A Comprehensive Guide On Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing has become a major tool of marketing for businesses of all sizes. It is a powerful and cost-effective way to reach potential consumers from around the world. An Indian brand can reach American citizens through social media marketing and can easily establish a small consumer base there. That’s the power of social media.

All the major brands are on social media and are competing to own a huge customer base through that. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. all are great social media outlets and have become a hub for brand advertisement. These apps are a great way for brands to directly interact with their customers. Therefore if you want to capture a large market, you have to up your social media game and use it to your brand’s advantage. Great marketing can double your consumer base in no time. But before learning how to use social media for marketing, one must understand the basic concepts of social media marketing. 

What Is Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a tool of online marketing that involves creating and sharing brand content on social media apps. The main objective behind creating this social media content is to achieve your branding and marketing goals. Social Media Marketing involves creating posts with images or texts, uploading small videos about your brands (reels on Instagram are a great example of this), and creating other mini content. 

While creating content for your brand on social media, one must remember that the goal is to create engaging content that drives audience engagement. People on social media have a short attention span and therefore your brand content must not be boring or tone-deaf. One great example of this is Netflix’s social media accounts. The OTT service uses Youtube and Instagram to engage its audience with funny videos, collaboration with influencers, and well-designed posts. If you look at the growth in Netflix’s consumer base, you’d notice that it has seen substantial growth and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that social media marketing has played a huge role in it.

Now let’s dive deep into the concept of social media marketing and learn about the five pillars of social media marketing.

The Five Pillar Of Social Media Marketing

1. Strategy

Before you even begin creating brand content on social media platforms, you'll have to carve out a marketing plan. A business cannot run on random marketing tactics; one has to have a laid-out comprehensive Marketing strategy. 

In coming up with a social media marketing strategy, you'll have to think about what your end goals are. Some brands use social media to increase their brand awareness, while some use it to drive more traffic to their website and increase their sales. Apart from them, a lot of brands use social media as a customer support channel. 

Apart from this, you'll also have to decide which social media platforms you want to take over and what kind of content you want to create. All this depends on the kind of business you are in. If you are a tech brand, Twitter or Reddit is a great option while for a clothing line, Instagram fits perfectly. These are all important decisions that your marketing team will have to take. 

2. Planning and Publishing Your Post

Close to 3 billion people around the world use social media, hence it's impossible to cater to everyone. Thus after you have come up with a strategy for your social media marketing, you'll have to plan how to reach your consumer. This includes planning when to publish your brand content. There's a time and place for everything thus you will have to plan your content rather than publishing your content spontaneously. This will help you maximize your reach.

This also includes the frequency of your posts. You can't publish all your content in a day and not post for the next five days. That's not how social media works. Consistency and frequency have to align in such an order that it helps your brand gain more traction. 

3. Engagement and Feedback

Social Media Marketing is all about these two words, engagement, and feedback. As your brand grows, more people will comment under your posts, engage in your stories, tag you, and even directly text you. After successfully publishing posts, you can't just shut your social media account. To make sure that your consumers stick around, you'll have to engage with them. 

The biggest advantage (or disadvantage in some cases) of social media is that you get instant feedback from people. So if you are going in the right direction, your feedback would be positive but if you are leaning in the wrong direction, people will call you out. Feedbacks are also great to know what's working and not working in your products. You can easily pay attention to your consumer's feedback and implement it accordingly. It'll immensely help your brand's growth. 

4. Analytics

After successfully publishing content, you'd want to know how your brand is faring on social media. A huge part of social media marketing involves analysis. It includes making reports about your brand's reach, growth in user base, increases in the number of followers, likes, dislikes, etc. Social Media apps themselves provide basic data regarding your reach and engagement. But to get a more comprehensive idea, you'll have to set up a social media team that will look after all this. 

5. Advertising

After your brand is doing well on social media and has a significant number of followers, you can think of growing big through social media advertising. Online advertising will help you hugely expand your horizons. Social Media advertising has become a beast of its own. It now has tons of tools that can help you grow. With its help, you can reach your target audience. Social Media advertising allows brands to specify who to cater to, which will eventually help you reach people who'd be interested in your product or brand.