An introduction to Social Media Marketing
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a marketing discipline that utilizes social media platforms to connect with your audience. Ultimately this helps you build your brand and community, increase conversions and website traffic.
How does social media marketing work?
Social media marketing connects your brand with your target market instantly through branded accounts, organic and paid account posts and community driven engagement. Social media marketing works alongside many other forms of marketing to bring awareness to your brand. A few of those areas include:
- Creative: Strong creative includes images and video that will drive brand awareness and traffic to your website.
- Content: A blog is the main driver of brand awareness and a great tactic for sharing on social media.
- Digital: Email and paid ads share the same content strategy as social media and your blog, so when a customer sees your marketing in an email, they will see something similar on social media.
- Public & Media Relations: Content such as press releases and news mentions are great outreach opportunities for brand awareness, likewise, these forms of content can be shared through social media.
- Website: Your website is your hub and social media is a spoke, when they work together the wheel starts to move.
As you can see, many areas of marketing and communications work with social media to drive brand awareness, build community, and increase conversions and website traffic.
What role does social media play in your marketing strategy?
A successful social media strategy begins with a competitive analysis, clear goals, an understanding of the brand’s audience, choosing the right social media platforms, content schedule, social media tools, monthly measurement, and daily engagement.
Once these are in place, it’s important to stay consistent with them. For example, you’ll want to keep a social media content calendar handy and engage with your audience on the posts to drive engagement metrics. These metrics will ultimately appear in your monthly reporting that helps to drive future strategy and goals.
How do you your measure social media marketing?
By setting clear goals with objectives and KPIs from the beginning, you’ll be able to pinpoint the areas that your brand is successful with social media marketing. Monthly reporting as well as annual strategy planning will assist in learning what is and isn’t successful, and what you can do differently in the future. Specifically, keep in mind conversions, engagement (likes, comments, shares) and website traffic from social media.
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