What is it?
Social Media Marketing, also known as digital marketing or e-marketing is the use of social media to build a company’s brand, elevate sales and increase web traffic. It provides a way for companies to connect and interact with existing and prospective customers on numerous social media platforms. Social media has been growing rapidly since the early 2000’s, meaning there are now more platforms than ever to reach your target audience and the wider audience you would otherwise be unable to reach.
How can it help you grow your business?
When used correctly, social media marketing can help to grow your business. By creating and sharing content and allowing your audience to interact with your business on social media platforms, you can increase your visibility across the web, increase traffic to your website and ultimately generate leads!
Posting regular content and interacting with your target audience on social media can also help to build brand authenticity and trust.
Social Media marketing platforms
When building your social media marketing strategy, you will need to carefully consider which platforms to use depending on your target audience.
Facebook – Facebook’s primary users are between the ages of 25-34. Used for sharing photos, links, distributing information, and live video. Facebook can be used to reach a wide audience for local marketing, advertising, and building trust between your brand and the consumer.
Instagram – Instagram users tend to be between the ages of 18-34, making Instagram a good platform to promote your brand to a wider age range through posting photos and polls. However, this works best for E-commerce and influencer marketing.
Tik Tok – Tik Tok, aimed at younger generations (10-19) and with 3.5 billion downloads Tik Tok can be a valuable tool for businesses to reach their audience. Used for posting short videos, businesses can increase their online presence through influencer marketing and series content.
Twitter – Aimed towards the 25-49 age bracket, Twitter is used to post news, allows people to engage in discussions, and is also for posting content such as photos and videos. Twitter has proven to be a useful tool in customer service, allowing brands to interact with their customers through tweets.
LinkedIn – Used by professionals, LinkedIn is the ideal platform for B2B and international marketing. Giving the user the ability to post long form content, this allows for businesses to feed valuable information to the reader.
Snapchat – With a target audience of 13–34-year-olds, Snapchat makes for a good platform to target teens and young adults. Businesses can create video ads and use location-based marketing to increase visibility.
YouTube – Targeted at 18-35 year olds, YouTube is home to all types of videos, from how-to’s to comedy, YouTube is an ideal platform for sharing video content with your target audience.
One of the many benefits of social media is that success can be measured with likes, shares, and page analytics. Your website analytics can also indicate which platform your traffic is coming from.
Determining your target audience
Your target audience is the demographic that you would like to reach, the following needs to be considered:
- The age of your target market
- Where are they located?
- What social media platforms do they use?
- What type of content are they interested in?
Once you have determined the audience you would like to target, you then need to think about the platforms you plan to use and the type of content you need to create to engage with your prospective customers. For example, for B2B marketing, you would consider posting content to LinkedIn as it is targeted at professionals and businesses.
Creating your social media marketing plan
To create a social media marketing strategy, there are various items to consider, starting with your goals and ambitions. Based on where your brand is now, do you need to build brand awareness? Or maybe you need to boost engagement across your posts?
Creating a strategy depends on what you hope to achieve using social media. However, once goals have been set, you will need to utilise social media to measure your success. Metrics such as likes and follows, although very easy to track haven’t proven to be as valuable as engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.
Most platforms have their own analytics pages to help you track social media metrics, however, the metrics you track are unique to each business depending on your goals.
Here are some examples of the most important metrics to consider:
Create original and engaging content
Engaging content gives users a reason to follow/like/share.
To determine the type of content you should post, a useful first step is conducting market research. This could involve posting a poll or survey to find out what your customers would find engaging. Another way to discover what your customers are finding engaging would be to look at your competitors and learn from them. Consider what they are posting, what is working for them, and what is not.
How we can help
Here at Flipp Design we can show you how to utilise social media to drive traffic back to your website and how to convert that traffic into business. Contact us today on 03456 868898 to find out more!