Social media has the power to reach people as far as the other side of the globe. It’s practically the strongest advertising tool any business would die for.
From merely chatting to building your corporate empire, social media has so much power and influence in today’s world of business and communication. The social media giants Facebook and Instagram alone have a combined user count of 3.7 billion active users – all of which are yours for the taking. Although it may sound as simple as making an advertisement online, utilizing social media to your advantage is harder than it looks. From the weekly ad expense to the painstakingly intricate way of building brand image, numerous factors have to be taken into account when using social media marketing.
Using social media for your venture would take skill and creativity to make it an efficient tool for your growth. But since it’s hard and can get a little tricky throughout the way, many young business owners feel disheartened when they don’t immediately rack cash. This is where we come in. Social media marketing is undoubtedly one of the hardest yet efficient tools any business can utilize, and we make sure our clients use it correctly. With skill and knowledge, you can turn the online world into your very own marketplace through SMM. With all that said, let’s start talking about business.
What Exactly is Social Media Marketing
Before learning how to use SMM to start reeling in customers, you’ll have to understand its nature and how it plays in today’s world. Most entrepreneurs make the most common mistake when it comes to SMM is not knowing why and how it works, leading to wondering what went wrong. There are so many little details as to how SMM works with how it’s made and how it’s supposed to act. In the end, you have to know that it’s all a bunch of codes working to help you or help others who use it better than you.
Learning its history
What you need to know about social media marketing is that it’s practically a platform for showcasing your business online to build your brand and increase sales. Take it as a modern-day newspaper where everyone can see it, so you’d have to catch their attention since you’re not the only thing they’ll be seeing. Social media marketing is built-up on the fundamentals of content making, ad traffic, and of course, customer engagements. Content making is the core foundation of SMM since you can’t go out advertising yourself without anything to offer the people you’re trying to reach out to.
On the other hand, ad traffic and customer engagement are where the essence of SMM really lies since this is what we’ll be focusing on. Ad traffic is the number of people seeing your content and clicking on it. Basically, it’s your “reaches” when it comes to the statistics of it. Meanwhile, engagements are the actual interaction you’d be having with your customers, from setting up a sale to the sale itself. All of these factors should be remembered since SMM isn’t as simple as posting an advertisement online. Rather, it’s about managing all of these three efficiently.
Social media marketing today
Now that you know the basics of what SMM runs on, you have to know its current situation and how you’d navigate through it. The major social media platforms that can offer you a good number of reaches are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat. There’s a certain style of advertising in each of these social media platforms, though. Because of this, you’ll have to know each and every one of them so you won’t seem out of place while still standing out. These styles refer to the type of advertisement you’ll be seeing and posting on a specific social media platform.
For example, most advertisements on Facebook are long videos and infographics about your product or service. Because of that, post your “Get to Know Us” ad there. On the other hand, Instagram and Snapchat are fonder of short clips and lively picture ads to showcase your business. Because of this, short snippets of your business should be allocated here instead of long and informational advertisements. Lastly, YouTube is, of course, for videos, so video content should be sent and published here. These are called “ad niches” because there are different types of people on social media platforms.
How To Start Up Your Own SMM Strategy
You’re now familiar with how SMM basics run your ads and the different ways of using social media platforms. Now the real fun begins with utilizing and setting up your own SMM strategy that would be beneficial for your business. As usual, there’s a lot of things you’ll have to take into consideration when it comes to choosing the right strategy for SMM. From focusing on brand engagement to increasing sales, different approaches would lead to different outcomes, so choose wisely. However, the essential goal we recommend to our clients is overall exposure and sales engagement.
The Dos and Don’ts
It’s easy to get caught up in the world of SMM because of how engaging and fun it really is to manage your business’ image online. It’s a common misconception that the more post you have, the more people you’ll reach, but people online don’t like being spammed most of the time. If you’re looking to have a positive exposure and increase sales engagement, then limit your posts to a schedule. This is to prevent daily posting, which usually attracts “Mute Notification” responses from possible clients online and gives you more time to create more creative concepts for ads.
However, for Do’s, we always try to instill the 5 Pillars of a Good SMM strategy to our clients: Strategy and Publishing and Planning, Listening, Reporting, and Advertising. Strategy is where you’d have to look at the bigger picture of things and plan on what you’d want to achieve. For this example, we’re focusing on exposure and sales increase. Planning and Publishing are about what site you want to focus on and how much you are willing to spend for an ad. The amount of money will affect how long the ad would stay, and it’s a good practice to note when the perfect time is to post in a day.
Listening, Reporting, and Advertising
Continuing the 5 Pillars of a Good SMM, we’ve divided the last three into a different category since this is more of a “customer-based” aspect. First, listening is your initial reaction to how your audience reacts to your advertisement, whether they want more of it or none of it. Always listen and keep track of your posts’ reaches and engagement since this information offers substantial information on your next few posts. Lastly, reporting is when you compile all the information you’ve attained through listening, so you’ll end up having your very own Dos & Don’ts book while Advertising is applying it.
