The process of social media marketing comprises of posting content to social media profiles, interacting with followers, and deploying social media advertising through marketing software. To accomplish these tasks, social media management software is often employed for scheduling and publishing diverse posts, managing workflow, and maintaining an online presence.
There is a multitude of social networking platforms available for a company to interact with current and prospective customers, and they can utilize integrated analytics to monitor the effectiveness of their efforts.
Social media marketing pillars
To ensure that nothing is overlooked, it is essential to traverse all five pillars of social media marketing for your brand.
- Strategy
In order to fully utilize the benefits of social media, it is important to analyze the overall perspective and develop a strategy for social media. Once this is done, one can proceed to actively engage in social media.
This comprises of:
- Determining the business goals you’re looking to achieve. For instance, maybe you want to expand brand awareness, drive sales, or get an increase in website traffic. Creating a social media strategy helps you generate engagement around your brand and its products while creating a community and building customer trust.
- Choosing the right social network platforms. Whether you pick Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, the strategy will look different on each site. Consider which social network platform your target audience uses most.
- Choosing the type of content to share. Is your brand going to opt for images, videos, or links? Will it be entertaining or educational? Remember that what you decide doesn’t have to be the strategy forever. Switch things up if the social media content isn’t working how you thought it would!
- Planning
After devising a strategy, the next step is to prepare and release it! This necessitates maintaining a regular social media presence that is consistent with the brand. Such an approach aids in the discovery of both current and potential clients. Planning content in advance, rather than creating and publishing it concurrently, is essential.
Initiating publishing requires clicking on a social media platform to share content such as a blog post, video, or image while also bearing in mind the appropriate timing and frequency. For instance, you should avoid scheduling social media posts to go live during unearthly hours and refrain from sharing an excessive number of tweets in a single day.
- Engagement
As you consistently publish content, your business and its social media audience will increase in size. As a result, discussions surrounding your brand will intensify, such as individuals leaving comments on your posts, mentioning you in other brands’ posts, reacting to your Tweets, or reaching out to you through private messages.
It is possible that your brand is being discussed by customers without them tagging you. Therefore, it is crucial to listen, monitor, and participate in as many conversations as possible. During social engagement, be vigilant for both positive and negative discussions. If a customer is utilizing social media to express dissatisfaction with your product or service, utilize the opportunity to address the issue or provide assistance.
- Analytics
Following that is the exploration of analytics and reporting, which enables you to extensively analyze your data and monitor the performance of your social media posts. Certain social media networks, such as Twitter Analytics, have this information readily available, making it effortless to identify successful practices and areas for improvement.
There are certain metrics that you can keep tabs on:
- Engagement. Clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your posts. Some platforms go even further with specific engagement types. For instance, TikTok and Instagram include “saved” posts.
- Reach. The number of users who have seen your most recent content.
- Impressions. The number of times a post from your profile or page was seen by users. Impressions count whether the post was clicked on or not.
- Mentions. The number of times your profile’s name has been mentioned in posts. Sometimes called “tags”, they often begin with the @ symbol.
- Followers. The number of people who have clicked the Follow button on your account to see your content and posts regularly.
- Video views. On TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, you can see how many views your videos have received.
- Profile visits. The number of people who have visited your social profile or main page.
- Shares. The number of times users reshare your posts to their network.
Questions such as the following can be answered by these metrics:
- Are we reaching more people this month vs. last month?
- How many positive mentions did we get this month?
- Are people using our brand’s hashtags on social posts?
- Are we on track to hit a certain number of followers by the end of the year?
- Advertising
As time passes, your brand might reach a stage where it can expand its marketing endeavors to encompass social media advertising. With such ads, it becomes conceivable to access a larger customer base beyond the existing followers of your accounts.
You have the ability to customize ads to target certain individuals or groups, utilizing factors such as interests, behaviors, demographic information, and geographical location. Many businesses opt to utilize social media advertising software to streamline the process of managing, purchasing, and placing ads on specific platforms.
Anthony Astacio, the Paid Social Manager at Quigley Simpson, highlights the significance of selecting the appropriate platform for your brand. To identify the ideal platform, various factors need to be considered. Firstly, defining your budget plays a crucial role. A higher budget provides greater versatility and allows for the use of numerous platforms. Additionally, it is essential to analyze the type of creatives available, such as images and videos, and the desired outcome of the campaign.
How to build a social media marketing plan
To increase the likelihood of success for your social media marketing program, it is important to follow these particular actions when starting from scratch. Failure to adhere to these steps may impede your progress.
Make a determination regarding the aims and targets.
It is essential to establish clear and defined social media marketing goals and objectives right from the start. These goals could be uncomplicated and direct, such as “maintain consistency by posting once every day for a month” or “interact with a minimum of two followers every day.”
By achieving these objectives, your team can establish a consistent rhythm and pace, resulting in a deeper understanding of effective and ineffective tactics. Subsequently, you can focus on more targeted goals within your social media marketing plan, such as increasing your follower count by 10%.
Identify your intended audience.
Failing to acknowledge your audience is a grave mistake in the realm of social media advertising. It’s crucial to obtain a comprehensive understanding of your target demographic. Additionally, you should strive to personalize your content in order to make it more pertinent. It may be beneficial to construct an audience persona by examining key variables such as age, dialect, geographic location, typical earnings, and potential obstacles. Ponder which segment of the population you desire to connect with and how you would characterise them.
Knowing these answers will enable you to identify the content that appeals to the specific followers and customers you aim to acquire.
Conduct a study on rival companies.
It is highly probable that your rivals have already established a strategic presence on social media. Therefore, it is imperative to examine their activities and performance to stay updated. Consider conducting a competitor analysis to determine the efficacy of their tactics.
By doing this, you can potentially create one or more opportunities that your team can exploit. For instance, if a rival company is focusing on Facebook but has a weak presence on Instagram or Twitter, that’s where you should concentrate your efforts.
Select a suitable platform.
Afterwards, determine the social media platforms that require your attention. Consider the data you’ve accumulated about your intended audience, along with the prevalent platforms in your sector, and the capacity of your team.
Your impact and success will be limited if you create profiles and devise an SMM strategy on too many platforms that you cannot manage efficiently. It is prudent to commence with one platform and gradually expand.
Develop a strategy for creating content.
It’s probable that you’re already familiar with the saying “content is king”. This emphasizes the importance of content in all your efforts. To satisfy your audience, you should produce varied content such as articles, blogs, videos, and images, which they will find intriguing and valuable. Afterward, you must establish the most effective approach for social media marketing.
Start collaborating with your executive and legal teams at an early stage.
Social media is fundamentally about socializing, yet numerous branded accounts appear to be one-dimensional. This isn’t due to a lack of appreciation for engaging with their followers, but rather the fact that they are unable to do so. This becomes particularly evident in fields such as healthcare, politics, pharmaceuticals, and education. Consequently, when developing social media strategies for their brands, marketing teams must collaborate with their leaders and legal experts from the outset to establish a set of policies and constraints regarding what their social media team can and cannot engage with online.
Make necessary modifications as required.
Utilize the analytics provided by SMM platforms to your advantage in order to identify the posts that receive the highest engagement, assess whether you’re gaining more followers, and delve deeper into the demographics of your audience. Continue implementing successful strategies and revise or discard those that aren’t effective.
Advanced Linkedin for B2B marketing strategies
- Encourage your sales team to build a strong presence on LinkedIn
Making connections and reaching out is made possible by LinkedIn’s potency. With the current shift to virtual selling, the platform presents endless possibilities to address the needs of prospective clients.
Nowadays, B2B LinkedIn strategies heavily rely on the participation of sales teams.
Include LinkedIn as a component of your virtual selling plan, and motivate your sales representatives to utilize it.
Modern technology has made it possible for companies to effectively handle a remote sales team, provide adequate support to distributed teams, provide excellent customer service, and attract new business without the requirement of physical presence.
To establish significant relationships with customers, empathy is crucial. By utilizing an appropriate technology setup, businesses can modify their sales strategy for remote selling via LinkedIn and employ face-to-face communication tools to detect subtle hints that facilitate reliance. Furthermore, they can ensure that all members have access to immediate data and work together to exchange successes and difficulties.
Begin your outreach by focusing on the ‘leads that follow your company tab’, i.e., individuals who are already aware of your business, and work towards achieving successful results.
By utilizing LinkedIn’s “who viewed your profile” function, you can begin conversations with individuals who have visited your profile, making it a useful component of your sales strategy. Take a relationship-focused approach and pay attention to their concerns in order to generate leads in a natural manner.
- Give ads a try in one of your LinkedIn strategies
Once you have developed your brand and established your credibility, you can take advantage of LinkedIn Ads as an effective tactic for your B2B endeavors.
Targeting a qualified audience is crucial for successful LinkedIn Ads campaigns.
These individuals will be responsible for deciding on the procurement of your products and services.
After successfully creating relevant content and achieving a positive response on your page, you can start targeting your audience according to their professional characteristics including but not limited to their job position, expertise, line of work, and organization name.
- Sponsored Content is native advertising on LinkedIn.
- Sponsored InMail allows you to use the private messaging system to reach your target audience directly with customized messages.
- Text Ads as an ad format enables you to promote offers or drive leads with short text that appears at the top of your potential clients’ feeds.
- And LinkedIn Video Ads are the most powerful format and play automatically on users’ feeds to get eyeballs on your content.
- Publish valuable content
What makes LinkedIn so great is that its features are readily available and user-friendly. Rather than posting external links on LinkedIn, take advantage of LinkedIn Articles to publish your own content.
You can showcase your knowledge and gain credibility among your peers by sharing impactful stories of successful customer experiences or crafting top-notch blog entries, such as a comprehensive guide on implementing CRM in small enterprises. Posting valuable content is a way to enhance your organization’s image and offer relevance to your audience. Consider sharing any relevant articles that could benefit your readership.
Employ LinkedIn as a platform to distribute valuable emails, social media posts, virtual demos, or testimonials with your current connections and also establish new ones. Ensure to incorporate a diverse range of content, keeping individuals engaged and interested, while leading a greater number of potential customers into the sales pipeline.
- Create videos and rich media
Half the challenge in B2B marketing is gaining the confidence of potential customers, which LinkedIn enables you to accomplish by displaying a variety of captivating content.
Skipping video marketing in your LinkedIn strategies is not an option.
Utilizing images, documents, and video content on your profile and business page can be effective in drawing in potential leads.
As you’re aware, text posts perform exceptionally well on LinkedIn by promoting platform engagement. However, videos are gripping content that’s currently flourishing across various channels.
By showcasing your skills through an interactive video and sharing it, you can enhance your credibility and generate more leads.
There’s no denying that video content generates more engagement compared to other forms, and incorporating it is a method to boost LinkedIn engagement.
While you can add pre-existing material to boost your LinkedIn profile, utilizing native video is the most effective choice.
For optimal visibility, upload succinct videos (less than 90 seconds) directly onto LinkedIn. To captivate your audience, incorporate subtitles into your content.
