Be it the millennials or the GenZ, everyone is flabbergasted by social media. Thanks to social media ads, everyone can find something on these platforms. You will often observe that people of all age groups find something entertaining on social media platforms. Based on the potential of these platforms, marketers advertise services cost-efficiently.
Just like every concrete foundation, social media marketing also rests on strong pillars. Let us check out these 5 sturdy pillars that fortify the entire marketing campaign.
Let us read about:
- What is social media marketing?
- Why should you use social media marketing?
- Five pillars of social media marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing utilizes social media platforms to spread awareness about a brand to a dedicated audience. Now with this opportunity, you can easily boost sales, build a brand persona and drive more traffic to the website.
An effective social media strategy includes great content creation such as publishing readable and attractive content across all social media collaterals, Interacting engagingly with your audiences and followers, measuring the performance of an ad campaign, etc.
Marketers at creative digital marketing agencies use popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to boost sales.
Presently, you will find a wide range of social media management tools. Whether you want to schedule a post or design carousel social media ads, everything is possible.
Here in this blog, we will closely learn about the 5 pillars of social media marketing to strengthen brand awareness.
Why Should You Use Social Media Marketing?
We have already covered how social media platforms’ popularity has now attracted the attention of marketers. However, it is natural to wonder why a shift was necessary from traditional marketing means. Let us glance through the social media platform evolution overview in the field of marketing.
Social media marketing flourished first in the publishing industry. Many businesses use these platforms to share the latest brand, product, or service updates. Businesses usually have one primary goal. Invite more traffic and boost sales. Now we have travelled past the broadcasting practices.
Businesses use social media for a myriad of purposes. They can share content, generate traffic, and boost sales. In addition to this, they can conduct an analysis of their audience engagement. They can monitor a campaign's reach. It is now possible for brands to run highly targeted ads for specific audiences that will lead to less investment and more returns.
Get a glimpse into the social media marketing core components. Let us examine its influence on the enhancement of brand image:
The Top Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Strategy
Think about what you want to post before rushing into publishing. Making content haphazardly and posting without a strategy will keep adding images and content on your page but not generate any traffic. Take a step back and imagine the big picture when you devise a social media strategy. Map a mental picture of your goals. What are the main business objectives to achieve?
Businesses usually have 1 dedicated goal. For example, some want to increase brand awareness, while some want to make sales. Social media helps you to build communities with loyal customers who trust your brand.
Other platforms serve the same purpose differently compared to the most renowned social media platforms. Some other lucrative channels of advertisements are Tumblr, Anchor, Medium, Pinterest and Quora. Messaging applications such as Whatsapp, WeChat, Telegram, and Messenger are becoming increasingly advertisement-oriented.
In the beginning, analyze the most visited platform for your target audience. For example, Pinterest has a wide audience base of women. Therefore, if your business caters to women, it's best to target Pinterest.
In the next step, determine the content type you want to share. Here, you may get help from some best content writing companies for content ideas. Design the social media posts depending on audience preferences. Put your thinking hat on and articulate what your audience wants. Think whether your campaign will include images, videos, or any links. Would you like to educate your audience or entertain them? Find out techniques to create more influential posts for your audience. You can build an influencer marketing persona which will make things easier for you. Design dynamic and scalable marketing campaigns for the everchanging digital landscape.
Planning and Publishing
Small businesses thrive by merely being present on social media platforms for a longer duration of time. As per statistics, nearly 3 billion people are on social media platforms every day. Just by showing up on social media platforms, you get a high chance of being discovered by your customers.
Publishing a post on social media is no rocket science. Add a text description, image, or video to get started. The posting is the least of your hassles. The major area where you should focus your attention is at creating wonderful posts that perfectly represent your brand. You must dedicate your time and energy to publishing content timely and spontaneously. Maintaining good timing and frequency is the key to generating a successful campaign.