Business Benefits of Social Media Marketing
If you’ve managed to make your first step in SMM, which is creating a post for your business, then you may start to see its benefits. Fair warning, however, that these benefits won’t come to you immediately, so you’d have to be patient and consistent. Remember that SMM, like any business strategy, takes time to work and start reeling in significant numbers for your business. Although, you’ll begin to appreciate SMM more for both your business growth and overall brand exposure if you keep up the grind.
Growing your business
It’s a given that proper use of SMM strategies would grow your business exponentially, considering how big the audience is online. But aside from growing your business through reaches and engagements, another thing that grows is your business’ influence. Influence and brand identity would be honed and fostered with SMM because you are choosing what your target audience wants to see. Proper use of SMM would put you on par with corporate advertisements with how much positive brand imaging you’d get from just an online post.
Not only will your advertisement be at par with top-level marketing if done right, but all of these also come at relatively low prices. An average boosted post on Facebook that is good for a week is two dollars, which can give you an average reach of 5,000 people. For example, for every 100 of those people you’d get a sale, your ROI would already make for itself in just one post. In addition, you’d have complete transparency in tracking all your statistics since these social media platforms give you a business oversight on every operation. A cheap and reliable advertisement should always be a go-to choice.
For you and your people
We’ve constantly mentioned that you get total control of your advertisement from how much you’re going to invest to who’ll be seeing those posts. This is another benefit of using SMM since you’re paying for the specific audience you’re trying to hit. Compared to the past regular untargeted advertisements, SMM allows you to choose keywords to make sure these specific groups of people will see your advertisements. Basically, you’re paying for the audience too, so you won’t have to worry if your ads won’t hit the targeted market you’re trying to penetrate.
Why Engage in Social Media Marketing
In today’s online business and marketing world, choosing not to adapt to the world’s current situation is a surefire way to economic loss. We’re in a time where the internet is one of the most used technology in everyday life, from communication to business. Adaptation is the key to a successful venture, and SMM is the next step to the aspect of advertising and marketing. From the benefits of not going obsolete to building customer loyalty, SMM is the key to a new future of business.
The problem of growing old
If there’s one thing a business hates more than lack of sales and money, it’s growing old and being forgotten. Although seemingly successful at first, many businesses fail to keep up with the competition since the competition online is highly aggressive. Most businesses often find it hard to compete online since managing day to day operations while maintaining a good standing is sometimes hard to balance. Running a business isn’t supposed to be easy, but engaging in SMM may be the right decision to combat the problem of going out of style.
Take, for example, a favorite local coffee shop you’ve been supporting for years now. The pandemic has made some major changes in local businesses since they don’t have enough capital to finance their stalls and services. Getting the word out that the local coffee shop is still up and running through deliveries can be made sure through publishing it online. Ensuring that the world still knows your business is up and running is already an SMM strategy, and it will continually bring in an audience and customers. Also, building a reputation online would certainly invite more people to your growing business.
Customers of trust
Like with the previous example of letting the world know your business is alive, SMM would benefit your business and its loyal supporters. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of building up a business since it boils down to the very lifeline – the customers. SMM would allow you to easily reel in a customer and keep them as a loyal one who would constantly return for your services. This can be done with how easy it is to engage and communicate with your customers through online means. Also, from the customers’ perspective, it would be easy to hear more from you too.
Because of how SMM is built on the internet, it’s relatively easy to build around your customer base through the various strategies as mentioned earlier. The big problem of maintaining your standing is also addressed with how easy it is to manage communication between you and your audience. Building a healthy community that’s speedy and reliant is attainable through SMM and, in return, would affect your sales and brand reputation.
Final Words
Social media marketing is the next step to business, and refusing to believe and engage may cost you dearly with how beneficial it is for any business. We have shown you multiple reasons about how and why you should start investing in social media marketing. Through the reasons mentioned above, we’re confident that it would be for the betterment of any of your ventures online or once everything returns to normal after the pandemic. After all, social media marketing would soon take over most aspects of online businesses.
From the cheap yet efficient way of hooking in an audience to efficiently communicating your business plans for your market to see and analyze, SMM is highly business-friendly. Although everything won’t be as smooth as you’d expect it to be since a business isn’t entirely based on you but how your customers respond to it. However, we have already shown you multiple ways of going through SMM, and our services can no doubt help you more in the future.
Always remember that a business is only as good as how the people perceive it to be. And with the benefits of social media marketing, it’s easy to paint yourself in good light for your audience to see and partake in. A business will never be easy when it starts off, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make it worthwhile and convenient. Smart decisions would always make a business thrive, and getting into SMM is one of those smart decisions.