitment.
Even if clients claim that they have a large audience, most of the time, these connections are not the right type identified as the target audience.
The process an agency has to go through is to make sure that the brand, products, and services, align with the social media campaign, any online paid ads, and website.
An agency has to go through a due diligence process and gather information to determine what it will take to successfully guide their clients along the path of establishing a successful online presence.
The Right Social Media Content Engages Audiences and Drives Targeted Traffic to Your Website
Social media marketing creates a strong digital marketing and social media presence, which provides your website visitors with the right social engagement that puts you at a competitive advantage.
Social media agencies create compelling content and manage your social media and lead generation campaigns. Social media is focused on creating lead awareness, with strategies throughout the marketing and sales journey.
Some of the tools include targeted content, the use of multi-channel nurturing including automation, email marketing, paid re-targeting, dynamic website content and direct sales marketing / lead generation.
Social media aligns your marketing and sales strategies.
Here’s Something to Consider as An Entrepreneur, Small Business, Start-Up, Or Personal Brand
40% of small businesses don’t use social media. 16% are unlikely to use social media for their businesses. In other words, there is room in this space for you to make your mark.
Here’s where you can grow your brand awareness, spread the word about who you are, drive traffic to your blogs, landing pages and home page. Social media marketing also has a place in the online digital world to showcase your products and services.
A robust social media strategy will create engagement, conversation and sharing about you, your brand, and products. Social media marketing is about effective storytelling and can establish you as a thought leader in your industry.
If You Want a Better Social Media Narrative, Follow These Tips.
Social Media Marketing Core Pillars
- Research which social media platforms work best for your brand in conjunction with where your audience lives online.
- Research the most effective times to post.
- Do competitor online-presence audits.
- Social media that drives traffic to your website must be congruent with your website.
- You must commit to being active online – engage, comment, share, like, and post, podcast, and videos.
- Social media marketing is not lead generation.
Social media is MARKETING.
Lead generation is SALES.
- Why do you need to do social media marketing? it’s where your competition is and where your audiences live.
- Use social media to build relationships.
Business Goals
- What do you want to accomplish and how will you measure milestones and achievements?
- How can you measure hashtags, likes, comments, shares, and other types of engagement?
- What is social media marketing versus online advertising – what are the benefits, costs, ROI, and ROM? What are the “time to results” for both?
Audiences
- Define your audience – your customers, your leads, who are you after?
- Breakdown your audience demographics.
- Who are you competing against for the same audience?
- Do a social media marketing and lead generation audit of your competition.
- Publish content where your audience lives online.
- Niche down. Content needs to be niched for your audience.
- Content creation is all about engaging with your audience. If your audience does not engage, re-evaluate your content.
- Become active in “Groups” related to your business/industry, audiences, and influencers.
Content Strategy
- Create value content. Content that engages. Content that is optimized to increase conversions.
- Be data driven, which means measurable results and benchmarks.
- Priority is video. YouTube is as effective as blogging SEO optimization for organic growth. Google owns YouTube. Video is “king” when it comes to engagement. Engagement is viewed as the core of Googles view of relevant content. The more relevant content you create that generates user relevancy, the better Google ranks you. SEO is about getting you to page 1 in organic searches.
- Video includes text captions.
- Tap into influencers.
- Publish weekly to YouTube.
-Bi-Monthly or weekly Podcasting, niche down and find your area of interest preferably associated with your audience you are looking to engage with. The key to podcasting is to be consistent and persistent.
- Publish at least 75% content, and no more than 10% product. 15% curated content. Blog snippets pointing to your blog.
- Grow a following.
- Join groups where your audience engages and posts. Interact with them to build trust and brand/industry authority,
- Use hashtags – research popular #’s.
- Use mentions, where appropriate and don’t abuse them – you might get reported or a negative response.
- Keep customers and leads updated on news, promotions and offers.
Planning, Scheduling and Publishing
- Quality over quantity but publish minimally weekly.
- Videos and images.
- Content must be optimized.
Blogging
- One of the most misunderstood “gems” of social media marketing and organic growth. Social media posts should have a balance of pointing to your blogs.
- If you want to be ranked on page 1 of Google (SERP) you need great content that beats what your competition is doing. So, ask yourself if your online competitors are the same people and businesses, you have identified as your competition.
Type a key word or keyword phrase someone would use to find you online. Let’s assume they do not know you. Look at page one results only, and do not include ads and major market players, unless you are one of them. Only look at the blogs and review blogs that show up on page one. Those are your competitors for the keyword you typed in. You need to write and optimize your post to be better than what you see. That’s what gets you to page one in organic searches.
Building Customer Loyalty
- Here’s where you can build brand loyalty for free. Customers follow and interact with brands and businesses they appreciate. 85% of people who have bought products follow the brands they like on social media.
- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are built around interacting with you via posts and messaging. People are using these platforms more and more as customer service platforms.
Social Media Versus Paid Advertisement
- These two channels of media expressions are merging because the platforms where social media takes place are increasingly making it more difficult to effectively communicate to the masses. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest are businesses first and social media second.
David Speyer, managing partner at Zoot Marketing is more than a digital marketing strategist. David is a coach and mentor who helps start-ups, and small businesses overcome the difficulties they face when navigating the challenges of online marketing and sales.
Faq
The term social media marketing (SMM) refers to the use of social media and social networks to market a company's products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones while allowing them to promote their desired culture, mission, or tone.
The six types of social media include, social networking, social blogs, influencer marketing, social media engagement, news and forum sites, and blogs (both writing, commenting, sharing and linking too.)
1. Determine where your audience lives on social media.
2. Create social media profiles on those social platforms.
3. Learn the basics of social media marketing including creating posts with the use of media, scheduling, hashtags, mentions, engaging, and data metric.
4. Look at what others including your competition are doing.
5. Be creative.
6. 80% of what you post is social, 20% is self-promotion such as products and services..
7. Focus of quality, not quantity but post at least once a week.
8. Evaluate and optimize, change.
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