Why social media marketing is so important.
Simple answer: it’s where you’ll find your target audience!
Successful social media marketing campaigns are based on a comprehensive understanding of your target audience. This information is vital in order to identify who to connect with and how to engage with them. It’s then a question of setting the right style, tone and content in your communications.
As with any marketing, understanding which media your audience engages with can help you focus your plans around these specific mediums. Social media is simply another tool in your marketing tool kit, ready to help you - so long as you know how to use it.
But let’s just think about the number of people using these platforms. According to Statista, there are 3.6 billion people engaged on social media worldwide. This equates to 53 million people in the UK - that’s an amazing 78% of our population. This is why it should be an important part of your marketing mix.
What is social media marketing?
The quick answer: it’s about engaging with your target audience using these platforms. Well-targeted and well-executed social media marketing campaigns are a proven way to increase traffic to your website and boost sales.
But let’s explore the difference between social media marketing and social media content marketing. A subtle change in emphasis, but important to understand how they fit together.
Social media is all about building brand awareness and communities whilst engaging with your target audience. It’s social networking across different platforms.
Content marketing focuses on producing blogs, articles, videos and podcasts. This is more about establishing your credibility, gaining trust and nurturing sales leads from your website.
How do the two fit together?
Social media builds your audience and signposts people to your website. Once there, visitors should find lots of helpful, quality content that is written in a longer format. However, it is often the case that people need a push to click that link - this is where content comes in. By creating posts that support your website’s content, you can draw readers from your social media platform to your website with the promise of more information.
How to market on social media?
These platforms collect huge amounts of data about your audience. This fact alone makes this an incredibly effective marketing channel. This data can be used to sharpen your social media marketing strategy to pinpoint exactly how to put the right message in front of the right people at the right time
You’re also able to learn what methods work for you as you build your engagement. Data, analytics and online tools are freely available - using these to your advantage can enable you to listen and engage with your followers while measuring your activity to see which parts were the most effective.
Any social media marketing campaign should have clear and measurable objectives. Once you have the right strategy in place this is easier to achieve.
But let’s get back to the how.
Like most improvement projects, the first step is to assess and address that you already have. The easiest way to do this is to call us for a free social audit today, and let the experts take it off of your plate!
Social media marketing is all about engagement, and there are different approaches to help you to do this:
- Building your connections while creating, sharing and interacting with relevant content. This is called organic activity, where you naturally build your presence on the platform over time.
- For a more targeted and direct response, you would look at paid advertising on these platforms. If done correctly this will deliver the relevant adverts directly to your target audience.
- Finally, there is social media influencer marketing. This works as a collaboration with people who already have established, dedicated and engaged followers. This is a form of endorsement, and is likely to fall under paid advertising or some sort of quid pro quo.
Integrating your social media marketing with your wider plans is an effective way to find and interact with your target audience. The best way to include this is to create the right strategy.