Marketing professionals should be familiar with this type of marketing. As the name suggests, this marketing strategy uses various social media platforms. In addition to general marketing strategies such as search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing and email marketing, social media marketing is the best strategy to achieve effective marketing goals to achieve the share target market of the professional public.
Being part of digital marketing, the practice of using social media is difficult as marketers need special techniques. However, the most important thing in the implementation of social media marketing is the creation of relevant content for the target audience and the consistency of content publication.
Well, this time inMarketing will cover the basics of social media marketing that you need to know. Starting from basic definitions, benefits, to strategic steps in social media marketing management.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Quite simply, social media marketing is one of the marketing strategies that marketers use through certain social media platforms. For example, Facebook (now called Meta), Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest which are also included in multi-channel support.
Commonly abbreviated as SMM, this marketing technique focuses on marketing company products or branding by creating graphic content such as photos, animations or videos. The types of content that can be marketed also vary, ranging from general business information, promotion and branding of commercial products or services, to guides (if required).
The goal is for businesses to grab the attention of the target audience so that the target audience interacts with the business content. If engagement has been formed, businesses can build a community with a target audience through relationship marketing. Ultimately, this will drive digital traffic to your business.
Although it focuses on the use of social media, SMM can be done in conjunction with other marketing strategies. For example, using a blog landing page with search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, influencer marketing, and other techniques. This is why, many SMEs to large companies use this strategy.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Since the launch of Glints, around 3.2 billion people around the world are digitally connected through social media which is also active almost every day. This data is what makes there a variety of reasons why your business should immediately use social media marketing. The four most profitable reasons for social media marketing are as follows.
1. Increase awareness of your business
Many business people and companies are proving that the power of social media can increase brand awareness by increasing social engagement. The social engagement goal includes things like audience comments, number of likes, shares, reposts, and saves. It will also support the creation of a word of mouth and marketing culture that is positive for emotional business.
This does not mean that you only occasionally download content from commercial products, in fact you must constantly download content within a certain period of time. For example, 3-4 content per week with various types of content so that the audience does not get tired of presenting your content (brand fatigue).
Also consider planning the use of clickbait content so that it triggers the initial interest of the target audience. Make sure the nature of the clickbait doesn’t make the audience feel trapped or disengaged with your business. Thus, more and more target audiences will know and recognize your presence on social networks.
Social media also helps you increase your brand awareness by driving direct traffic to your business website. The trick is to use a hashtag campaign that represents the marketing objective, including direct links pointing to the company’s website in your profile, bio, and social media posts.
2. Generate leads and increase conversions
Promoting and sharing information about your products or services on social media is an easy way to increase lead generation, conversion rates, and increase sales. Because you market effectively by promoting business products to people who choose to engage with you by following or following your business account.
However, it is not impossible that you will conduct other marketing activities that will further increase qualified leads or qualified leads. For example, use the live streaming feature on supported social networks (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook or Meta) to announce exclusive updates of your company’s latest products.
Moreover, you can also implement several marketing campaigns that allow to do it only through social media. Although they are not the main marketing strategy of a brand and they are only a small part of the marketing strategy, marketing campaigns are powerful enough to obtain potential leads and increase sales conversions. For example, you promote a product by hosting a payroll event or a nice month date in the market (1.1, 2.2, 3.3, etc.), holiday promotions, warehouse cleaning, etc.
3. Establish a close relationship with the target audience
By being digitally present, connecting and engaging with your company’s social media followers, you will be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You have the opportunity to reap these benefits through the interaction process you initiate on social media content posts, responding to questions and comments from the public, and providing customer service assistance that the public may need. to become more involved in your business.
However, instead of just answering questions, you can also ask the target audience who follows your business account questions about your product, weak points or shortcomings of your product, or organize a giveaway to help you build trust and show them how much you appreciate the reviews and comments.
Social media is the best digital platform that can help you conduct competitor based market research, monitor and analyze your business competitors. Whether it’s their social media marketing strategy, the product innovations they promote, examples of marketing campaigns they implement, or the level of interaction from their followers.
Apart from that, social media also lets you see what works and what doesn’t to compete with your competitors. In this way, social media can help you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach to your target audience.
Finally, by reviewing your competitors’ social media accounts, you can ensure that your marketing strategy stands out and creates unique product sales for your brand.
While overall social media marketing is very valuable and beneficial to your business development, the strategic steps you take will differ depending on the type of social media your audience uses often.
For example, if you use Instagram as a social media marketing platform, you can implement a marketing strategy based on its features, starting from:
- Publish Instagram micro content as part of the writing technique that you upload to the Instagram feed. Sometimes you need to download multiple content graphics in one download, so use the Instagram carousel.
- Promote commercial products to a large but targeted audience using Instagram Ads.
- Serve more engaging content using videos and animations through Instagram Stories or Instagram Reels.
- Offer professional products directly and more easily to customers with Instagram Shopping. This feature allows you to showcase product catalogs, product detail pages, and even live shopping.
- Analyze leads, sales conversions, and monitor marketing performance based on how engaged businesses are on Instagram with the Instagram Analytics feature.
Closing
This is a brief overview of social media marketing that you should know as a first step in understanding the power of digital for marketing. Essentially, all marketing strategies are aimed at bringing profit to the business and building long-term relationships with customers.
At the same time, apart from implementing a community marketing strategy, you can also use the services of a digital marketing agency to help you grow your business. Some of the marketing strategies that can be implemented are growth hack marketing, inbound marketing, 360 digital marketing and data driven marketing so that the business can grow rapidly.
