Social media is an effective tool to achieve multiple goals for your marketing strategy. Whether it is a focus to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or to generate leads and sales. Social media marketing allows a business to achieve their marketing goals when deliver the right social media strategy.
Within our blog post we will look closer at what social media marketing is, along with tips and advice to help with reaching your target audience through social media. There are many platforms for businesses to consider when planning their marketing plan.
It is important to not try and be all things to all people, your target audience will be most active on particular platforms due to their demographic and interests. Getting that right can make a big difference to your marketing efforts and content strategy.
Also below we will cover relevant goals to consider for your social media marketing, so can fine tune your approach to best suit your business and what you are looking to achieve.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is when businesses whether that be brick-and-mortar companies, E-Commerce businesses or influencers use social media to help reach their business goals. It could be promoting a new product or launch through paid or organic content, such as Facebook ads.
Or it can be used for community building with your existing customer and follower base, as well as your target audience. Creating a strong and personal relationship which in turn strengths their view of your business and products/services.
A big focus for many business accounts on social media is to drive traffic and increased sales and enquiries. Which can be from an audience untaped from their other marketing efforts.
Users following your business accounts are excited to know more about your business and products. With a survey finding 68% of consumers say the primary reason they follow a brand on social media, is to stay informed about their new products or services.
Setting Goals
Whether completely new to social media marketing or looking to improve your existing presence and wanting to review your social media efforts. As part of your marketing strategy it is important to identify specific business goals looking to achieve. This will directly feed into your social media marketing plan going forward.
Often the mistake can be made of trying to achieve too much, rather than focusing in on one to two goals and monitoring progress with regular reviews of how the social media campaigns are going. From this then optimising the social content strategy to excel even further from your learnings over time.
We touched on it above, here are some of the main social media marketing goals often targeted:
Increasing brand awareness with target audience
Driving website traffic from social content
Improving enquiries, conversions and sales
Building a strong and personal community online
There are many other potential goals a business may be looking to achieve, those are just a few examples. Having social media targets alongside your goals will help to keep focused and structured when planning your social media campaigns going forward.
Social Media Platforms
There are many social media platforms available to share social media content on or run social media ads for reaching a wider and targeted audience. However it is essential to know exactly where your potential customers are most likely to be active.
The reality is unless you are a big business such as Tesco or John Lewis who can be across multiple platforms, you will need to be selective with your time and resource put to running an effective social media marketing strategy. Therefore, it is recommended to identify which social network or select few your desired audience are spending time on.
This could be for example Facebook users, present on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, PinInterest or X (formerly Twitter), or more recently Threads. Amongst many others to consider. It is important to note each of these social media channels all have different focuses.
Instagram and PinInterest are heavily visual focused, therefore suiting businesses with standout product or business photography will be ideal for their social strategy. Equally the same applies for short form videos which are popular on Instagram, to incorporate into the content calendar.
For businesses who are business-to-business then LinkedIn is necessary as part of their social media marketing campaign. With a survey finding 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive purchase decisions. It is the known platform for businesses to display themselves as industry leaders with insightful content and valuable insights to help with pain points.
Recommend reviewing each social media platform to identify which are going to work best for your business to deliver an effective social media strategy.
Having chosen the right social platforms for your business, it is now about planning in the right social media posts for your social media marketing strategy. Bearing in mind that each platform will demand different type of content and interactions to consider. It could be posts, reels, short form or long form video, stories or carousels.
As part of content planning is ensuring anyone involved within the business or social media marketing efforts are using the right tone of voice that represents your brand identity.
Along with the style of social media posts such as the brand colours, assets, fonts. It is important your social media presence is consistent across the platforms and takes into account the overall social media content calendar, not just the individual social post.
This includes planning in time each day to ensure any comments, tags and interactions are responded to in a timely manner. Anyone engaging with your social content could be a loyal customer base, who should feel part of a community and being heard by the business to achieve strong community building.
How you respond to your community should also be agreed internally as part of your social media marketing strategy to ensure it is being delivered effectively and in the right manner for your business.
It could be that responses need to be kept professional due to the nature of your business. Or it could be that as part of your brand story and voice that you want it to be more fun and personal.
Monitoring And Testing
Social media marketing platforms are always evolving and the social media algorithms also have regular changes which impact on the best ways to deliver quality content and reach your target audience.
With all social media marketing it is recommended to regularly measure success for your key metrics. This could be reach, likes, engagement, followers, conversions amongst many more metrics.
With looking frequently at how performing and completing a competitive analysis too, this can help to identify for your digital marketing efforts for both organic content and paid ads what has performed the highest.
This could be content that resonates with your audience, such as solutions to pain points. Or behind the scenes of new products before they launch as an example.
Deep diving social media analytics for all your social channels present on will provide invaluable knowledge to further build on your social media success stories. To deliver even more engaging content or educational content to help boost brand awareness and increase enquiries and sales for your business.
We hope our blog post was useful to learn more about the importance of social media marketing and how it can help reach your marketing goals for your business.
To have the best social media marketing success requires time and effort to ensure researching, planning, creating, engaging and delivering the right content and interacting too with your community on each social media platform focused on.
At 1PCS Creative our social media specialists can take care of all of it for you with our social media management service. We can happily review your social media or create from scratch for the relevant platforms. Taking care of all your social content, strategy and responding to any messages and comments.
Freeing up time for you and your team to focus on other important tasks. If you would like to discuss how we can help, please free free to get in touch with one of our team.
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