- 1. What are Your Social Media Strategy Objectives?
- 2. What Are The Importance of Social Media Channels To Your Social Media Strategy?
- 3. Why Should People Use Social Media for Their Brands?
- 4. How Can You Choose The Right Social Media Channels To Reach Your Customers?
- 5. How Can You Choose The Right Social Media Platform To Reach Your Audience?
- 6. How Should You Create Content For Your Social Media Platform?
- 7. How Can Markethinkers Help You Reach Your Customers Using Social Media?
What are Your Social Media Strategy Objectives?
Social media is one of the latest forms of marketing, and in recent years, it has become the best way for brands and businesses to promote themselves to a wide user audience. With billions of people from all over the world active on a number of different social media platforms, it is important that brands and businesses use these networks to their advantage. Your social media strategy should clearly outline and identify the goals you have set when it comes to social media development, the timeline in which it needs to be done and the metrics you will be using to monitor the progress that you make.
Does Your Brand Need a Social Media Channel?
Yes, your brand does need to have an active presence on social media, at least if you want to continue developing your business into the future. Many businesses have the response “Well I am doing just fine right now, why should I have a social media account?”. While you may be surviving now, with so much competition and other brands that are similar to your own, promoting to a much wider audience than you ever could alone, it is only a matter of time before they start to overtake you. If you are a brand or business that has not yet started creating a social media platform on which you can interact with your customers, now may be the time to consider it!
You may be asking yourself “What are social media channels?”. Social media channels are the different platforms and types of social media apps that you can use. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and many more all exist freely and allow brands and businesses access to the wide user base on each of these different channels. Many social media platforms have business accounts that are specifically designed for businesses, providing certain features that a standard account would have no use for.
What Are The Importance of Social Media Channels To Your Social Media Strategy?
The channels you decide to focus on in your strategy are the types of audiences you are going to attract. Different groups of people more frequently use certain types of social media channels. Younger generations have taken to using TikTok, while older generations mostly use Facebook. Understanding who your target audience is and who you are hoping to appeal to can greatly impact the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Why Should People Use Social Media for Their Brands?
Build Brand Awareness
With billions of people all around the world using different social media channels nearly every day, the audience you have is bigger than ever before! Brand awareness is all about connecting to and promoting your business in a way that has the most impact. When it comes to how brands use social media to ignite marketing and drive growth, having a large audience will always ensure that you are getting your message out there. Social media and brand awareness bring attention to your brand and help to ensure that you are attracting consumers who would be interested in the products or services that you offer. With social media and algorithms having come so far, you are able to strategically create social media accounts that are specifically in line with increasing brand awareness to specific groups of people.
Connect With Customers
In the past, many forms of advertising were very one-sided. An advert in the newspaper or even a billboard sign on the street allowed for a business to connect to customers but not for customers to connect with a business. Social media allows for a two-way street interaction, and connecting with customers has allowed companies to better understand what their consumers need and want and how best to supply these different desires. Social media marketing and branding is all about connection and forming connections between a business and its customers is now more important than ever. With so much competition in the marketplace, a brand can increase their connection with their customers, helping to ensure that they return back after the purchase of a product or service!
Boost Your SEO
While many do not realise it, social media can actually help boost your SEO! Social media marketing and SEO are very intertwined and as social media channels grow in popularity and become the go-to marketing platforms, we can only assume that search engines are going to continue ensuring their importance and use them more to determine the relevance of your page. Search engine algorithms take everything into account when ranking your page on search engine results pages, and connecting your social media to your web pages can show how you are using every possible channel to promote your business and remain relevant. This in turn will boost your SEO
Grow Your Mailing List
While social media channels focus their attention on the promotion of your business and brand awareness, they can also help to grow your mailing list. Many strategies offer social media users the opportunity to sign up for regular emails if they are interested in the product or services that you offer. This automated process is easy to achieve and can help you achieve your goals when it comes to email marketing, which is another great advertising technique! While email marketing does not allow for as much interaction and communication as social media, it greatly benefits your sales and can help to increase the number of visitors to your page.
Drive More Revenue
How many times have you been scrolling through your social media and seen a product or service that interests you? This happens on a daily basis for many avid social media users and through the promotion of your offers across social media channels, you can greatly increase the number of sales! In order to do this, you need to ensure that your posts are direct and have a clear call to action that informs social media users of the next steps to take to make a purchase.
How Can You Choose The Right Social Media Channels To Reach Your Customers?
What Industry are You in?
The type of industry you are in can greatly impact the types of social media channels you should be using. Your industry, and the customers you are aiming your content toward, need to align, and if you are promoting across channels that are not specifically targeted toward your business, you may be doing a lot of work while still not seeing results. An example can be looking at the difference between B2B and B2C audiences, if you are a business that is focused on getting the attention of other businesses, you need to consider which channels they use most often and how you can best grab their attention.
Which Channels Are Your Target Audience Using?
The channels that your target audience are using is another thing to consider! What social media channels is the majority of your target audience using? Which specific features on this channel do they use more frequently? Considering these questions will help to ensure that you are streaming your content to the right audience! Specifically analysing each of the social media channels that you have in mind and putting your focus on one or two will allow for you to remain centred and aligned with your overall goal!
What Channels are Your Competitors Using?
