In this blog post, I will analyze and discuss one of the contemporary digital marketing approach social media marketing. Over the past decade, social media has become a game changer in the marketing field.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a form of contemporary digital marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms in order to achieve marketing goals. 

Social media started as an entertaining platform however, it has rapidly evolved into a dynamic marketing tool. Apart from the primary use of connecting people, social media plays a major role in enabling the connection between marketers and customers. 

Businesses used to share their content on social media to merge traffic to their websites and potentially to reach sales. Nowadays, social media marketing has grown far more beyond that. Social media marketing can help you reach goals, such as:

• engagement with your brand
• raise brand awareness
• create a community
• build conversions
• serves as a customer support channel for customers

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the top three most used social platforms among global marketers. 

“Investments in social advertising worldwide are forecast to grow from around 32 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 to approximately 48 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.”

According to Statista 2018

The pictures below represent some of the companies that actively use social media marketing.

How other companies use social media?

Square Sayings’ company marketing strategy is very simple. Their Instagram posts are made of multi-colored square quotes. Each new post shares a unique saying and they turn their most popular posts into merch products such as phone cases, hats, t-shirts.

TIP: Try to create an original content on your social sites!

Building social marketing plan

The following are the 5 steps I recommend for creating a successful social media platform for marketing purposes. Take your time and try to answer each of the following steps.

1. Strategy

Before you publish anything on social media, first you need to think about your strategy and content you want to create.

• How social media improve achieving your business goals
• What this channel will help accomplish?

Social media networks

The social media platforms, as I mentioned above, are the major. However, there are also smaller companies such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, Messenger, and many more.

Content

• What type of content will attract your audience?
• Will you use images or videos?
• Will you post educational or entertaining content?

Who will you reach?

• What type of audience will you focus on?
• Are you trying to reach young people or older generation?

2. Planning

In the next step, you will need to plan the content of future posts ahead of time.

Tone of engagement

• What kind of typing style will you use?
• How will you attract the audience?

• How often and what time of day will you post on social media?

3. Publishing

Make sure you maximize your targeting reach and that you post frequently at schedule time. Don’t forget to:

• create original content
• apply keywords
• possibly use @tagging
• create catchy #hashtags

4. Engagement

You may think that the key element when it comes to social media marketing is creating content or publishing posts. However, more important is the after-post engagement with the audience. You need to make sure that you engage with the audience who interact with your brand. You will need to monitor social media conversations about your brand across the platforms as well. It’s all about letting people feel apart of your brand.

Tips:

• reply to comments personally
• ask your audience questions
• implement # strategy

Remember! Engagement is more than just marketing.

5. Analytics

You will need to analyze how your social media marketing is performing. The analysis will give you a deeper understanding if your strategy works and if not, you can always change your strategy according to the performance of your posts.

• Are you reaching more people on social media than in the previous month?
• How many users used your brand’s hashtags?

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

The statistic below represents the top advantages of social media marketing. According to Statista, increased exposure is the biggest advantage of using social media for marketing purposes among global industry professionals. Improved traffic, lead generation, and growing fan loyalty are further reasons why marketers see value in employing social networks in their campaigns.

Some of the challanges you might face

Struggle with designing engaging content

Getting audience to share your post

Keeping up with competitors

Conclusion

Remember, in order to create a successful social media marketing platform, first you need to define strategy and plan for your social media marketing campaign. It’s always best to evaluate each social platform according to your strategic goals and audience needs. Therefore, make sure your activities (especially the after-post engagement) contribute to your strategic marketing goals. When is social media marketing done properly it can be a very effective tool of how to target audience and increase sales.