SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR BUSINESSES

Social media marketing is an effective way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. People find, learn about, follow, and buy from brands on social media, so you’re missing out if you’re not on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you market your business well on social media, you can have a lot of success. You can get people to love your brand and even get more leads and sales.

In this guide to social media marketing you’ll learn:

• What social media marketing is, how it can help you, and what you should do.
• How to make a plan for social media marketing and a strategy for putting it into action.
• How to use the seven best social media sites for marketing

What is Social Media Marketing [SMM]?

Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing that utilizes the power of popular social media platforms to help you reach your marketing and branding goals. But it’s not enough to just make business accounts and post whenever you want. Social media marketing needs a plan that changes over time and has goals that can be measured. This plan includes:

• Keeping your profiles up-to-date and optimizing them.
• Sharing brand-representative images, films, stories, and even live videos can help you reach your target demographic and build your business.
• Getting back to comments, shares, and likes, and keeping an eye on your reputation.
• Follow your followers, customers, and people who have a lot of influence and talk to them to build a community centered around your brand.
• Paid social media advertising is also a part of social media marketing. This is when you pay to put your business in front of a large number of highly targeted users.

Advantages of marketing on social media

With so many people using it and so many ways to use it, social media is one of the best free ways to market your business today. Here are a few specific ways that social media marketing can help:

• Put a face on your company by becoming an engaged member of your target audience through the use of social media. Your profile, posts, and interactions with other users create a persona that your audience can connect with, get to know, and come to trust.
• Encourage visits to your website by directing users there from your social network profiles, blog posts, and paid advertising.
• Lead generation and customer acquisition can be accomplished in part by utilizing these platforms’ in-built tools and features, such as online stores on Instagram and Facebook, one-on-one chat, “call to action” buttons on user profiles, and the ability to schedule appointments.
• Improving recognition and familiarity with your brand is facilitated by the visual nature of social media platforms, which helps you to establish a consistent online presence across large user bases. And if people know more about your brand, all of your other campaigns will do better.
• Foster connections: these channels allow you to network, collect data, have conversations, and interact with your audience on a personal level.
• The more people you can reach and get interested in what you have to say on social media, the more likely you are to succeed in your marketing efforts.

Social media marketing statistics

Don’t just take our word for it that the above benefits are true. Let’s look at some facts about social media marketing that show how powerful it is:

• The average adult in the US spends 2.25 hours a day on social media.
• Over 70% of people who have a good impression of the business on social media will recommend that business to their circles.
• On average, Facebook users click on 12 ads every month.
• 81% of people look into products and services on Instagram.
• When a business responds to a tweet, nearly 80% of Twitter users feel better about it.
• 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn make business decisions.
• 46% of people who use TikTok do so without anything else going on.

The most important parts of a successful social media marketing strategy

Every business will have a different social media marketing plan that works, but they will all have these things in common:

• Know your audience: including what platforms they use, when and why they use them, what content they like, who else they follow, and more.
• Brand identity: What do you want to tell your audience? How do you want them to feel after looking at your content?
• Content strategy: There is an element of spontaneity on social media, but you’ll need a structured content strategy to have a consistent voice and regularly put out good content.
• Analytics: Your strategy will be based on data about who you’re trying to reach, the best content to share, the best times to post, and more.
• Regular activities: Social media is a real-time platform. If you want to utilize it to expand your brand, you need to post often, keep track of engagements with your brand, respond to engagements, keep up with current trends, and make sure your profiles are correct.
• Inbound strategy: Don’t promote your business on social media. Focus on adding value by making content that is useful and interesting and helping the people around you. This will help your business grow naturally, and other people will help you market it.

Planning your social media marketing

Now that you know the most important parts of a social media marketing plan, it’s time to put it to use. Your social media marketing plan is how you’ll put your strategy into action. It gives your work a structure so you can measure how well it’s going and make sure you’re spending your money wisely. Here’s how to make a plan for marketing on social media:

• Choose where you want to go: Choose based on who you want to reach, what platforms are popular in your industry, and how much bandwidth you have. Take on only as many platforms as you can really keep up with. You can always begin with one and add gradually as you get the hang of it.
• Set up aims and goals: Start with simple, task-like goals, like posting once a day for a month, setting up your profiles, or researching your competitors. Once you get into a routine and learn more, you’ll be able to set more specific and strategic goals, like increasing your following by X% or posting X [types of content you’ve learned your audience likes] per month.
• Report often and make changes: Use the analytics for each platform to find out which posts get the most attention, if you’re getting more followers, and what your audience looks like. Use what works and make it bigger, and get rid of what doesn’t.

