Social media marketing is a powerful tool for enterprises of all sizes to reach prospective customers. A successful social media strategy requires strategy and creativity and can bring remarkable success to your business.
The key to effective social media marketing goes far beyond simply having active social media account. The more your audience is inspired to engage with your content, the more likely they are to share it, potentially inspiring their peers to become customers as well.
Social media is vital to your marketing efforts, so having a well-thought-out social media strategy is an essential aspect of your digital marketing strategy. An effective social media activity can help you build your reputation, brand awareness, and your audience. It is a great channel for maintaining contact with your customers, expanding your reach, and distributing the content you create.
Before you start to create social media marketing campaigns, you have to think your enterprise’s aims. How will you do that? Here are some questions for you:
- Why do you want your business to be on social media?
- What do you want to achieve with the use of social media?
- What is your target audience?
- What are your customer’s interests?
- How do your customers use social media?
- What message do you want to send to your audience?
Below, you will find some reasons that make you understand why social media marketing is important for your enterprise’s growth.
- You promote your products or services.
This is actually your primary aim when you use social media marketing. Promotion of products and services on social media platforms is much easier in the digital world, where you can put up professional images of your product and their details.
- You increase your customers with a small budget.
Social media advertising is one of the least expensive ways of marketing your business digitally. You can also grow only by posting interest content and interacting with your audience, without spending any money for digital advertisements. If your social media strategy is effective, you will see your customers to be constantly increasing.
- You learn about your competitors.
As social media are so popular and business profiles are accessible to public, you can easily know better your competitors, the strategy that they follow and how effective they are. You will be able to see the content that they are posting and get feedback on how they attract audience. By doing the comparisons with your enterprise and social media strategy, you will be able to analyze how you can do better than them and improve your strategy.
- You built relationships with your target audience.
Communication is very important and mainly when you are an entrepreneur, as it helps you to further develop your enterprise. Customers not only trust the product or the service that you offer, but they also trust you as a person. Social media is a tool which enhance the friendly relationship between the entrepreneur and the customers. Interact on their posts, learn what they want, like or need and use it as your tool, in order to make a strong marketing strategy.
- You increase your brand awareness.
Being an active member of all social media networks helps you create brand awareness. It is important to create a brand awareness first, so the potential customers be aware of your brand. You can achieve that with an interest content, which will attract the customers. But you do not have to do only this, you should remind your existence to your customers constantly.
- You are the first choice for your customers.
Your aim is to become the first choice, thought, or preference for all the customers who can be important for you and your business. Social media helps to achieve that, by giving you the opportunity to create an image of your brand that your customers will think when they want about a certain product or service.
- You learn your customers preferences.
Social media are open to all, giving you the chance to see what interests your customers the most. It will be helpful for you to learn more about their likes, dislikes and interests, so that you can create a better marketing strategy to attract such customers.
- You can build custom audience.
One of the biggest advantages of social media platforms for entrepreneurs, is that they can get information about their customer’s activities. You can have access to those data and help you build a customized audience where you get to target the people who seemed interested in your product, but for example they did not complete the shopping process. Through social media marketing and after seeing your ads, you will show your brand content to such customers, reminding them how they wanted your product.
How to do effective social media marketing?
- Strategy: Before you publish anything, you have to think about your social media strategy. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it will be hard to achieve results on social media.
- Plan and publish: Publishing to social media for your enterprise is a simple procedure, just like how you would share on your personal account. The main difference is that you have to plan the content that you are going to publish. It is important to publish content that your audience likes, at the right time and frequency, in order to maximize your reach.
- Listen and engage: People are going to talk about your brand on social media, either letting you know it or not. What you have to do is to listen what people have to say about your brand and make the appropriate changes or adaptations if needed. There are tools that aggregate all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that did not tag your business’s social media profile.
- Analytics and report: Since you publish content on your enterprise’s social media accounts, you would want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Social media platforms give you the opportunity to know about their performance.
- Advertise: If you are willing to grow more your social media marketing and spend more money, you can also take advantage of social media advertising. It is a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach and you can get your content and offers in front of a huge audience at a very low cost.
How to choose the best social media platform for marketing?
- Facebook requires an active social media marketing strategy. The basic aspect of Facebook is the visual component, so you have to pay attention to layout. Keep in mind that your content has to be light and friendly, as people relax and chat with friends on Facebook.
- Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media marketing trends and allows you to promote your products. Everyone can benefit from using Pinterest for social media marketing, especially those who target on women.
- Twitter is a social media marketing tools which requires your interaction as much as possible, in order to be effective. You have to retweet when a customer has something nice to say about you and answer in every question you get.
- LinkedIn is one of the more professional social media marketing sites. It is a social media tool which allows you to talk with people in similar industries and it is great for posting jobs. Recommendations make your enterprise more reliable to potential customers, so make sure that your current customers will help you with that.
- YouTube is the most popular place for creating and sharing video content. It is a powerful social media marketing tool, as with a “how-to” video you have the benefit of high ranking on the search results of Google.
Looking to learn more about social media marketing? Check out this video.