You do not have to worry incessantly about posting every day. There are ample social media scheduling tools to publish your posts automatically. You can schedule your posts weeks in advance. You can keep a record of the published content too.
Make a social media calendar to ensure a more organized process. Provide access to the calendar to all team members for transparency.
Listening and Engagement
People talk about brands in open forums. They discuss, comment, praise, express grievances, and even mock openly on social media platforms. Sometimes, they find the logo offensive or the service, dissatisfactory. People share experiences on social media for all events. It is your responsibility as a brand to address such comments in public. This way you will be able to preserve your image and improve customer satisfaction. Let them know you will solve their problems and listen to them. This step will enhance your customer relationship management.
You can keep a check on direct messages, tags and mentions to read what people are talking about your brand. You can manually check your notifications to know if there is a tag or mention, however, it is easy to miss out on these mentions. Using a listening and engagement tool will gather information on all social media mentions and messages. It will effectively monitor the posts that do not have a tag at all.
Analytics and Measurement
Analyze social media campaign performance to determine if you are on the right track. What we aim for, is a steady increase in traffic, sales, or engagement - whichever your goal is.
As you move forward towards publishing or social media engagement, you should track the performance of your marketing campaigns. Is your growth progressive or regressive compared to the last quarterly data? If you are an e-commerce brand, are you getting tagged or mentioned in positive comments or negative ones? That is the ratio of your brand’s hashtag from the previous month to the current one.
The social media analytics and tools record all the basic information regarding this which you can easily access on the applications. However, check social media analytics tools for a better understanding of inclusive data. A wide range of such analytics tools are available today such as Sprout Social, HubSpot, IZEA, BuzzSumo, Google Analytics, and Followerwonk, etc. these tools also enable users to compare their performances across several social media platforms.
Online Advertising
Social media advertising is a lucrative area to explore once your funds grow. Presenting your ads to a wide target audience increases your chance of reaching a wider audience. Your followers spike at a great speed with social media ads. Social media algorithms are so particular that they can narrow down the audience appropriate for your brand. You can segregate the audience based on interests, behaviours, demographics, age, gender, and many other parameters.
There are 4 major types of social media advertising that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy:
Static Image Ads
You can add your product images or make a carousel ad of your services and post it on your social media accounts as ads. The main reason behind using images in advertisements is that people are usually more drawn towards visuals. Adding buttons such as “Shop Now” “Download Now” and “Install” prompts the viewer to take an action. To succeed with a static image ad, you must follow two tricks-
- Ensure that your pictures are of high quality.
- Your ads are consistent with the rest of your content.
Video Ads
Moving objects attract the human eye compared to static ones. Be it an aeroplane, a flying bird, or motion pictures. Videos are by far the best way to advertise your brand. Mostly video ads are small so the users are interested in the length of the video. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube give this unique opportunity to create short-form videos so that people can look at and interact spending only a few minutes.
Stories Ads
Users can add both images and videos to create unique story ads. Several social media platforms allow this feat. These are full-screen ads that run for a different time duration based on the platform. On Facebook, you can run a picture ad for 6 seconds while for a video you can take up to 15 seconds. On Instagram, the advertisements can be as long as 120 seconds for both images and videos. A viewer can swipe up the ad to visit the brand's website. These ads are available only for 24 hours. This is an excellent way to promote short-term deals and discounts on product lines or services.
Messenger Ads
Messenger ads are the Facebook ads that are displayed in the Messenger tab of Facebook platforms. This enables a one-on-one conversation with the customers through messages. Customers can ask questions and directly visit websites through these automated messages.
Bottom Line
Social media marketing is a smart, pocket-friendly, and sustainable service promotion practice. Devise your strategy based on the strong foundation of the five pillars - Good Strategy, Planning and thoughtful publishing, audience engagement, social media ads, and analyzing the performance of campaigns. Excel in business endeavors and achieve your marketing goals.
Want to learn how we can help you develop a winning social media strategy, contact digital marketing virtual assistants today at MyTasker.
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