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The impact of social media has altered our daily lives beyond recognition. We use them to interact with our loved ones, share our daily lives with people we know and don’t know, and learn new things. We also use them to research new products and make shopping decisions.
And brands know this all too well. Today, most companies and brands have some sort of social media presence to make sure they are where their customers are. However, not all of those brands have managed to develop a solid social media presence. One reason for this is not having a social media strategy. On social, where millions of brands fight for the attention of users, this is a grave mistake that results in a situation when the company doesn’t have a specific goal on social and is simply shooting in the dark.
To help you avoid this fate, in this article, we’ve compiled everything you need to know about building a social media marketing strategy for your brand.
SMM (Social Media Marketing) is one of the components of digital marketing. The role of SMM is to attract customers from social networks and turn them to conversion. For many businesses, like for e-commerce businesses, social media management is not only one of the ways to promote trade, but also is the only online promotion channel that is able to lead your business to prosper and contribute to e-commerce development. Moreover, social media is generally the customer’s preferred channel, so don’t pay less attention to it.
SMM is suitable for everyone: B2B prospecting, online stores, services, and media. More than half percent of customers who have had a positive experience interacting with a brand on a social network recommend the company to their family and friends. Therefore, to work on ‘’word of mouth” marketing, it is essential to create accounts on different social platforms. Social media marketing is about all marketing mix. Consumer attention can be attracted by advertising. But you can not buy the trust of the target audience, and you can only earn it.
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In short, social media marketing is a powerful tool that helps advertise, create engaging content, and raise your brand awareness throughout its channels: Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, etc. They can bring leads; even using Linkedin for sales is possible. The important part is to know how to use them and provide great content with the help of several tools. After understanding what social media marketing is, let’s make sure now why you need it?
Before you “go” to the social network, you need to determine for yourself whether you and your business need it. For example, what do users say on social media? Networks about products similar to yours? Is there a social? Networks are your target audience, and how big is it?
Last but not least, do you have something to tell your audience on the web? So, marketing in social networks allows you to attract an audience to increase its traffic and directly communicate, identify their needs, and receive feedback from them.
Through social media, you empower your audience to feel connected to your brand. By working with your audience here, you can improve your service, increasing trust among consumers. In addition, maintaining pages on social networks is a great way to show the world what your company is doing.
Design communities, guided by the rules of your company’s brand book, make them bright and recognizable, use the brand name and logo of the organization. You can also create branded tapes, notebooks, mugs, and other items with your brand elements. If desired, you can also use the slogan and mission of your company. For the design of communities, it is better to involve professional designers who will develop and offer several options to choose from. Have your logo and slogan that will remind people about you. And if you don’t have one, use a slogan maker to have a catchy one for your business.
Your social media channels are the face of your company. But, in our digital century, it can be a problem if customers check on your pages and see that you don’t even have one. This is all about your brand because if you are running a side-hustle business, for example, the first thing customers will do before visiting you is to search your brand name to understand your style and atmosphere.
Engaging customers means to ‘’play” with them, talk with them in the same language, and maintain social media trends. Here are some life hacks to engage your audience.
Always keep your story part active because people intend to watch more stories than newsfeeds, so find creative Instagram story ideas to grow your business.
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Except for the above-mentioned life hacks, you can also create guidelines and events for your niche. Just everything that they may be interested in and will be helpful for them. In a few words, provide them with value. After all, do not forget that social media is created not for selling, so do not expect you to have many orders after even the most engaging post. Moreover, remember that employees are on the other side of communicating with customers.
Growing your audience means growing your business. Reaching a new audience is the way to keep the circulation too. The audience you have may one day go and become your competitor’s audience, so you should not lose time, and it’s better if you keep your audience at the same time reaching new ones.
Here things work the same way as in engaging your audience. For example, when you hold a contest, you automatically let your audience bring the new audience to you due to the condition that they should tag their friends.
Another way is to work with influencers that ‘’fit” your business. They have a large audience that trusts them, and the word is said by itself – “influencer.” So they can influence their audience to become your audience. And when we say influencers, we don’t only mean Instagram influencers, but also you can find Facebook influencers if your business is more active on Facebook.
