Doing social media marketing the right way

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a process of attracting people into your website through social media platforms. This is a type of word of mouth marketing where it encourage the visitors to attract more people by encouraging them to share content with the others.

Why it is important?

Social media is popular among almost everyone regardless of the demography. Today’s busy lifestyle further encourage people to use social media to interact with each other. Even the increasing use of smart mobiles and tablets further encourage people to engage with social media. Most of these smart devices now come to the customer with social media in build inside the devise. There is a community building up even without us noticing. More the social media is getting close to people, more the businesses can reach people. Even Google analytics now gives you a report on how many social media referrals you get to your website. So the real question is not “why it’s important”, but “why it is not important?”

Social media for businesses

Regardless of the size of the business, today every business needs to be on social media. Is it because social media is free? Not really! Technology is changing rapidly, to keep up with the new technological changes; you must be up to date and so do your business. Being on social media can benefit your business in many ways. 

• Increasing the brand awareness

• Increase sales

• Easy customer support

How to market your business through social media?

Just because your business is listed in few social media websites, does that mean you are doing social media marketing? May be not. Just being on social media will not benefit your business. You need to have a plan in order to make it useful. Most crucial thing when marketing online is to have your own website. Having a business website act as a destination for your social media followers. To increase the effectiveness, you must make sure the information on your website are properly arranged and those information are accurate. You can use tools like Google analytics to analyze your website and change content to make it relevant to your business. If these initial steps are complete, make sure you have answers to these questions before marketing your business through social media.

1. What social media platform is best for your business?

2. What are your goals for being on social media?

3. What is the budget for your social media marketing plan?

4. Who is implementing your social media plan?

5. How you measure the success?

1 What social media platform is best for your business?

May be this is the easiest question of them all, but if you ignore this; your entire social media marketing plan will become a waste of time. You should always pick the social media platform which is used by your clients (target audience). If you select the wrong platform, you are just singing for the deaf. You must have a clear understanding about your audience and the demographics. You have various ways to find out the social media that your audience is using. You can create a survey and get the audients feedback or simply do an online research to see what your competitors are using. 

2 What are your goals for being on social media?

After selecting the social media platform(s) your audience is using, you need to set goals for the social media marketing plan. Without a proper goal (Purpose) you are just beating around the bush. For example businesses use social media marketing to:

• Increase the brand awareness

• Build-up the network

• Increase sales

• Divert traffic to the website

• Interact with the customers

Your marketing approach may change based on the goals you set. For example, if you are using social media to interact with the customer, the way you follow is entirely different than building traffic to the website. When selecting goals you have to make sure these goals are relevant, realistic and measurable. It’s good to have thousands of likes to your Facebook page, but if it doesn’t contribute to any of your goals it’s irrelevant. If your Facebook fans are not buying anything from you, there is no value in that fan base. Be specific and make sure the goals you set has a meaning.

3 What is the budget for your social media marketing plan?

Why you need a budget when social media is free? Nothing is free when it comes to social media marketing. Even though the platform is free, you still need to have a budget to do marketing through that platform. So what is the cost for this? Social media marketing budget must be a part of your marketing budget. So do you still need to have other marketing methods to promote the business? Can’t you market the business entirely on social media? May be you can and may be you can’t. If you sell a unique product may be you can sell the product entirely based on the social media. But if you have a competition, do you really think only social media can market your product? I don’t think so. Single marketing channel will not link you with the entire customer base, you still need marketing mix to sell your product or service to your customers. Selecting the methods you use may again depend on your target audience and also the demographics.

4 Who is implementing your social media plan?

Keeping a social media page up to date is crucial when it comes to Social media marketing. To do this you need someone to update your social media pages day to day with your product or service and also market insights, new technologies, etc. To do this you need to hire a dedicated someone in your organization, for this it cost money. But can’t you take care of those yourself? That way you don’t have to spend money on someone else to do it for you. Though you think like that the reality is it still cost you money, because the time you spend on the social media worth money too. 

5 How you measure the success?

Measuring the success of the social media marketing is no different than any other marketing methods, return on investment. As mentioned above, goals must be measurable and realistic. Taking the same example, brand awareness and network can be measured by the number of Facebook likes, twitter followers, etc. Increase sales can be measured by the periodic sales percentage, Divert traffic to the website can be measured through analytics, Interact with the customers can be measured by the number of support enquiries resolved through social media. 

Conclusion

So if you answer these questions now you have a better and clearer understanding about how social media marketing works. Now it’s time for you to create the marketing plan for your business. Remember..! Social media marketing alone will not boost up your business. Decide your other marketing tactics, analyze your target audience, think about the products or services you sell, imagine you sell your product to retired seniors, investing more on radio and TV commercials might be your key marketing channel. Always make sure you go social with a better understanding about your target audience. This will make your social media campaign more successful than ever before.