Find out how social media marketing (SMM) can help you generate leads, boost conversions, and increase brand awareness. At Hemmer Media Consulting we use what we call the "Big 4". Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to generate the most traffic possible.
When it comes to social media marketing (SMM), marketers' top goals are advertising their products/services and increasing their brand reach and awareness. However, many brands struggle with creating engaging content and reaching their target audience. With social media playing such an important role at the top of the funnel, let's dive into all things social media marketing – what it is, its benefits, and how to actually build a social media marketing strategy that'll work for your specific business.
1. What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is all about connecting your target audience and customers to your brand on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. While social media marketing as a whole is super important and benefits your business growth, your strategy will differ based on which social networks your audience spends their time on.
Social Media Marketing Platforms
Users: 1.9 billion daily active users worldwide
Audience: An even spread of Generation X and Millennials
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: Brand awareness; advertising
Facebook is the largest and most established social media platform in the world. Since its birth in 2004, Facebook has grown exponentially. It really helps in the area of advanced marketing tools and also gives you some room with organic reach.
Users: 2 billion monthly active users
Audience: Primarily Millennials
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising
Instagram has only been here since 2012 but its growth has taken the world by storm. Instagram gives you the opportunity to showcase premium visual content and your audience will be able to look at your products, prices, and buy all in one app. They never have to leave the platform to purchase from you. Instagram is hard to beat with that rap sheet.
Users: 229 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials
Industry impact: B2B and B2C
Best for: Public relations; customer service; community building
While Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube focus more on visuals, Twitter focuses on text content. Since the early days of 140 characters or less tweets, you now have the ability to expand your content into community building tools and blog type content with features like Twitter Spaces, Twitter Communities, Twitter Moments.
YouTube
Users: 350 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
Industry impact: B2C and B2B
Best for: Brand awareness; long-form entertainment, and how-to videos
According to SEMRUSH, YouTube is the 2nd most visited website in the world! Many marketers, including myself say this is the best social media platform to build community with your audience. Along with being popular, YouTube is a great place for long-form content (videos) which is perfect for educational material (How-to, Educational, Assembly, Demonstrations). What better way would their be to but a video up about your product and then share with other social media?
2. Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Increase your Reach
There are tens of thousands or more depending on your industry that are ready to see your business. But you have to first put yourself out there. If you don't, you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic that can be made organically. Social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving post engagement. Engagement can be anything from a like, comment, share, or click to your main page. It also helps you increase brand awareness by directing traffic to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.
Boost Leads and Conversions
By simply posting and promoting your products on social media you are improving lead generation, boosting conversions, and increasing sales. This is because you are advertising directly to the users that follow you directly. The amount of shares and re-posts possible makes a marketer excited to get started on it.
Here are some ways that you can generate more leads and conversions on social media:
Create contests and giveaways for your followers. As an example you are giving away concert tickets to a big band coming to town so you tell your followers to share the post. Once a follower shares the post they are entered in a drawing that you would make at a future date. This is a popular and fast way to generate more eyes and follows on your page. That ultimately turns into leads and conversions.
Include links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles. Anyway you can get your website and any potential products in front of customers is a good thing. You never know when someone may ignore your content and want to know who you are by going to your bio/about sections of your social media profiles.
Host live videos to make announcements about products and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company. Your audience wants to see your face and know your personality. It really helps build trust with your company and brand. Which again, ultimately will need to more conversions and leads.
Sell your products through your social profiles. For example, you can enable Facebook's Shop Section or Instagram's Shopping feature on your profiles. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on products you've shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size. Then, visitors can easily proceed to checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.
Build Relationships With Your Customers & Followers
By engaging with your followers on social media, you will be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by responding to posts they make on your profile, asking questions to them about your business and products, and hold giveaways. This makes them feel like you value their input and discussions, which is VERY important.
Watch Your Competitors
Social media is a very good way to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing in your industry. Watch what content they are producing, how they interacts with their followers and customer, and any promotions or tactics they are running. This enables you to find out if your social media page is up to snuff with your competitors and gives you a better idea about the content you are producing and how you are interacting with your followers.
Now lets talk strategy! There are some steps and know how to use when implementing a strategy that works for your business.
3. Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social Media is constantly changing but foundationally, the steps for success stay the same. Quite simply, you are following the strategies you would implement for a your entire digital marketing strategy.
Lets cover these steps in more detail so you have an idea of what Hemmer Media Consulting would do for your social media presence.
Step 1: Research Your Audience
The first step in a digital marketing strategy or, in this case, a social media strategy is to research your audience and their buyer persona. This lets you target their interests and most importantly, their needs appropriately.
To do this, think about the people you are trying to reach and why, and how you would put them in a group. For example, if your company sells fitness watches, you would classify this group as millennials who like to wear technology while working out, also known as technophiles.
By researching your audience and their buyer personas, you will then and only then be able to determine what content you should be putting out there to attract potential customers and followers. Along with that, you will learn how to create content that is engaging to your audience.
Step 2: Decide Which Social Media Platforms to Market On.
There really is no right or wrong answer on which platform you should market on. What is important is where your target audience is spending time with social media. It is important to know where your target audience is today and which social media they will be on tomorrow. It is best to be ahead of the curve, rather than behind and in the dark.
For example, if you are targeting an audience that are technophiles, it would be best to market on Instagram first because of the ability to market quality visual content but also because your target audience, millennials, make up a majority of the users on Instagram.
Stephanie Morgan, founder and CEO of social media agency Social Lock, shares this sentiment.
"Think about their behaviors and where they hang out online. If that's Pinterest, use that platform for your brand. If that's TikTok, use that platform for your brand," Morgan adds. "Don't waste time on a platform that your ideal client avatar is not very active on."
Step 3: Analyze and Report With the Most Important Metrics
As you navigate the landscape of social media marketing you will quickly find out that your analysis needs to be data driven. This means focusing on the metrics and data that align directly with your goals.
So what are these metrics anyway?
Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
Organic and paid likes. Beyond a standard “Like” count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people talk or feel about your brand.
Step 4: Know Thy Competitors
Competitive analysis is essential to know and do for any type of business in any industry. Doing this gives you a good sense of what is happening around you in the industry. This will help you set social media targets and will help spot opportunities. Many of these opportunities will come from your competitive analysis. Knowing what they are good at and what they ARE NOT good at gives you an idea of how to progress forward.
Let's say that one of your competitors is super active on Facebook and has a huge following. But you notice they are not active on Instagram or twitter at all. This gives you the opportunity to capitalize on those social media platforms before your competitor has a chance to do so. Rather than trying to win part of audience from your competitor, think of it as focusing on the areas where your audience is underserved.
Step 5: Create Original and Engaging Content
Creating original and unique content that is engaging to your audience is important. This is because chances are that some of audience now or potential followers have already seen your competitors content. You also have to consider that some of your audience is already watching content from other competitors that you have not heard of or researched. So don't get in the situation where your content is not up to par and your users decide that your competitor does a better job. Its up to you to create content that is light years ahead of what others are doing.
This again brings us to market research and competitive research. Knowing what your audience likes as in content will be a huge factor in determining whether they click that follow button or not. To help you get creative, consider creating content that is unique to your competitors. Are they writing quality blog posts and sharing them? Are they getting lots of engagement from their audience? if so, it would be a good idea to try a live video promoting one of your products are a contest/giveaway you have planned.
You can also get help from your current customers. Think about encouraging your customers to use your hashtag or @business when making a post about the product. You could even tie in a giveaway with this idea. For example, you have a new product to promote and you make a video explaining its features and benefits. Within this video you also encourage your customers and followers to make a post with your hashtag or @business and they will be entered into a contest to win something from your company.
Lastly, you can utilize leverage trends. Think of the cinnamon challenge as an example. Within your video promoting your business, you would do the cinnamon challenge to delight your followers and customers and to keep them engaged. Chances are they will stick around for what you have to say about your company and products.
Step 6: Organize a Schedule for Your Social Media Posts
Not keeping a schedule and being on time is hard enough in adult life and chances are if you can't do it in real life, you will need something to help you stay on a schedule to keep your audience engaged. If your audience is used to getting three posts a week from you and then all of sudden you have a lapse in when you are posting, they will start to become uninterested in what you have to offer as in content If a schedule is not something you can keep up with then it is a good idea to seek help from social media management solution software. This software can help you keep organized and help you create outstanding content that can be created and then posted at a later date and time. This can help you focus on the content rather than the when and how.
A great software and company to look at is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a software platform that helps you create and schedule content on ALL social media platforms. For a low monthly cost this is something to reasearch and look into if you are looking at saving time and staying on schedule.
Summary
Considering there are billions of people on social media today, it's easy to see why so many businesses and marketers use these channels to promote their products and engage with customers.
Although determining your company's social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding social media marketing trends and using some of the many resources available about the topic from Hemmer Media Consulting. So, start working on your business' social media marketing strategy today with Hemmer Media Consulting to increase your number of followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions.