Today is the world of social media and everything revolves around it. To build a brand, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and come up with a brilliant social media marketing strategy that can help you beat the competition and increase sales. And this is what this article is all about! Here we will share with you everything you need to know about social media marketing, how it is done, its various types and tools, and how you can build up a great social media marketing strategy. So without any delay, let’s get started.

Some Basic Definitions

Before we get started, you must know what certain words in social media marketing mean. So let’s have a look at these:

Content

Whatever you post on your social media account is content. It can be a status, picture, video, or tweet. It is, no doubt, very important, but what’s more important in the context.

Context

Let’s explain what context means with this example. Suppose you have a very good joke to share. If you share it in a 2000 words long post, very few people will be able to read it. However, if you share the same joke as a tweet on Twitter, there are chances that a lot of people will read and share it, and the joke might get popular.

Similarly, if you have long content to share, you do not have to post it as a tweet on Twitter. Instead, you can add a “call to action” with the relevant hashtags to drive the traffic.

Shares

It is a way to measure the success or popularity of your content. The more people like your content, the more they will share it. Thus, it is the best form of engagement that you can get from the audience.

Engagement

It refers to the interaction of the audience with the content. It can be in the form of likes, comments, reactions, and the best one is the share.

So now that you know the basic definitions, let’s have a look at the core pillars of social media marketing.

5 Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

If you want to brand to be popular, then you need to know the core pillars of social media marketing. Without keeping them in consideration, you can never get success on social media. So let’s see what they are:

1.      Strategy

It is the backbone and your success totally depends on it. Without a good strategy, you can never build a good name for your brand. Thus you have to consider it while introducing your brand on social media.

In simple words, if we define strategy, it refers to coming up with the right content at a right time for the right audience. This means you have to work on creating content that

·         Has a good value

·         Gains attention and drives engagement

·         Increases the conversions

You must have clear goals and plans in mind, and the results must be measurable. With the set benchmarks, you can keep a check on your success and may change the strategy if not working according to the plan.

2.      Planning and Publishing

You cannot just publish any random content on social media. Instead, you have to plan it first. For that, you must keep the following things in check:

       Know who the audience is:Knowing your audience is very important and you must know the demographic to interact with them successfully.

       Quality of the content: There has to be no compromise on the quality of the content as it is equally important.

    Consider the brand values: Your content must be in line with your brand values.

Now talking about publishing, there is just one thing to remember and it is “Consistency”. Just be consistent and follow a regular publishing schedule.

3.      Engagement

While planning for content, you must have to consider the engagement with the audience. The feedback might now be positive, but you have to listen and engage to improve the overall customer experience.

4.      Analytics

If you want success on social media, you have to keep a check on the analytics. Without this, you can neither understand the behaviour of the audience, nor you can refine your marketing strategy and work on the things that work best for you. Thus, you have to work on this if you want a successful marketing campaign.

5.      Advertising

You may not know this, but there are around 2.9 billion active Facebook users per month and this is a huge sum! Thus, you have to work on advertising to get more reach and become more popular amongst the audience. Social media advertising can be of 3 types:

       Organic: Your content gets reviews and you don’t pay.

      Paid: Organizations sponsor the content and thus, costs money.

  Earned: Free content that is given in the form of engagement, for example, share, comment, or like.

There are several ways to do it. Some of these are:

·         Creating free content for example videos and photos.

·         Promoting via sponsored content.

·         Getting active in interaction with those popular in your industry and joining such groups

·         Creating and sharing of content by those who follow your brand

·         Offering PDFs, videos, podcasts on your social media accounts

Advertising is a great way to enhance your brand marketing strategy as it not only makes your brand known but also increases brand loyalty and increases conversions.

Types of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a broad term and includes various types such as:

·         Content marketing

·         Influencer marketing

·         Sponsored posts

·         Social media management

·         Reviews

·         Paid post

·         Building your following

While working on your social media marketing strategy, you have to come up with new and creative ideas to engage the audience and develop leads. Also, you must keep a check on the analytics so that you know what works best for you. Now talking about this, let’s have a look at some important considerations that you must always pay attention to.

Some Important Considerations

You have to keep a check on some important social media trends to know that you are going in the right direction. If things are not working right, then you must work on coming up with a solution that can help you optimize the results. Let’s have a look at these trends:

Organic reach goes down

If everything is going right, you are creating compelling content, and your social media following is increasing, but then suddenly, after a few months, it stops, there is a reason for it. And you guessed it right. It's due to the ad spend. These social media platforms are just making their businesses and thus, sometimes they make changes so that the organic reach drops down and people spend money on the advertisements.

It's a “pay to play” game

Just as we discussed, the reach goes down and the social media platforms are paid loads of money through the advertisements that people pay for to gain reach.  Thus it is all a pay-to-play game. However, you must also know here is it is all worth it and the cost is reasonable too. Thus, if it helps you reach the audience, you must go for it.

New emerging social media channels

Now that new social media channels are emerging, the possibilities seem to be endless. Thus, each website is coming up with innovative and new ideas to reach the audience and pull leads. At one time, we used to rely on emails but now it's all about the new social media channels emerging with new ideas and there is no end to it.

New emerging tools

Just as we talked about the new channels, new tools are also emerging and working seamlessly for the advertisements of businesses. Here we can take the example of MailChimp which is an email marketing software that can help the users create ads natively and then you can easily preview and publish them on social media.

Now keeping these trends in mind, let us talk about some of the popular social media platforms.

Facebook

The biggest and the most popular social media platform, as we all know, is Facebook. It offers targeted ads and even the most beginner marketers can gain success through this platform.

Facebook Business Manager:

For the advertisements on Facebook, you must know about the Facebook business suite tool. It acts as a hub and manages all your inboxes, advertisements, pages, and people. The best thing about it is that it is free for all and very easy to use.

To use this, you simply have to create an account on the Facebook Business landing page. Once you have logged in, then you can use it for your brand marketing and advertisements. If you are serious, then it can be a great tool for your brand's success.

Facebook Advertising Campaign:

You have to create a Facebook advertising campaign to help you drive traffic to your website, promote your page on Facebook, build your business, get the audience on your post, or anything that you want. You can also customize the traffic so that you can get a targeted audience. Also, you can choose the devices and when and where you want your ads to appear. Although Facebook recommends ad placements, you can even change according to your choice and desire.

You can also create your smart audience or lookalike audience. Thus if the results come out to be good, then you can work on the analytics and create a similar audience again and again.

Instagram Integration

If you post an ad on Facebook, you can run a similar ad on Instagram as well just by clicking one button. Yes, it is that easy! Just click the Instagram ad placement button and you can choose wherever you want to post it on Instagram.

Facebook Live

Another very popular thing! Facebook Live is a great option as people feel more connected and like it more than the recorded videos.

Instagram

It's all about pictures and videos. On Instagram, you can use tools like InVideo to create professional videos. It also helps in editing so that the videos come out to be of good quality and thus, reach have a high rate of engagement.

Influencer Marketing:

Did you know that around 65 % of the brands participate in influencer marketing on Instagram? That is a huge number and it is increasing greatly because of the popularity of this platform.

Now the question arises how do brands use Instagram for marketing? The answer is engagement. Once people recognize your brand, they will buy from you. Thus you have to make the audience like you first, then you can use features like links in the stories and product tags to help your brand grow.

YouTube

Every single day, around 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube and that is enough to tell how popular it is amongst the people around the globe. Thus, YouTube is a great platform for marketers who want to share long-form content especially if their targeted audience is not avid readers. In that case, you can use YouTube to make videos instead of going for blog posts.

Also here is a pro-tip for you! You can always use your social media platforms to drive the audience on YouTube by sharing snippets, previews, and teasers. This will increase curiosity in them and they will want to see the whole thing on your YouTube channel.

There are various tools like WeVideo that you can use for editing your videos. Just make sure that the video is of good quality, the lighting is good, and the voice is clear.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not as popular as Facebook, but it has grown more than 770+ members in recent years. LinkedIn is basically for professionals. They learn about the new hirings and what is happening in the relevant industries. You can expand your business networks on LinkedIn but you need to have a good setup on other popular platforms first.

So these were some of the famous social media platforms. Apart from these, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, Snapchat, Medium, Tumblr, and now TikTok has also emerged as a famous social media platform. There is no end to it. Each one of them is coming up with new ideas and to be popular, you have to work on your strategy and follow the trends. The rest of it is easy.

Conclusion

So here is the conclusion! Social media marketing is all about creating a good marketing strategy with clear goals. You must know what you are posting and what you want to achieve. Also, as we discussed, there are numerous social media platforms, thus you have to choose which one will work best for your company. With that, you can experiment with different types of content and by keeping track of the analytics, you will learn which one works best for you.

Remember that the trends change every other day, so make sure that you adapt your marketing strategy accordingly and come up with new and innovative ideas. So that is all about it! We hope that this article helped you learn everything you need to know about social media marketing. So get started today! Good luck!