The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing

It’s no surprise that when it comes to social media, every brand’s top goals are advertising their products/ services and increasing their brand awareness.

However a lot of marketers have a hard time creating engaging content and reaching their intended audience. I have constantly debated publishing this post thinking that no one is still interested in the basics but if you are reading this then hooray for you. This is it, the only guide to social media marketing that you will ever need. With social media playing an undeniably important role at the top of the funnel, let’s get into all things social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing

The term social media marketing (SMM) refers to the use of social media and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones while allowing them to promote their desired culture, mission, or tone. Social media marketing has purpose-built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

There are different reasons why your company should adopt social media marketing. Here are a few of the most beneficial to consider:

1.?Increase Brand Awareness & Recognition

Gaining brand awareness and brand recognition is one of any business’ most important marketing goals. That’s because?consumers want to buy brands they recognize.

Social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagements includes things like comments, likes, shares, reposts and saves.

It also helps to increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio and posts.

2.?Generate Leads and Boost Conversation

Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.

Here are some examples of ways you can use social media to generate more leads.

• Create contests?for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
• Include links to your website and offers?in the bio sections of your profiles.
• Host live videos?to make announcements about products and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company.
• Implement a social media marketing campaign?on one of your channels.
• Sell your products through your social profiles. For example, you can enable?Facebook’s Shop Section?orInstagram’s Shopping feature?on your profiles. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on products you’ve shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size. Then, visitors can easily proceed to checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.

3.?Helps Understand Your Target Customers’ Interests

You need to know what your target customers are interested in if you’re going to try to reach them effectively. You can do this by monitoring their social conversations around certain topics. This is called?social listening, and can help you understand what’s important to your audience while identifying trends they’re following. You may also learn about what they’re struggling with, which can help you create content addressing those pain points.

4.?Learn From Your Competitors

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.

Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of?your?company’s approach.

Lastly, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

Now, let’s talk strategy — there are several steps to ensure your social media marketing plan is sustainable and positively impacts your business.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy

Although social media is constantly evolving, most of the foundational steps you need to succeed stay the same. Essentially, you’re following the same steps you would take to create a?marketing strategy?and narrow it to a specific channel.

Let’s cover these steps in more detail so you can begin applying them to your business.

Step 1: Research your buyer personas and audience.

The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is to determine who your buyer personas and audience are so you can target their needs and interests appropriately.

To do this, think about the people you’re trying to reach and why, and how you would classify them as a group. For example, if your company sells trendy leggings and joggers, you might classify your target audience as millennials who like to wear stylish athletic apparel regularly — a style known as?athleisure.

By considering your buyer personas and audience, you’ll then be able to determine what content will attract the type of followers and customers you hope to gain. Plus, learn how to create engaging content to keep your followers interested.

Step 2: Determine which social platforms you’ll market on.

As a social media marketer, it’s crucial you determine which platforms you’re going to share your content on.

There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer when it comes to which social channels your business should use — it’s more about the needs of your target audience and where they tend to spend their time.

“It’s important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow,” said Andrew Delaney, former social media marketing manager at HubSpot. “It’s better to be ahead of the curve than behind.”

For example, if you are going for that target audience of athleisure-loving millennials, you may want to focus the majority of your social media efforts on Instagram — this is because?millennials?cover the largest portion of users on the platform.

Stephanie Morgan, founder and CEO of social media agency?Social Lock, echoes this sentiment.

“Think about their behaviors and where they hang out online. If that’s Pinterest, use that platform for your brand. If that’s TikTok, use that platform for your brand,” Morgan adds. “Don’t waste time on a platform that your ideal client avatar is not very active on.”

Step 3: Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.

No matter your goals or industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven.

That means focusing on the?social media metrics that matter. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, dig into data that aligns directly with your goals.

What metrics are we talking about? Check out the breakdown below:

• Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
• Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
• Organic and paid likes. Beyond a standard “Like” count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
• Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people talk or feel about your brand.

Step 4: Get to know your competition.

A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.

It will also help you spot opportunities.

Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.

Step 5: Create unique and engaging content.

With the billions of social media users around the globe, there’s no question that at least?some?of your followers — or the people browsing your profile — have also seen your competitor’s content or that of other businesses in your industry.

That’s why you must have engaging social media content that stands out and provides viewers with a reason to click that “Follow” button and interact with your brand.

Not sure what’s considered engaging? Morgan has a recommendation.

“My number one tip to brands for creating engaging content on social media is to do market research first because what will be engaging depends on the audience,” Morgan said. “When you know what your audience likes and needs to know, you can create content that engages those interests.”

To help you get creative, consider the content your competitors are sharing and how you can uniquely promote your products. Also, take advantage of the features offered by the platform you’re using.

For example, you can create live videos on Facebook to share the latest details about a product launch or conduct a giveaway.

You can also use your current customers and promoters to help you generate content. You can do this by re-posting their content or encouraging them to use a hashtag to share their own experiences and pictures with your products.

Lastly, leverage trends. Social media trends are always coming up, especially on short-form video platforms like TikTok. Don’t be afraid to join in but you still have to be intentional about how you do it.

