I’ll first give you a definition of Social Media Marketing, then I’ll go through some of its platforms, it’s importance and finally, how to run Social Media Marketing campaigns. Let’s begin by defining the term:
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms to promote company’s products and services. It is a broad term that encompasses both Paid and Non-Paid form of digital marketing.
For instance, an image posted on Facebook can be considered as organic or non-paid form of social media marketing. While the same image posted with the objective to target audience at certain placements with an average daily spend (budget) is an Advertisement (Promoted/Sponsored) or Paid form of social media marketing.
Social media marketing should be goal driven and result oriented.
Types of Social Media Marketing Platforms
As per Hubspot there are 5 types of social media marketing platforms:
- Social Sharing (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn)
- Photo Sharing (Instagram and Pinterest)
- Video Sharing (YouTube and Vimeo)
- Interactive Media (Snapchat and TikTok)
- Blogging/Community Building (Tumblr and Reddit)
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
- Drives Traffic
- Generates leads and boosts conversions
- Creates brand awareness
- Gives a human tone to your business
- Builds relationship with your customers
How to run Social Media Marketing Campaign
Let’s learn about how to run Social Media Marketing Campaign with Non-Paid (Organic) and Paid (Sponsored/Promoted) Campaigns.
Organic (Non-Paid) Campaigns
Non-Paid (Organic) social media marketing focuses more on brand visibility and awareness. As it’s a free form of digital marketing we can leverage it to our advantage by following below steps –
- Firstly, we need to create Business account/Business page on social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn etc by signing up with your user id and password.
- Then we need to complete our profile by following below steps.
a) Create a Profile Image and a Cover Image to attract the attention of audience.
b) Mention your Company Name, Address, Phone Number, Website link, Category of Business, Working Hours, Call To Action Button (Learn more, Get Message, Follow) and other details.
- Ones your Profile is completed start researching about your Target audience.
- Start Posting on social media at a regular interval (consistent but not too frequent).
- Make sure your Posts are relevant to your audience.
- Keep a track of your Post timings and publish post accordingly.
- Measure your post performance at regular interval through insights/analytics.
- Optimize you content through A/B Test.
- Keep analysing and monitoring performance for better results.
Paid Campaigns
Paid (Sponsored/Promoted Ads) social media marketing focuses more on conversions or returns. We will learn how to do paid social media marketing campaign from below steps –
Let’s understand the steps involved in Paid form of social media marketing campaign –
- Create an ad account with Facebook or LinkedIn (we are using Facebook or LinkedIn as examples in this post, but to learn more about other forms of social media accounts click here).
- Select a Business Goal for your ad (Traffic, Leads, Calls etc).
- Choose your Target audience
- Choose your Daily budget to keep a track as well as restrict your spending’s.
- Select from different forms of ads (Images, Videos, Carousels, Events etc.)
- Monitor and measure your ads performance (Reach, Views, Followers, Tags etc.)
- Keep Optimizing your ads for better results.
In Summary
We are going to summarize our understanding about social media marketing through below points –
- Social Media Marketing will create more brand visibility and awareness than before.
- Online Competition would increase so businesses need to get more creative with their organic content and paid advertisements to attract target audience.
- More social media platforms would emerge and more users would switch to other less known platforms for better experience.
- Internet users are rising and so are the government scrutiny on privacy policies. Hence, monitoring of user behavior by social media platforms would get tougher in coming years.
- Social media marketing will always be about the user engagement i.e., replying to comments and requesting to like, share and follow.
Hubspot and Wordstream have blogs that can help you with social media marketing while Dimaxlor’s blogs can guide you on effective digital marketing strategies for achieving business goals.