Share more video content, and do not just spend your advertising budget; choose the right target because the right targeted advertisements can grow your audience and followers.
Customers choose brands they are familiar with. So, you need to build brand loyalty from your audience. Let’s see how social networks can help with this.
Loyalty in the marketing concept means loyalty of consumers to your product or brand. The definitions add the following conditions: the frequency of purchases of a particular brand of goods, the consumer’s attitude to the brand (brand attitude), the likelihood of switching to another. Social networks can also show levels of brand loyalty: a loyal consumer is subscribed to the brand’s pages, is ready to like and comment on his posts, and participates in contests.
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Social media plays an essential role in the purchasing decision process. Here, people find products, meet new brands, evaluate the quality of the product, and communicate with other users. Social media is the main channel of communication between consumers and a brand. Users order goods, ask questions, make appointments in communities or messengers. As a result, people have an emotional connection with the brand. Brand storytelling is one of the best ways to create that dynamic connection.
Many marketing professionals use social media to show off their expertise, attract an audience, and new job opportunities. Your small business can do this for growth and participation and become a thought leader in their industry and community. From being a marketing mentor for other startup companies to becoming a trusted expert, you can do anything through social media.
For being a thought leader, the most important thing is to be an expert in your field. More important than popularity and number of followers on social media are engagement and your ability to influence people.
To be a thought leader, you should:
Being a thought leader is a powerful way to raise awareness, get sympathy for your brand and increase sales. You can start your leader journey by building an online community.
Improving sales and growing the number of customers is the primary reason for-profit companies exist, and there are lots of ways to do that. One of them is lead generation through social media.
Instagram is the fastest-growing social platform worldwide. Lately, Instagram also added a shop (which is starting to be available in more countries) to show your product with its prices.
When promoting your brand on social media, it’s essential to remember that the number of followers is not everything. Very often, accounts with 300,000 subscribers generate profits much better than millions. So, think more about the quality of your followers, not only the quantity. You need a real customer base to make conversion optimization and improve your customer journey in the long run.
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Gradually start interacting with other bloggers. Interaction means joint contests, promotions, gifts. There are several ways to generate leads. All you need is to be patient with your socials.
Another way is targeted advertisement. The advantage of targeted advertising is that it shows only to a specific audience who is probably interested in your product. You may even create different ad campaigns and put ads on specific targets who may be interested in them. But, again, this is more efficient since the costs are only spent on those interested in the product.
Today’s consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to service channels. And it’s no surprise that social media is a staple of customer service today, alongside telephone customer service and emails. While B2B brands still benefit highly from emails by using a free email signature generator tool for being more professional, the B2C sector relies highly on social media. For example, a single Facebook inbox combines Messenger messages, Facebook messages, and Instagram comments into one view. The availability of all these options has led to a situation when customers expect brands to provide support right on social media. If you provide roadside assistance services or furniture repair, you can still use social media to answer questions and provide proper support.
If you have a large social following, dealing with all the messages that come your way may be overwhelming. But this is necessary to grow your brand. One way to solve this issue is by creating a free chatbot for use with Facebook Messenger. This is useful if you often receive questions of the same type.
However, chatbots will not yet replace the need for a real person. Staff still needs to manage customer service. Even if the team has experience working with clients, they will need to be trained in working with clients through social media. Employee learning management tools will allow you to easily onboard your team members on how to approach their followers on social media so that they become customers. There are also many training programs or coaching platforms where you can find lessons about everything and provide them to your team.
Remember, customer service starts even before they contact you with product-related issues. Everything you say on social networks is publicly available (unless it is written in private messages).
Approach every interaction with the public as if it were public. Even private messages can be captured and shared via social media.
Likes, comments, and social media reposts can expand business content reach, boost brand reputation, and improve traffic and visibility.
Social media can help more and more people find your content and introduce your brand to the world without any special effort.
The more people spend time on your content, the more important your page is in the eyes of Google, which automatically translates into higher SEO rankings. The key to strengthening and growing your brand lies in social media.
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Indeed, social media doesn’t directly affect rankings, but certain factors associated with them affect your SEO. Building a full-fledged SEO project leads to increased user reach and better SEO rankings, and optimized social media profiles play a role in this. All of the actions like using high-ranked keywords in your content, pictures with descriptions, and optimizing your socials will improve the SEO ranking of your business. You can reach the best results by researching the SEO software market using the best tools that align with your brand needs. After all the ‘’procedures” check ‘’where are you” with the Google position checker.
Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-calculator-near-ballpoint-pen-on-white-printed-paper-53621/Experiment with different types of content to see which one will appeal to your audience the most. And double down on your most effective marketing tactics by continuing to experiment with new ones – ideally having a diversified strategy. And if you don’t profoundly succeed, give it time. Don’t worry; whether you are selling electric skateboards or any other product that you think is hard to promote on social media, check how other electronic stores make them and just take a good example of each of them.
Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-survey-spreadsheet-590022/CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a platform on which first-party data collect and interact with the client. CRM collects data provided by owners – mainly identification and quantitative, to a lesser extent – socio-demographic and qualitative.Customer data management requires data collection from multiple sources centered around the customer rather than the channel or device. There are lots of tools available that have data capability and can directly transfer the data.You can use customer data to offer attractive personalized loyalty programs that generate brand advocates among customers ready to recommend it to their environment.According to Salesforce research, 52% of customers expect all brand offerings to be personalized. For example, you can refer to a customer by name, send congratulatory mailings, and add an address and order number in a message.The feeling that the brand is personally addressing the consumer increases loyalty by making repeat purchases, receiving feedback, and growing trust – customers recommend the product to friends and family.Every company can use social media marketing to build brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales. However, just like any other marketing channel or tactic, you need a plan to be successful on social media. You can’t just post funny memes on Facebook and tweet a few stats every week and expect results.
One of such tactics is Agile, a widely-used project management methodology, and companies that use agile methodology have been seeing success during the past years. Although very often associated with technological products, this strategy works well for marketing projects too. As well as coworking spaces help teams to work more effectively, project management tools work in the same logic. Everything is on the same platform, so organizing work, by their urgency and priority, becomes easier and more productive.
Social media strategy describes how you plan to use social platforms to promote your brand and its products. To craft an effective social media strategy plan, you must first determine where your business is now. Which sites see the most engagement? Where do you get results?
List all the social media platforms your brand uses and describe what works and what doesn’t work on each channel.
The first step in any social media marketing campaign is to identify your target audience. You, of course, cannot search for “them” if you do not know who “they” are.
If you’re lucky, you may already know the kind of people you are selling your products to. But, of course, having a general idea and giving a detailed description of your typical customer are two different suggestions.
If you already have a customer base, it might be worth taking the time to create customer profiles. It’s easy to explore the types of people who buy your products or services. However, you will achieve better results by asking them questions that encourage them to describe their passion, interests, and topics they would like to know more about.
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We all know how famous Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are around users. These are all well-known social media and video-sharing sites with millions of members. And yet, not all people spend time on these social networks. There are also many other smaller and less visible social networks; in some cases highly specialized for certain types of audiences.
The best example of your target audience is your existing customer. While you may already have a good understanding of their occupations and interests, the best way to get valuable information is by interviewing them. Once you know your target audience, you should encourage existing customers to connect with you on their preferred social media platforms. On some platforms, like Facebook Ads Manager, there exists an ability to import your current customer database, and Facebook will do its best to find your existing customers on their platform with its algorithm.
Many social media platforms work with CRM to help you do just that.
Here are some simple questions to help you at this stage:
The tone of voice describes the principles of communication with the audience. It is the brand’s voice that reflects the company’s differences, values, and style. This concept includes words, tone of communication, intonation, the visual design of messages, use of terminology.
Here’s where your tone of voice should be heard:
A well-developed brand voice becomes an integral part of the corporate culture that all employees share. They convey their message to customers in different ways: from copywriting texts on Instagram to greeting the cashier at the counter.
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The voice of a brand begins to work when all employees share it. To do this, collect the rules in a detailed instruction, which should contain:
KPIs can be different, and you need to choose them depending on the goals of your social media marketing campaign. Your KPIs can be:
Often KPIs are associated with “conversion.” In today’s competitive environment, conversion is more important than ever. Typically, conversions should be specific (i.e., easily identifiable and measurable) and significant (e.g., a user fills out a contact form when making a purchase).
Reach
This metric shows how many people have at least one contact with a page’s posts. Most often, customer reports show the total reach for a specific time. But you can also compare the reach of particular posts to understand which one hits better.
When calculating reach, social networks only count unique users.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
This indicator can be calculated using a simple formula: divide all costs associated with maintaining social networks by the number of visits to the site.
You can also calculate the cost of one subscriber. It is necessary to replace the number of clicks with the number of new subscribers.
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Leads
This metric shows how many contacts of potential customers a company has received through social networks. Contacts are requests, orders, or calls. For example, if your business creates tech products and has sold some of them through certain posts or ads, this is considered lead generation.
Social Media Traffic
If you have a website, the traffic you get from social networks is essential for you. It can be easily calculated in web analytics systems, and it is even easier to do this if the links have UTM tags. Thanks to this, you can understand the effectiveness of each post.
To do this, you need to choose at least three and no more than five main factors that managers and employees will rely on. Here are some examples.
You can calculate KPIs in simple excel sheets with formulas or in task management software.
To successfully promote your business on social media, you need to create good content regularly.
To begin with, you need to accept the fact that the number of subscribers is no longer an indicator of quality. Social media algorithms are designed so that only those who engage with your content will see you.
For example, an Instagram account with 1000 targeted, engaged, interested subscribers can bring more customers than a profile with 20-30k non-target people and those who hardly see you. Moreover, they can be fake followers. This is a trick that even some influencers are using, and this can damage your account! If you have a large following and the engagement rate is low, the algorithms will assume that your content isn’t engaging enough, even in the case when your followers are fake. Therefore, make sure to conduct an Instagram fake followers check and remove the inactive followers. Your content plan should contain almost everything, in case you feel it can make your results better. If your content team thinks “best I can do is meme”, based on content feedback monitoring, then you already found your unique approach on social platforms which users like the most.
Here are some engaging content ideas:
Experiment, use various options for questions and discussions, ask your customers for opinions, share helpful information with them. Talk about them and even share some customer’s testimonials. The result will not be long incoming!
Visuals
First, do not upload a sheet of text to social media. Unless you’re a genius writer, no one will read it.
Organize your post better: divide it into small paragraphs, add “air,” use emoji to draw attention to important points. This will make it much easier for a person to navigate the text.
Secondly, no matter how eloquent you are, your subscribers always pay attention to the visual. So don’t forget about pretty pictures. Take pictures, draw or select ready-made images in the photo stock – the main thing is that the picture is of high quality and suitable for a particular post. Well, and so that in the end, your feed is designed in the same style. Plan your content, preferably for the next three months ahead, to always be ready for unplanned situations. Consider getting a special CRM for creatives so that you have everything in one spot and at hand.
Keep It Simple
As we become an expert in a particular area, we gradually begin to think that everyone around us understands this matter just as well. This is not surprising because we spend a lot of time in the company of colleagues, read thematic blogs, etc. Even family and friends, constantly communicating with you about work, begin to understand a little about your expert niche.
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What To Remember
Here are some of the key things to remember when working on your marketing strategy.
Stories are a great way to keep your page always active. Maybe you heard before, but again, people watch stories more than they scroll the feed. Stories are also the way to engage your audience with voting polls and questions there.
Live videos are a direct way to talk with your audience. Think how it will be: will you show them your products on the live stream? Or show ways of using your products? So many ideas. Even you can go live with some celebrity or influencer, or even why not? With competitors with whom you can both give some knowledge to your audience and answer their questions. Even if you don’t have any idea or topic, just go live and communicate with your followers, believe they have questions and ideas, so they will give a case to you to talk about by themselves.
Keep your content with high quality and consistency. Don’t put so much advertisement in there because some users on social media use it for relaxing and some to get information and not go shopping.
Videos are mobile-friendly, easier to watch on the go, and generally deliver more results than other social media content types. No wonder video content has seen a rapid rise in consumption during the last several years.
