Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing to build the brand, increase sales and drive web traffic. Social media is a robust platform for businesses of all sizes to reach the targeted audience and customers and creates space to interact with each other. It involves publishing content on social media profiles, engaging and listening to your audience, running social media advertisements, and analyzing results.
Improve your social business presence with these 15 effective social media strategies and develop your social media marketing expert plan. There are also various social media management tools to get the most out of social media platforms that help to build your brand and grow your business.
Social Media Goals
Create S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) social media goals.
Social media is an important medium for any business to build brand awareness, increase customer engagement, lead-to-deal conversion, customer support and much more. Define your actionable social media goals, tactics individually for businesses of all sizes and shapes that use social media marketing to gain effective results.
Rise Of Social Media Platforms
Brands need to update harder than ever before to achieve a good level of engagements and organic reach. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter act as a core platform to share content, promote products and services and grow your business. Stay ahead of the social media updates and features to find out what is the best option for your business.
Facebook – With 2.5 billion active users, Facebook is still one of the most widely used online platforms. It continues to provide brands and businesses an opportunity for maximum visibility.
Twitter – Twitter has more than 300 million active users and young demographics make twitter a great platform for most marketers.
LinkedIn – LinkedIn has more than 500 million active users and 93% of B2B marketers believe LinkedIn is the best place to win leads.
Instagram – Instagram had reached more than 1 billion active users and more than 60 million photos are posted each day. Instagram has a large number of influencers with a massive amount of followers. Most brands buy Instagram views services to increase their account visibility.
TikTok – TikTok has over more than 500 million active users worldwide and has become a huge hit among the younger audiences. Musical overlays and AR filters take TikTok to the next level than other video creation platforms. You can buy TikTok likes to increase your recognition instantly.
YouTube – YouTube has 2 billion logged-in monthly users and considered the second most visited site on the web. The boom of video content has resulted in a flood of brands trying to master YouTube marketing to increase brand visibility.
Find Your Target Audience
Social media remains the most cost-efficient and targeted form of marketing in which finding your target audience remains the most time consuming and brands might feel challenging to start this process because they might not know where to start. Find your target audience with few active measures and quality research.
- Choose a specific niche.
- Define your service and what you offer in each social media platform.
- Study your competition. Find inspirations from their marketing strategy to reach the target audience.
- Identify and fill the gaps in your marketing offerings.
Local Targeting
Local targeting is a counterpart of social media just like local SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Location-based targeting is used to reach and attract people from specific geographic locations. Brands attract the local audiences by geo-tagging their posts and stories and would automatically draw the local audiences. Instagram provides options to search for posts from nearby places and the ‘boost post’ option on Facebook helps in selecting the location to the target audience.
Create A Strategic Plan
Craft a social media strategy that focuses your marketing initiatives and get clear on ROI (Return on Investment) goals. Maximize your returns from social media through these effective social media strategies.
- Create consistent quality content.
- Increase brand awareness – Track the analytics of followers, likes, engagements, and retweets.
- Enhance public relations – Responding and solving customer problems improves brand loyalty.
- Research and Development – Keep track of competition and insights.
- Drive sales and leads – Increase web traffic.
Building Social Media Community
The important aspect of social media success is maintaining strong relationships with viewers and customers where members relate common experience and interest that fills a specific need. A community of like-minded people lets businesses meet and interact with new audiences, showcase themselves as well as their content to a wider audience, sharing of thoughts and views, and explore everything possible.
Brands maintain their social media presence by engaging with their audience in creating a meaningful and valuable experience while sharing posts. Original content gives increased followers insights which aid in developing stronger connections.
Social Media Influencers
Social media influencers are users with credibility in a specific industry who have access to a larger audience and can influence others by their authenticity and reach.
- Discover influencers based on location, interest, followers count and engagements and find the best fit for your business and build a stronger brand community.
- Monitor and measure the influencer’s activity. Keep track of content, communication, campaign activity, understand costs and audit your metrics.
- Publish your top-performing influencer content across digital channels.
Social Media Contests
One of the most effective ways to attract new audiences is running a social media contest which gains more active followers. In 2020, brands communicating with the audience get changed and marketers use social media contests to focus on engaging and connecting with social media users. Running a social media contest also results in:
- Attracting and engaging new followers.
- Converting existing followers to the community.
- Increasing brand popularity.
- Audience feedback and opinion about the brand which increases brand authenticity.
Rise Of Video Contents
Video contents are the forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your social media platforms, promotes brands and also serves as a medium to promote customer testimonials. Plan, test and analyze your video contents, focus on telling a story to engage your customers and align to your sales funnel. Some of the types of video contents are:
- Demo videos, Brand videos, Event videos
- Expert Interviews, Live videos
- Educational videos, explainer videos, AR and VR videos
- Customer testimonials and case study videos
Chatbots
Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence software designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers. In social media platforms, chatbots are described as one of the most advanced promising expressions of interactions between customers and brands. Chatbots sparks curiosity, fuels conversations, provides assistance or access information efficiently and boosts the social experience.
Augment Your Reality
Augment Reality (AR) is almost the same as Virtual Reality (VR) but the only difference is you are only augmenting one factor of reality instead of creating an entire landscape. Augment Reality can be used in Videos, Live events, online shopping. Instagram is currently testing AR on the platform and this is the right time to learn how it evolves and find ways to incorporate AR into your marketing strategy and improve customer experience.
Paid Ads
Social media advertising is one of the key features for greater audience reach and could be part of your winning marketing strategy. Marketers will have less control and monitoring over PPC campaigns and higher importance on automation, AI and machine learning. In 2020, responsive search ads will be a big trend as it develops, spreads and becomes more resourceful.
Remarketing ads (Users who visited and took a specific action on a site are targeted with ads) will remain smart strategies for e-commerce businesses.
Shopping On Social Platforms
Shopping on the social platform is a trend began this year which attracted the audience by providing the ability to purchase without leaving the page and would continue to grow. This feature lets users shop then and there with just a few clicks, users can go for seeing something, like products while scrolling, and purchase while surfing on the platform.
Improved Customer Service
In the digital age, Customer service you offer is more visible to everyone online; brands need to focus more on providing better customer service. Online customer reviews, customer issues, and complaints are easier to find since a lot of them are shared on social media to increase brand authenticity. Most people expect brands to give replies on the same day. Utilizing chatbots technology in combination with live staff provides better results.
Predictions For 2020 Social Media Marketing
- Live content will be dominating.
- Marketers will use TikTok effectively- Considered the most downloaded application in 2019 and has more than 15 million active users.
- Increased use of social listening- Improved product or service, attracts new customers, provide better customer service.
- Micro-influencers will be more effective in promoting a brand- More than 60% of customers trust the recommendations of friends and family over celebrity endorsement.