What is social media marketing? And why is it in every blog out there right now about growing your business and increasing your profit online?
Let’s start with what it is first.
Social media marketing is basically using social media platforms in such a way to market your business or products by gaining awareness of your brand, generating leads towards your products, and converting those leads into sales. It creates a sales funnel, essentially, that works from getting people’s attention to getting them to buy what you are selling.
This process tends to include different strains of strategy, including running ad campaigns, sponsored posts, content writing, blogs, customer interaction, and so on.
The reason why all of this is so popular right now is because of how powerful social media has become. It has become one of the very best places to market and advertise because it is one of the most high-traffic places out there. More people are on social media than ever before and they are spending quite a lot of time there, too. It is estimated that the average user spends 144 minutes a day on social media, which shows a rise of over 60% in the last ten years.
So, it makes sense that so many companies, big and small, are spending their time and resources on social media marketing. And it makes sense that you would be interested in doing the same.
If you do, you’re in luck.
This blog is going to tell you about some simple ways that you can get started with social media marketing for yourself, by yourself.
Let’s get straight into that, a second more reading is a second less you could be spending on your brand spanking new marketing campaign!
1. Pick the Right Platform
When you are first getting started with your journey of social media marketing, you will need to work out which social platform will be right for you and your specific goals. It might be more than one, and that is ok, it can be good to spread your content out in such a way as to get as much brand awareness and interaction as possible, but it is important to keep things neat and streamlined, not wasting any of your precious time on a platform that won’t work for you.
It is worth doing some research around all the different social media platforms that exist and seeing what kind of content tends to perform well on there. TikTok will have a far different feel than LinkedIn, for example, and what succeeds on one won’t succeed in the other. In fact, I think you might get kicked off LinkedIn if you tried to post a TikTok style trend on there.
Pick the right platform (or two) for you right from the start and things should be much easier to get going and growing.
2. Figure Out Who Your Target Audience is and Speak to Them Directly
To make the content you post on social media successful in generating leads and improving sales, you need to make sure that all of your efforts in social media marketing are targeting the right people.
Before you start any campaigns, think about who your target audience is first. Who is your ideal customer? Who is the person you want to see your content as you are scrolling through their social media feed?
It is this person (or these people) that you need to have in mind every time you construct a post ready to send out into the algorithm. If your posts and ads are going to the wrong people, they will never succeed and will instead get lost in the void.
Try and think of it as you would in a brick and mortar store. How would you talk to your customers that come in? How would you spend your time with the ones you know are the most likely to make the sale you want? Create your posts and content with this in mind.
This will also help you with our previous step in picking the right platform for you. Once you know who your target customer is, figure out where they spend their time online and start there.
3. Be Consistent and Post on a Schedule
You can’t post randomly and sporadically and expect results. With social media marketing, you need to be consistent and post on a regular schedule.
There are programmes and tools that can help you with this through automating posting but you can also do it yourself through good old fashioned calendar work. There is a key balance of overposting and underposting, something once daily usually works pretty well. Diversifying your content will help you keep this fresh and interesting too.
If you want your brand’s name to get out there and you want people to see you as a brand to turn to when they need something, you will simply need to be on their screens and their feeds regularly.
It’s all about exposure and all about gaining trust, and you can’t do that overnight.
If you think that you might find posting daily too stressful or time-consuming, you can help yourself out by creating lots of content at once and saving these to post until a later date. This way you can maximise your time and your content without getting too bogged down with it all.
Social media marketing is supposed to be one of the highest return for the lowest cost input marketing strategies and so this is something to keep in mind with how much time you are spending on your accounts.
4. Bonus Step – Take a Free Course
One of the best things you can do is take a free course to help you out with your social media marketing endeavours. There are loads out there, even on YouTube.
If you are finding it tough to get started or you aren’t getting the results you want, this is always a good step to take. There are so many free but useful resources on the Internet right now, you can really learn to do anything if you put in the time and effort.
So, why not start today?
You never know the results you could have in only a month or two’s time.
(Hey! Before you go, check out the rest of our trends and technology section, you never know what new info you could learn!)