Knowing the channels that your competition is using can help you to better align your strategy with your overall goals. Your competitors would have done a ton of research on the best social media channels to use, and instead of wasting time and completing the same research that they would have done, you can simply follow them and use the channels that they are. Competitor analysis is a large part of content marketing, and any strategy will involve looking at your competition to see what they are doing and whether or not it is working. Through analysis metrics and keeping up to date with the developments of your competitors, you can make a big impact in your social media marketing strategy!
What Content Types Do You Have?
The type of content you most often use will also play a big role in determining what channels you use. If you are hoping to focus more on video content, a platform like YouTube would be preferable though if you are focusing on images Instagram and Pinterest offer better algorithms. Though the algorithms for this kind of content are centred around certain content types today, they are always changing and you need to ensure that you are keeping with the times!
How Can You Choose The Right Social Media Platform To Reach Your Audience?
One of the most effective platforms to use thanks to the wide range of users and many different types of users is Facebook! As one of the first kinds of social media, it’s safe to say that this platform is a pioneer when it comes to social media and marketing. Facebook is popular for both paid and organic targeted campaigns, offering high success rates when it comes to engaging user audiences and getting more traffic. Facebook is incredibly popular with a number of different types of people and its world coverage ensures that even international markets can be reached. Facebook is becoming one of the top marketing tools to use and its social media marketing effectiveness has been the reason why many brands and businesses have grown and developed quickly within today’s market.
The messaging platform has become one of the best and easiest ways to reach consumers, and with this platform developing new ways for businesses to interact with their customers more easily, global reach is increasing in ways that have never been seen before! Through WhatsApp business accounts, brands are able to better keep in touch with customers, and as Whatsapp is generally a platform used each and every day, it is a channel that businesses can use to easily keep in contact with their clients!
One of the main reasons why Instagram is popular with brands and businesses looking to advertise their products or services is due to how interactive this social media app is. Instagram is incredibly popular with younger generations, with the main focus on people from ages 15 to 35 years old. Through the use of elements like stories and polls, brands and businesses are able to directly interact with their target audience and find out what exactly this audience is hoping to see from their page. Many enjoy using this channel as a kind of social media marketing blog where brands and businesses can actively interact with their user base to find out more about them, their wants, and their needs. These target posts are both engaging and they help to determine what an audience is looking for and who they are, ensuring that this social media channel is a good marketing platform.
YouTube
For brands and businesses that are hoping to use video content, where better to promote your company than on the top video content platform, YouTube! YouTube has an extensive database of users and whether you are generating growth organically on your own YouTube account or are paying for advertisements, this platform is a brilliant way to gain followers and increase your sales. YouTube marketing focuses on video content which is known to be one of the most interactive forms of social media, inspiring relationships and cultivating your client base faster than other forms of social media content. YouTube marketing is a brilliant way to gain new clients as well as provide content that keeps existing clients wanting more!
Twitter is a popular social media platform that can be used to promote a brand or business. Along with being a popular personal platform, there are many different companies and brands that are jumping on the bandwagon and creating Twitter accounts to promote a specific good or service! Twitter marketing can either be paid for or free, depending on the type of promotion one is planning to do. Using paid ads is a good way to grow an audience and drive traffic to your website, and even if a person does not follow your page or your social media marketing hashtags, they still come across your products or services. There are different paid media ads on Twitter ranging from promoted tweets to promoted trends, the prices increasing depending on what is being promoted. Twitter is slowly becoming one of the more favoured kinds of marketing tools and with the ability to reach thousands of potential customers at the drop of a hat, it’s not hard to see why!
Linkedin is a top tool that is specifically used to promote job offers, make important connections and interact with a customer base in a professional way. It is becoming increasingly more important for businesses to have a LinkedIn account and promote their brand and business from here. Linkedin marketing involves using this business platform to promote your company in a way that leads to higher sales and more organic traffic to a web page! This is done through promoting the company organically and through paid advertisements. Both of these types of advertisements are an effective way for marketing to be done and they can lead to growth in client base and a growth in sales! Things like social media marketing podcasts and social media marketing articles are popular types of data and information that are shared on this platform, but the options are limitless in what you can do and how you can portray yourself or your brand.
How Should You Create Content For Your Social Media Platform?
You should be creating content that is both relevant to your business and also designed with specific intent into who your target audience is. Ensuring that the content you are creating and releasing is aligned with your specific goals and the outcomes you are hoping to see. Content needs to be created with the target audience and goal in mind in order to be as effective as possible, creating content that is not thought out with these things in mind will probably mean that it will not meet your goals. Using social media as a marketing channel is only as good as the content you create, so be sure to put a lot of time and effort into developing it!
How Can Markethinkers Help You Reach Your Customers Using Social Media?
As Markethinkers, we take all aspects of SEO and marketing into account when helping our clients succeed. As social media becomes a more powerful tool and popular form of advertising, we are also growing and developing our social media strategies. As SEO copywriting and professional SEO consulting experts, we have the tools and the expertise to create social media campaigns that help to grow your business and help you find the relevant social media channels to be focusing on. When it comes to social media channel management, it is hard to keep up with your own goals and ensure that your content is properly developed. Our goal orientated and 360-degree approach to social media and SEO will help you to create the best strategies to meet your targets and grow your business! To find out more, do not hesitate to contact us.