Tips for social media marketing

Are you ready to start using social media to market your business? Here are a few tips for using social media to market your business.

• Create diverse content: When it comes to social media marketing, content is king, just like it is in other parts of online marketing. Make sure you post often and offer helpful, interesting information that your ideal customers will find useful. Among these are:
  • How-tos and quick advice
  • Local and business news: facts and figures
  • Polls, questions, contests
  • Notices and new information
• It also means using the different types of content that social media has to offer, like pictures, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more.
• Be consistent: When you use social media for marketing, your business can spread the image of your brand across a number of different social media sites. Even though each platform has its own environment and voice, your business’s core identity, whether it’s friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay the same.
• Do more than just publish; get involved: Rather than logging in once a month to plan out your content, try logging in more frequently. There are communities on social media channels. You should pay attention to who is interacting with your content and interact with them back.
  • You can do this by responding to comments, liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts, running live streams, posting polls and real-time questions to start conversations, and reposting other people’s content.
• Use content-making tools: Instagram isn’t the most visual social media platform. Everyone is! If you want to stand out in someone’s feed, use photographs, graphics, and text art. Canva’s templates and capabilities let you rapidly create professional-looking visuals using your logo and brand colors.
• Repurpose, Reposting, and Recycle: Social media is saturated, so you must post outstanding material consistently to achieve traction. The key? 3Rs:
  • Repurpose: Turn a customer review into a Facebook post, a blog article into a series of Tweets, a case study into an Instagram customer spotlight, a webinar deck into a LinkedIn carousel. It’s limitless.
  • Reposting: You shouldn’t do it all the time, but it’s a great way to fill in gaps in your content calendar. Repost user-generated Instagram and Twitter content. You can also curate authoritative information and link to it.
  • Recycle: Post TikTok videos and Instagram Reels to YouTube; re-share your top blog posts every month to gain new followers; add Facebook Live recordings to your YouTube channel.
• Customize your own feed: We’re always trying to get into others’ feeds, but we forget about our own. Follow your competition to obtain ideas you can apply and gaps you can fill. Follow influencers to learn about trends. Follow brands with strong content strategies for inspiration and outside-the-box ideas.
• Use analytics to measure success: Without tracking data, you can’t measure social media marketing success. Google Analytics can be used as a social media marketing tool to measure your most successful approaches and identify which ones to quit. Track your social media marketing campaigns with tags. Use each social platform’s analytics to see which of your posts are most popular.
• Paid social: Social media advertising is a cost-effective strategy to reach more people. You can reach a large audience for a little cost if you play your cards well. Most social media sites offer detailed targeting, allowing you to focus your budget on likely customers. Here are some paid social media marketing tips and resources:
  • Twitter adverts
  • Promoted pins
  • Facebook adverts

The top social media marketing platforms for a company

Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat are good for business. Different strategies are needed for different social media marketing sites.

Social media marketing service

A solid social media marketing strategy requires multiple platforms and a mix of organic and paid methods. It’s a good problem to have, but the more you grow your social media audience, the harder it is to keep up. Social media marketing services help businesses use social media effectively. Ex:

• HootSuite and Sprout Social use proprietary technology to help social media marketers streamline processes and get advanced analytics.
• Some social media marketing agencies, like Akvertise, only do pay social advertising.
• One platform doesn’t do social media marketing, and one channel doesn’t do overall marketing. Digital marketing agencies can help you integrate social media into your email, website, SEO, and other strategies.
• Some combine the above services. Social advertising uses proprietary technology to manage your strategy and let you focus on social alone or as part of a larger plan.

Make social media marketing a top priority.

Social media marketing improves site traffic and reach. It gives your firm a personality with which customers may connect.

Social media is not a place to market your business, no matter which platforms you utilize. It’s a place to express yourself, share information, and help others. With natural followers and promotion, you won’t need to pitch. With this technique, you’ll attain not only commercial goals but also satisfaction and fulfillment.

Social Media Marketing with Bonelli Systems

At Bonelli Systems, we want to help you stay up-to-date with all the latest changes and strategies to succeed on social media. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we’re here to help you succeed.

Connect with us on our social media platforms. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Messenger and LinkedIn. Also, don’t miss out on our engaging content on TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat.