Did you know that 89% of marketers use Facebook in their brand marketing efforts? You need to be using social media in your marketing efforts for your business if you are not already. The value of social media marketing will be huge in 2020.
If you don’t have a social media marketing strategy, building one should be your next priority. Keep reading below to learn the value of social media marketing as we break it and it’s importance down for you.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is an essential part of any business’s digital marketing tactics. Social media marketing is the process of advertising your business on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, and more. Social media marketing can include both organic and paid social media posts.
Businesses use social media marketing to connect with their target audience, increase their brand awareness, drive sales, build the brand, increase website or brick and mortar store traffic, and more. Social media marketing is essential in any digital marketing strategy for a business.
In order to get the most out of your social media marketing you should include the following aspects of social media:
- Build a strategy
- Plan and publish your posts
- Listen to your audience and engage online
- Analyze and report out on trends and findings
- Advertise on social media platforms
Social media marketing works at its best when all of the above aspects are working together to achieve your overall business goals.
The Value of Social Media
So what exactly is the value of social media? With social media marketing, you typically get out what you put into it. This means that the harder you work to hone in on the perfect social media marketing strategy the better your results will be.
It was found by Curalate that 76 percent of U.S. consumers have purchased a product they’ve seen in a brand’s social media post. This means that a business’s social media can be directly correlated with driving sales. Don’t count out social media advertising, consumers do buy from brands through social networks.
Social media also provides a peek into a brand and how it works. Consumers are interested in learning what brands stand for.
It has been found that 86 percent of Americans believe that transparency on social media is more important than ever before. This means that they are willing to take their business to a competitor if they see a lack of transparency on a brand’s social media accounts.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
A social media marketing strategy is imperative to conducting good social media for business. To start creating your social media strategy, start by determining what social media platforms your business will be on. Be sure to select platforms that make sense for your brand.
Choose Your Social Media Platform
If you are a fashion brand social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are good options for you. However, an education company will likely see better results on platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. Just because you have a social media account on a particular platform does not mean that your account will be successful.
Identify a Target Audience
Once you have identified which platforms you will run your social media marketing on you must figure out for the target audience. A target audience will typically need to include the following information:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Interests
- Behaviors
These items should be mapped out in order to properly target your potential customers. This audience should be who you ideally think, or know, is interacting and buying from your brand. A target audience does not have to be set in stone, you can optimize along the way as you gain consumer insights.
Write a Social Media Channel Guide
Next, you should write a social media channel guide or strategy. This should outline when your brand will post on each platform, hashtags to use, what tone of voice content should be written in, and more. This document will be essential in ensuring that your brand stays consistent online overtime.
Outline Paid Social Media Budgets
In your social media strategy, you should outline how much budget is being allocated to paid advertisements across social media platforms. Paid social media is a very important aspect of social media marketing and it drives the value of social media up as it helps create a return on investment through sales.
Develop a Measurement and Reporting Framework
Your social media marketing strategy should include a measurement and reporting framework in order to continually provide the value of social media marketing to your business. In your social media measurement and reporting framework, you should identify benchmarks and track progress over time through metrics and analytics. This can be done by using free tools such as Facebook Business Manager and Facebook Pixel paired with Google Analytics.
Identify milestones in which you will gather data and analyze findings. This may be weekly, monthly, and or quarterly. At these milestones, you should determine if your social media marketing efforts have been a success or if you need to take the insights and pivot to a new tactic.
If a tactic is not successful that is okay. Digital marketing is a learning process. You must constantly optimize and make your social media campaigns better.
Never stop measuring the success of your campaign! This is an ongoing task that is essential for proper social media marketing performance.
Importance of Social Media Marketing
The value of social media marketing cannot be overstated, it is a huge factor in a business’s online success. We understand that social media marketing can be a large undertaking for many businesses. That is why we are here to help at Corberry Digital Marketing.
At Corberry we know that an effective social media marketing strategy can help you grow your business, maintain your social presence and engage with the right audiences.
Contact us today for a free marketing audit so that we can help your business achieve success.
