Social media marketing is one of the strongest ways businesses can connect and engage with their target audience. According to Hubspot, more than 53% of the world’s population use social media daily for entertainment, socialising and connecting with brands.
Depending on which platform suits your customers best, social media can be incredibly valuable (and profitable!) if done correctly.
What is social media marketing?
Marketing your brand or business on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin can build awareness, increase traffic to your website and boost conversions. Whether you post organically or pay for results, the most important thing is showing up at the right time for the right people.
What are the benefits?
For businesses on social media, the opportunities are endless. Marketing on social media is a great way to develop relationships with your ideal customers, drive traffic to your website and monitor your competitors.
Below are the four key benefits of social media marketing:
- Brand Awareness
- Increased Engagement
- Lead Generating
- Competitor Analysis
How to create the ideal social media strategy for your business.
Creating a strategy is vital before jumping into a regular posting schedule. While it can be tempting to post multiple times a week, it’s important to first understand your goals and what will drive your audience.
Taking the time to understand your customer avatar and what drives your audience will help determine what you should and shouldn’t be posting.
Once you have researched your target market, you can then decide which platforms you need to share your content on. For example, if you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn may be the most effective platform for your brand. Whereas businesses with a younger, more adventurous demographic may instead want to focus their efforts on Instagram.
Now you know which platform to focus on, it’s time to get creative and develop unique and engaging content. Whether it’s captivating imagery, video or copywriting, engaging content that helps your brand stand out from the crowd is key.
Finally, it’s time to create a social media schedule and start tracking your results. At Chilli, we encourage our clients not to think about the quantity of their content, but the quality. Why are you posting that particular piece of content? What are you hoping to achieve?
With any marketing activity, analysing how your content performs is vital to ensure you’re meeting your goals and getting a strong return on investment. You can easily do this by reviewing and managing the social media metrics found on each platform.
These metrics can include:
- Reach: The number of people who have seen content associated with your page.
- Engagement: “Vanity metrics”, including likes, comments, clicks and replies.
- Followers: The number of people who have chosen to “follow” your page to receive regular updates.
- Video Views: The number of views each piece of video content receives.
Paid Advertising v Organic Posts
“Organic posting” refers to any social media activity without a paid promotion. Paid and organic social media are used for different goals, but we recommend finding the right balance for your brand.
Free content like posts, photos, videos and stories are a great way to connect with your customers. However ranking algorithms have meant only a small percentage of your followers will see those posts (about 5%, according to Hootsuite).
Paid social media involves “boosting” your organic posts so they reach a wider audience, plus creating targeted campaigns based on your business goals. While organic activity is necessary, pay-to-play is a huge part of marketing your business on social media.
Start growing your business today!
If you’re interested in refreshing your social media strategy, or simply building a library of great content to post, contact our intelligent creative team to get started.
