Marketers are constantly changing their techniques and marketing efforts to keep up with the fluctuations in consumer behaviour and buying decisions of prospective customers. As a result, we have developed this guide to provide our audience with an insight into Social Media Marketing, and to highlight the importance of obtaining a strong social media presence to hook your prospective customers.

What is Social Media Marketing? – Understanding the role it plays in marketing

Our first step in this guide to marketing your business, using social media marketing, is to define what it is, and why this technique is used.

Social Media Marketing, or SMM, is a form of online marketing that uses social networking platforms to achieve marketing communication goals and reach consumer attention.

These days, Social Media plays an important role in a marketing campaign.  The networking platforms are the foundation for a marketer to connect the prospective customers with the desired brand, in order to establish a strong relationship and loyalty.

The Guide to Market Your Business – Social Media Marketing

We have identified four key components of Social Media Marketing that we consider to be the building blocks of a successful SMM campaign.

1.      Start with a marketing plan:

Before we can develop a SMM campaign, we must first build the foundation to establish a marketing plan. Without a plan in mind, there is no direction, which will leave us lost with no results to show for it. The following points are essential components to include, when developing a marketing plan. These include:

–          Identify your target audience

–          Establish a plan to target your audience directly using social media

–          Recognise the message you want to convey to your audience

–          Determine your goals and objectives you hope to achieve.

This brings us to our next key component.

2.      Identify and develop your objectives and goals:

Establishing the goals and objectives you want to reach is a crucial component in marketing your business on social media. We need to ensure we are working towards a goal; otherwise we are unable to move forward and achieve a successful outcome.

3.      Create engaging content:

Without engaging content, social media is worthless to market your business. We need social media and appealing content to achieve goals and reach the desired audience. Make sure your content is valuable to your reader by offering engaging information in the form of images, videos, webinars, info graphics, and blogs.

4.       Maintenance of campaign and evaluating results:

One of the most essential aspects of a SMM campaign is maintaining and assessing the performance of your results. You need to ensure your content is kept to a high level of quality to effectively target your prospects. In assessing the results, we need to measure our key performance indicators. For instance, evaluating our reach to prospective customers through social channels will tell us if our efforts are generating the intended results.

Social Media Platforms – The Four Leading Online Platforms

Social media has recently become a vital component in any business’s marketing strategy, with a significant importance to secure a strong online presence in the digital marketplace. These days, a website is not enough to attract your customers to your products; it needs to be complemented with the responsive components social media platforms offer. In order to effectively target our audiences, we need to tailor our campaign to fit each networking platform’s unique environment.

We have created an overview of the four leading social media platform’s and their unique benefits when targeting your desired audience.

Facebook:

This would be considered the most widespread social platform, used by companies for business. Facebook has established several incentives for businesses to adopt for their marketing strategies including:

–          Effective communication with their targeted audience to build strong relationships

–          Facilitates reach of the desired prospects through targeting their needs and interests

–          Ability to create Facebook ads to further promote brand awareness

Facebook is also a useful tool in tracking the success of your content and measuring the results achieved, through the use of statistical data.

Twitter:

Twitter has now transformed from once just used for personal status, to now incorporate business communities, and has increasingly become an effective communication tool for small and larger corporations. This platform has proven to be a successful approach in promoting brand images, drives traffic to company websites, promotion of business blogs, and creates effective communication between the user and the brand.

LinkedIn:

This online media platform’s key advantage is the networking ability it maintains in connecting people to corporations, and businesses to find marketing opportunities in partnering with other corporations. LinkedIn has significant benefits for business including:

–          Business to Business (B2B) Networking: allows for businesses to network and create connections for likely partnering opportunities.

–          Customer Satisfaction and Lead Generation: this benefit creates the ideal avenue to interact with your targeted audience to listen to their concerns and resolve these issues, in order to build on customer satisfaction.

–          Business to Consumer (B2C) Networking: allows for businesses to network with the desired consumer to create strong relationships, and builds sustainable brand image.

–          Recruitment and Staffing Opportunities: this benefit enhances opportunities for recruiting professionals to your business page.

It is assumed that LinkedIn is just a networking platform for the job seekers and recruitment agencies, therefore businesses are failing to gain these broader benefits, as suggested above.

Google+:

Google+ has increasingly become a social networking sensation for businesses looking to build a loyal customer base and a higher online presence. This platform has developed several advantages for the business industry to adopt including increased Google search visibility, a high influence to search rankings, enhances direct relationships with your audience, and functionality of the Google+ Communities to engage with your existing customers and prospective audience.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Now that the four leading social media platforms have been evaluated, we can take this opportunity to determine the benefits of Social Media Marketing and how this marketing sensation can contribute to growth for your company. Our team have constructed the following list of benefits in using a Social Media Marketing strategy.

• Increased website traffic
• Creates interaction and communication with the desired target audience
• Highly cost effective
• Enhances brand awareness
• Increased conversions
• Effective and efficient in targeting  your audience
• Develops a strong brand identity
• Enhances customer relationships with the brand

Still not convinced?

We know this is a lot to take in, with most companies restricted to budgets, resources and are time poor. As a result, our team at Newpath WEB want to assist your business in taking advantage of a Social Media Marketing strategy and enhance your full potential as an industry leader, ahead of your competition. We deliver high quality SMM services tailored to your business goals and guide you through the process, to greatly improving your social media presence.

For more information on our Social Media Marketing services, please contact us.