Part 1: Social Media Marketing Guide for Dummies

I don’t think I need to tell you how big social media is – the king of the internet!

Social media is one of the current trends that mesmerizes the globe’s overall population from young to old. Approximately 3 billion people are active on social media platforms these days. Social media happens to be the primary source to connect with friends and family in the digital era. It also is a great platform to update photos, events, and more.

What do you think about the quantity of time an individual spends on social media?

Go ahead and guess!

If you guess an hour or more? Then you are absolutely right. Everything is changing from manual to online, for instance, from ordering food to watching movies and even managing bank accounts and bill payments, everything happens online. This definitely has managed to change offline business strategies to a great extent. Social media marketing (SMM) is one of the powerful platforms that cyberspace marketing is leveraging these days.

This marketing platform is an inexpensive and highly effective way to spread the recent news and expand the consumer base and business. Social media marketing offers an indispensable resource for start-ups and small companies looking for cost-efficient online marketing strategies.

What is social media?

“Social Media” is a tunnel for people to interact and communicate online. It encourages an individual’s transparency by way of following, voting, posting, and commenting. Individuals can be part of this social family by using enhanced social media channels and tools. Social media channels make it easy for consumers to spread the word about absolutely anything – lifestyle to products and services.

Planning and implementing a social media marketing strategy can be daunting. There are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn used extensively by individuals across the globe. Marketers need to create ads, posts, customer interaction, and, at the same time, be authentic, and grow connections. Almost every business knows the importance of investing in social media marketing.

Social media marketing (SMM)

Successful social media marketing is achieved when companies create clear goals, focus on consumers’ needs, and generate appropriate and persuasive content.

• It gets people talking and spreading the word.
• Helps get new clients.
• Makes buzz about your company, product, event, and a place.
• It helps to build up a loyal consumer force.
• Increases awareness of your organization’s services among the populace.
• Drives visitors to your websites.

To begin with SMM, the following guidelines will help dummies to understand the process better:

Five essential pillars that will help create your social media strategy:

• Goals
• Target audiences and the idea of how they consume data/content.
• Determine what type of content will work to attract an audience, whether text, video, images, or graphics.
• Channels
• Tools and processes to execute strategy.
• Maintain the style and tone of the content.

The globe has already seen the impact of acceptance and expansion of social media strategies; thus, the increasing stats speak for themselves.

Guidelines for starting social media marketing campaign –

• Know your consumer base.
• Create SMM guidelines for employees to practice social media marketing.
• There are no end dates in marketing on social media, so plan your resources and budgets carefully to allow constant fostering.
• Be clear about your objectives.
• Create a proper roadmap to success. The roadmap will help coordinate marketing programs, plan resources, use new strategies, and conduct more research.

Marketing via social media platforms varies entirely from traditional offline marketing.

The next six guidelines will help one to have a successful marketing campaign –

• Several influencers present on this social media platform help impact consumers’ decisions at various points in the marketing funnel. Influential bloggers are a great place to start the promotion of your products.
• Discover what words consumer uses to define your products.
• Make sure you give your consumers something valuable. Always believe in delivering advanced products or your rivals will.
• Build an authentic brand voice across all social media platforms.
• Make your consumers brand advocates and partners in your business.
• Explore numerous social media channels to make sure you manage to reach your consumers from any corner of the world.

Goals that can be accomplished using SMM are as follows –

Few people around the corner make social media marketing seem superficial, but it is the opposite in reality. With clarity and genuineness, social media might help businesses  to accomplish the following goals:

• If a business is using social ads, then it is necessary to spread the word about the brand and its discovery.
• Discussion with people helps build relationships and community.
• Driving sales and leads is a must.
• Regularly post business developments and novel products on the social media platform to increase the number of viewers and buyers.
• Enhance site traffic with the help of referral clicks.
• Innovative promotion of new events will help increase the attendees. Thus, it will lead to an increasing number of viewers and buyers.

Any which way, transparency in business will help to achieve these goals. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn are the major platforms used to promote businesses.

I think, by now, you all might have got a basic idea about SMM in this part. To know more about SMM in detail, stay tuned for part 2.