Social media marketing (SMM) is a great way to promote your company and connect with customers online. But what exactly is social media marketing, and how can it help you grow your business?
Defining Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the process of promoting a company’s products and services through social media. In the digital marketing mix, it can boost brand recognition, drive website traffic, and increase conversions.
Social networking is an invaluable way to engage your audience in marketing your products and services. In addition to being an effective and easily accessible channel and strategy. Essentially, it’s all about getting your name out there and connecting authentically with your customers.
The ease of using different social media platforms makes them popular with businesses for sharing information. Therefore, many businesses blog, tweet, or post information using these platforms. Additionally, there is also an option to purchase ads for a broader reach.
The most commonly used social media networks are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube.
Your customers are worth a conversation
A primary objective of social media marketing is to develop and maintain a more casual relationship with your customers. The main difference between SMM and other forms of marketing is that SMM uses a free platform. Moreover, social media users are more likely to interact with brands on these open platforms. As in, it’s a more playful and causal setting, where you can be present, where they are hanging out. Gone are the days of disruptive, hard-sell marketing tactics.
In other words, we don’t use them to outwardly promote and sell our brand. But since our target audience uses social media, we use it too, to initiate conversations with them.
“Social Media gives us the opportunity to humanise our communications and make our companies more approachable.”
Ardath Albee, CEO of marketinginteractions.com
Despite rumours to the contrary, social media marketing is here to stay. With more companies recognising the benefits of having a social presence. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses use social media more strategically. To help them remain customer-centric instead of being hindered by outbound promotions.
Social Media Marketing: What does it involve?
How successful your social media efforts are will be determined by the strategy you use and how you manage them. So why does your business need a strategy?
To answer that question, we must examine how a Social Media Strategy and its Management fit into the big picture.
1. Social Media Strategy
- The point of a Social Media Strategy is to integrate social media into a company’s marketing plan.
- To build a strategy, you must learn what your audience needs are. Additionally, how you plan to captivate their attention and engage them on each channel.
- Creating your social media marketing strategy starts with researching the platforms and channels available to you. Where you then drill down to which channels your audience is present on most.
- To do it effectively, you must efficiently set your business goals and objectives to establish your presence and engagement.
Starting and maintaining a successful social media presence is not simple. It takes an investment of time, creativity, effort, and considerable skill. However, it is possible! A worthwhile option is through NZIE’s 7-week Social Media Strategy short course. As a result, you develop a highly targeted strategy, aligned with the above points, to implement on your business instantly.
To summarise, social media is not something you should just join in an attempt to “just have a presence on”. Producing content that you are proud to share with your audience takes time and commitment. In fact, doing it well will give you a far greater sense of satisfaction and results.
2. Social Media Management
Social media management aims to maintain relationships with online audiences interested in your company or products.
Once your strategy is ready, someone must implement and manage it. Maybe you are that person. Even so, interacting with vendors and clients, creating content, and maintaining a social media account can feel like filing taxes. As in it can be overwhelming if you don’t know how to do it. Time is probably the most critical factor – creating, publishing, scheduling and distributing social content is one part. Furthermore, engaging, commenting, replying and conversing is another part. In this case, it may be appropriate to hire a social media manager.
What exactly is involved in social media management?
- Social media managers are experts at keeping a company active on social media. Using their knowledge, they can showcase your company’s voice, personality, and value in the most effective way. In addition to keeping up with that social media platforms updates and practices.
- Hiring someone familiar with your business and who has some experience with Social Media is an ideal scenario. Not all social media platforms are built the same.
- An experienced social media manager can give your brand the voice it deserves. As well as build authentic relationships with your online connections and followers.
- If you already have someone who can help you with content creation and posting, great! As having someone dedicated to your account’s posts can make a huge difference.
- A dedicated person to this task will allow you to make the most of what other time you have for your business.
Social Media Management depends on the industry or company and whether one or more people are responsible for these duties. If you decide to outsource your social media management, you may want to consider Social Media Agencies and Freelancers. Or even your Virtual Assistant, who may be able to assist you.
Here is a list of just a few of the services offered by Social Media Managers:
- Creation of your social media profiles
- Social Media Audit of existing Social Media Profiles
- Development of a SMM Strategy
- Design and result of Social Media Templates
- Caption writing and scheduling of Social Media Posts
- Creation of Video and Photo Content
- Interaction and engagement with followers
- Running and hosting competitions
- Setting up Ads and Ad Campaigns
- Analysis of Ads and Social Media Reporting
Ready to get started on your Social Media Marketing?
Making the best use of social media will help attract customers, convert them, and even provide an opportunity to upsell. Furthermore, a well-structured and managed social media strategy can help you grow your social networks and reach.
How you choose to implement your Social Media Strategy is entirely up to you and your budget. For instance, you may decide to create your strategy and get someone else to implement and manage it. Also, keep in mind that your costs will be lower if you are more hands-on in Social Media Marketing.
NZIE can help you! More specifically if you’re an upskilling professional or business who isn’t sure how to get started with a Social Media. At NZIE, we offer an online short course where you can create your own Social Media Strategy in 7 weeks. Furthermore, you will be guided by an industry expert who will support you every step of the way. To fulfil your dreams of achieving Social Media success, get in contact with us today.
Author: Jenni Harrison
