What is a Social Media Marketing Campaign and Should I Start One?
In this article I will look at the value in a social media marketing campaign and if it might work for your business.
The last question first - you should definitely be starting a digital media marketing campaign in one form or another. The options and benefits/costs can seem scary! If you do not have a plan for your digital marketing, you are leaving ￡1,000s on the table!
As 'digital media marketing' is a broad term that includes search engine optimisations ('SEO') such as Google AdWords, we will use 'social media marketing' to leave out SEO and Google AdWords from this article.
So, let’s build up some initial understanding of what a Social Media Marketing Campaign is in simple terms, so you’re not alone, and can make your own choices. "Forearmed is forewarned!".
What is a Social Media Marketing Campaign?
Simply put, a social media marketing campaign consists of three elements: - 1) social media; 2) marketing; and 3) campaign. We will think about each in turn.
Social Media
With vacuum cleaners simply known as ‘Hoovers’ (after Edgar Hoover its inventor), photocopiers being known in the USA as ‘Xerox machines’ (after the brand first associated with them), and tissues in the USA being known simply as ‘Kleenex’. Similarly, social media and Facebook have taken on a similar connection.
When people talk of social media, they generally mean Facebook as the first port of call. The others are secondary.
Facebook’s control of the ‘social media’ market is not surprising given the following statistics: -
- there are 2 Billion active monthly Facebook users.
- 80% of the internet is on Facebook.
- 65 million businesses have a Facebook Page.
- 94% of Facebook’s users use the Facebook App on mobile phones to access content (so it is very important to optimise for mobile).
Facebook is very user-friendly. As a result, it is incredibly easy to share posts, images and videos. If you have shared posts, images and videos before, you will know that Facebook rules the market and the easy sharing is probably a key reason for this. The platform is super-simple to get started on and users can immediately share content, photos, videos, live videos and 'stories'.
Another, worthy competitor/complementary social media platform is Instagram, known simply as ‘Insta’. Facebook saw so much power in the platform that it bought Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger's 13-person start-up in 2012 for the princely sum of $1 billion (￡825 million in today’s market). This was Facebook's biggest buy at that time.
If Facebook owns the ‘blog/group/page’ aspect of social media, Instagram stands out in the imagery niche. So, it was no surprise at all that Facebook bought Instagram at such an important point in its growth cycle.
Instagram controls the social media market in image-sharing, dwarfing their closest rival Snapchat by a long way. The following statistics show how Instagram does this: -
- Largest picture-sharing platform.
- High-resolution photographs (compared with Snapchat's less bright/sharp offering)
- 1 billion active monthly Instagram users (compared with Snapchat's 255 million active monthly users).
- Plenty of analytics utilising Facebook's incredibly powerful tools.
- 71% of businesses are using Instagram.
Other Social Media Platforms
In addition to these platforms, other impressively strong social media platforms worthy of mention in the UK/Western markets include: -
- YouTube – largest video sharing platform, a billion hours of video are watched every day. Google owns YouTube and now claim a whopping 1.9 billion active monthly users.
- WhatsApp – dedicated messaging app. WhatsApp has also been building out a dedicated business platform for the small business user. Largest Facebook buy ever, purchased in 2014 for $19 billion in its largest acquisition (over ￡15 billion in today’s terms). 1.5 billion active monthly users.
- Messenger – now a standalone app, used to be part of Facebook. With 1.3 billion active monthly Facebook users it is almost the same in many respects to WhatsApp though retains a closer link to Facebook and can be used with messenger bots.
- Tumblr – a site for short shared online writing with photos and videos. Over 630 million active monthly users. You can think of this almost as a more supped-up version of Facebook’s former ‘Notes’ function, (still exists but I haven’t seen this being used for years and it’s buried way down in Facebook so you may not even know it exists).
- Twitter – Twitter differentiates itself in providing real-time content. So, people/businesses can ‘tweet’ in short 280-character tweets to keep their followers informed about related news and content, live, as it is happening. Businesses often use Twitter in a public customer-service manner. 335 million monthly active users.
- LinkedIn – The number one professional social media site. It can be 'the' place to show thought-leadership and display your business online. LinkedIn has 250 million monthly active users.
Marketing
In the big picture of social media marketing, marketing mostly focuses on these platforms.
Within social media marketing, there is unpaid marketing and paid marketing.
Unpaid marketing includes connecting with friends (and leads) and messaging them privately, promoting the business to current followers through blogs and relevant posts, or using groups and pages you are connected with (where appropriate!) to further your business goals.
Paid marketing includes investing an amount of your business capital into the platforms related to your business to accomplish your goals. Your goals may be:-
- a warm list of people interested in your product/service that you can then reach out to;
- having people coming into the doors of your physical business;
- simply getting the word out there about who you are and what you do and getting people connecting with that message and brand; and/or
- having people buy from your e-commerce website.
Usually, out of these platforms, the key platforms used by most businesses to achieve their marketing goals are: -
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Messenger, Twitter and LinkedIn – and these should likely be where you invest your paid marketing budget.
Campaign
So, you now may have an understanding of the social media platforms that might be useful to your business based on what they do and how they operate, the numbers of users, and your own business goals.
You will now hopefully understand that there are steps you can take yourself, both paid and unpaid, to market your business across these platforms.
This is a great start, though as with most things it is the method that people look for, the tried and tested methods of accomplishing results. Knowing how these social media platforms really work, how their complex algorithms boost posts and content, how to get your business ranking higher and helping your business achieve your goals, it pays itself back double and triple to work with a business who understands the social media marketing world inside-out, prices according to your own level of growth, and knows how to get your business achieving the top results it can through a dedicated Social Media Marketing Campaign.
Look at other familiar life situations you're likely to encounter: -
- When you want a website for your business, there are dedicated websites like Wix, Squarespace and WordPress that do this for free (at least at first). However, it makes business sense to pay a specialist web-designer who knows what works and is trained in the art.
- When you want to get fit you could simply stop eating bad stuff and run daily. This won't cost you a penny. However, it takes time and dedication to research intensively online and come up with a plan of what will work for you. So more serious people will join a gym (to benefit from the wide range of machines and the environment) and will maybe invest in a personal trainer to help custom-design and figure out a dedicated course of action based on the personal trainer's experience of what works and what is able to last.
- When you want to recruit for a position within your business – you could put a link out on your website ‘apply here’, personally review every CV received, go through an interview process with candidates you see and hope to strike lucky. However, for a fee, recruitment agencies who do this daily, have built up working lists of who would be right for which job and use software to target the best candidates for you. They then screen the candidates and present you only with a selection of high-value candidates, saving you time and money.
“Now I know what a social media marketing campaign is, should I start one?”
If you are ready to have a chat about how a strategic social media marketing campaign can help your business achieve great results and create a significant social and monetary return on your investment, we'd love to hear from you.
We will be happy to give you an initial FREE NO OBLIGATION CONSULTATION to see what level of service may be appropriate for your needs.
Tel: 020 7193 5882
Mob: 07908 973 679