“If the trend started happening three weeks ago, you’ve probably missed the boat,” Morgan said. “Catching the trends early is the best way to capitalize on it without coming across as inauthentic or like you’re trying too hard, or worse [as] ‘chuegy’ – see Gen Z for that one.”

Step 6: Organize a schedule for your posts.

One of the easiest ways to ensure your content is shared as planned is to use a social media management solution. These tools allow you to write captions, prepare pictures and videos, and schedule posts in advance. They also automatically share your content on schedule and?monitor?all post interactions and engagement for you. Social media management solutions save you time and allow you to focus on your other tasks.

There are a number of?solutions options?available — here are a few examples.

HubSpot

HubSpot?offers a social media tool — as part of the?marketing software?— to help you publish and monitor your content and create real connections with your followers. You can schedule and publish your content in advance and compare in-depth reports on your posts’ engagement to understand the performance of various platforms, types of content, and posting times.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media marketing and management solution designed to help your team organize and plan content creation, manage campaigns, understand engagement, and review content reports and analysis.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite?is a social media management platform for finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on your content. You can schedule posts in advance on?all?of your channels at once and measure your ROI with comprehensive content analysis.

How often should you post on social media?

Now, you might be wondering how often you should post content on your social media channels.

As a rule of thumb, you should only post on social media when you have?quality?content to share. Meaning, there’s a reason you’re posting the content. This is how you’ll strike the right balance when it comes to your posting frequency.

Morgan says the top mistake she sees brands make in regards to social media marketing is focusing on quantity of content instead of the quality of content.

“They think they need to post every day, so they force themselves to create posts to fill up the calendar,” she said. “Odds are, every single one of those posts isn’t going to be very valuable to the ideal customer, I’ve coined this ‘clutter content.'”

Instead, she recommends downsizing in quantity and upping the quality.

“It’s better to post two or three times a week with super valuable content, versus posting seven times a week with only one or two valuable posts,” said Morgan.

There are plenty of studies and resources available explaining social media post frequency standards by industry and platform for you to follow. Every business is different, so find what works for your audience.

Then, you can begin experimenting with more or fewer posts – as well as other factors such as the time of day you’re posting on social – to determine what provides the highest level of engagement.

How to Analyze Your Social Media Marketing Impact and Results

One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is ensuring your efforts are successful in helping you meet your goals. To determine this, you’ll need to keep track of all of your posts, on every channel. You can do this by reviewing and managing your social media metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Social media metrics are data related to the success of your posts and your impact on your audience and customers on various platforms. These metrics may include data about your level of engagement, likes, follows, shares, and all other interactions on each platform.

Here are 10 of the most important metrics for you to track:

1. Engagement:?This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your social media posts. There are also platform-specific types of engagement such as “Saved” posts on Instagram and “Pinned” posts on Pinterest.
2. Reach:?The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
3. Followers:?This is the number of people you have on your profile who have clicked your “Follow” button and see your content in their feeds regularly.
4. Impressions:?This is the number of times a post from your profile or page is seen, whether or not your audience members click on it. This is often what happens when someone is scrolling through their newsfeed, but not clicking on anything.
5. Video views:?On Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views each gets.
6. Profile visits:?The number of people who have opened your social media page is your number of profile visits.
7. Mentions:?This is the number of times your profile has been mentioned by audience members in their posts.
8. Tags:?This is when your audience adds the name of your company’s profile or your hashtag to another post.
9. Reposts:?This is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.
10. Shares:?These are the posts your followers and audience take from your profile and share with their network.

You can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile by using the same tactics you would to generate leads and boost conversions.

Morgan adds that the metrics you focus on will depend on which season you’re in. Here’s her formula:

• If you’re new, focus on building an audience and awareness. Key metrics: reach, impressions, audience growth.
• If you’re growing, focus on building trust. Key metrics: Likes, saves, comments, DMs.
• If you’re established, focus on retaining and nurturing. Key metrics: Likes, saves, comments, DMs.
• If you’re launching something, focus on selling. Key metrics: DMs and clickthrough rate

How to Measure Social Media Metrics

You can review social media metrics in a variety of ways, For example, you can use the analytics tools built into the various platforms you use. Here are a few examples:

• Twitter Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• Instagram Insights

You might also choose to use an analytics and tracking tool such as?Google Analytics. This is a great option if you want to track your social media?and?website metrics. Lastly, many social media scheduling solutions — as we reviewed earlier — have monitoring and tracking features automatically built-in.

All of these?metrics tracking tools?will give you a better understanding of what your followers and audience respond well to and what you should consider modifying to improve engagement.

Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of social media marketing and how to build your strategy, let’s talk about the various resources available to help you along the way.

Start Marketing on Social Media

Considering there are billions of people on social media today, it’s easy to see why so many businesses and marketers use the channel to promote their products and engage with customers.

Although determining your company’s social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding social media marketing trends and using some of the many resources available about the topic. So, start working on your business’ social media marketing strategy today to increase your number of followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions. Don't hesitate to reach out to Lunio Digital Marketing Agency if you need help with your company's social media marketing strategy.

Thank you for reading today's edition of The Lunio Marketing Newsletter. If you are a subscriber, thank you for the support. For the first time readers please read some of the past editions of the newsletter, I guarantee you will find something you like.