When creating a video for your social media, there are several things you need to remember.
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User-generated content, in its essence, is the content your followers create that is somehow related to your brand, from product reviews to event attendance. UGC is the perfect content type for any brand because you don’t have to put effort into creating content, and you get to share reviews from other people, improving your credibility.
A great example is follower’s stories where you are tagged in; for example, they visited your restaurant, took a picture there, and tagged your restaurant on their story. Another piece of UGC is customer reviews. Many brands successfully leverage user-generated content for their benefit by posting brand-inspired fan art and testimonials on various social media platforms.
When it comes to UGC, make sure to wisely incorporate it into your marketing strategy-the results will be well worth it.
Constant change is the beauty and bane of digital marketing. On the one hand, your job is never dull as you need to rethink and adjust your marketing tactics regularly.
On the other hand, it is difficult to distinguish the actual trends that will change the digital marketing landscape in a few years from the long-term evolution of existing marketing strategies.
Budgeting is important for all departments. Some underestimate and think that they should not put so much budget for marketing, but believe marketing can return more than you think. The greatest tool of marketing is social media. That includes not only ad payments and other campaigns but also works with influencers and celebrities. When creating your budget for social media, consider using specific templates, make strategy changes, and conduct safe transactions for payments.
Let’s go over each one separately.
To save you some money on getting additional management software and platforms, you can create and use budget planning templates. A simple Excel sheet can be used as a budget planner for your B2B payment processing service, where you can fill in the information regarding social media expenses, track and analyze spendings.
Moreover, these templates can be helpful when it comes to financial forecasting. For example, as you analyze income and expenses, you can see where you have budget gaps that could be better filled in.
If you have a specific social media strategy in mind, make sure it goes well with your budgeting plan. Are you financially ready to run another Instagram Ad campaign? Do you have enough money resources to collaborate with influencers?
Your social media marketing goals and KPIs need to be well aligned with your financial means. Moreover, you need to determine which social media channels are more profitable for your business and whether you are targeting the right audience.
A simple trick that can help you define the weak parts of your strategy is to understand that ad spend makes a small part of your overall budget costs. Other aspects that cost you money include project management, visual designs, and video production, copywriting, and tracking overall results.
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In the digital age, it’s not always easy to make sure payments will go through securely. Whether it’s a Facebook Ad fee or an outsourced employee payment, there are many ways to ensure it’s done safely. Many businesses are slowly switching to cryptocurrency transactions mostly because it’s safer. As one of the most popular types of crypto, Ethereum works best for making transactions faster. Other alternatives include Bitcoin and Litecoin. Moreover, crypto is slowly becoming the new normal for financial transfers, so make sure you don’t stay behind.
Additionally, if you make lots of international crypto transfers, consider using a portfolio tracker to always be aware of the value of your coins. You should also keep in mind that crypto gains are taxable. Consider consulting crypto tax advisors before converting your cryptocurrency to fiat.
Was that campaign worth it? Does your team work efficiently?
First of all, start by gathering data about your expenses and spendings. Make sure the information is stored securely as it is really sensitive. For example, Microsoft has launched the NTFS system, which helps store any type of data safely. When you analyze NTFS permissions, you can secure data folders and give access to the right people.
Answering these and similar questions will help understand whether your budget is being spent wisely or not. To help you track and analyze your performance, you can use various tools and platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Zoho social, etc. Budget analytics help organize your team and strategy based on real financial data. Once you have it, it’s easier to calculate your ROI and determine if you can make additional adjustments.
Establishing a well-planned social media budget will do much good for your overall marketing strategy. Moreover, in the long term, it can help attract a loyal follower base on social media, reach out to a wider audience, and boost sales.
AI and the further development of social media algorithms will make your marketing experience even more personalized. As a result, your window of opportunity for reaching your target audience shrinks, and they become more alert to the content they want to see.
To rebuild trust in social media and influencers, research the social media sentiment around the celebrities you want to partner with.
Social Media presence has become part of the business culture. She helps each team member understand the goals and desires of the project and contribute to the development of the brand. And, of course, build thriving communities.
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