Social Media Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide

What Is Social Media Marketing?

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How Can SMM Help You Grow?

There are not just one or two ways social media marketing can help you grow with online marketing. There are many of them. Address them right below:

1. Showcasing Your Brand

Social media offers another marketing channel for creating brand awareness, relationship building, and driving new leads and sales for both small and big businesses.

On top of that, it’s a hundred percent free. Then why not use it for the better, right?

2. More Exposure In The Digital World

Interaction with social networks can significantly increase your online presence.

If billions of people are actively using social media, which I have already discussed in the introduction of the post, you get access to a huge audience which leads to more exposure.

3. More Traffic and Better SEO

Of course, social media can bring tons of free traffic to your website and funnels that convert into leads and sales.

On the other hand, as search engines consider social media engagement as a part of their ranking factors, you get some good juice flowing to that as well.

4. A Faithful Community

People love being part of the business that is proactively building a vivacious community.

Such an online community can support establishing an irrational connection between your organization and the prospects, which is highly quintessential for long term success.

5. More Sales & New Audience

Listening to your prospects using social networks can assist you to respond to their specific needs.

This will most likely cause an improvement in sales and expand your consumer base.

6. Refine Customer Service

Social media is a great feedback source.

Enabling prospects to communicate with your company efficiently and easily can greatly improve your customer service even if you don’t have a large customer service staff.

This increases brand trustworthiness.

7. Lower Marketing Costs

Compared to traditional methods such as TV advertising and print media, social media marketing is affordable for any business.

Why? It’s because the channel itself is free.

What Are The Main Pillars Of A Right SMM?

So, there are five main pillars of an extraordinary social media marketing campaign. They’re listed right below:

Killer Strategy

Content Publishing

Engagement With Audience

Advertisements

Analysis Of Results

Let’s learn about them each.

A Killer Strategy (is important)

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Here are some of the questions that you can ask before even starting to publish content on your favorite platforms:

Am I doing this for more leads?
More sales?
More awareness?
Better reputation?
Just to engage with the audience?
To gather lots of reviews for future products?

Also, the procedure requires analyzing your demographics and concluding what terraces your target audience is sitting on.

Just for example, if your target audience is below 30, Instagram might be the best option for you.

But if the target audience is below 18, then Tik Tok might be the best choice.

It is important to know that using multiple social media platforms at a single time can be disastrous for your business for you will not be able to focus on one thing and keep hanging among many of the platforms, which will not be able to push more sales, leads, awareness, and credibility.

You need to focus on one network at a time to get the best outcomes possible.

Once you have enough following with one platform, you can go omnichannel.

After choosing the right website, the next thing to be taken into consideration is the nature of the content.

Let’s say you’re using Instagram, and if someone will post a video teaching you how to do proper marketing, you will hardly watch it.

On the flip side, if that video is put on platforms like LinkedIn, there will be many more people engaging with it.

Different social media sites have different nature of content flows. You need to find the nerve before you get started.

It’s significant to determine how many videos, posts, or articles you will be putting out on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

This will help the algorithms understand that you are serious about your content creation, and those algorithms will favor you by showing your posts to more of the people that are likely to be interested in the particular topic.

Also, you’ll need to pick the specific time spots that you will be posting your content on.

You don’t want to post when people are sleeping. No one is going to notice the posts if you do that.

And if no one is going to mark your posts, the algorithms will not push the content too high, thinking that it’s not very likable.

But one thing is clear, you’re going to want to test everything out and see what works best for you.

The way you make your content-consumer feel like a CEO is by appreciating their feedback, liking their comments, responding to their messages, and praising their mentions.

You have to take people’s suggestions and give them what they want.

This will only be possible if you spend time making connections.

After all, a business is only sustainable if it has built a real and strong community.

• Locations: It’s possible to target different cities or countries.
• Interests: You can target people based on their interests (what they like).
• Demographics: You could target people based on their age and gender.
• Lookalike audiences: People who are similar to your existing customers.
• Custom audiences: People who visit your website or like your videos or clicked a specific link.
• Behavior: People who spend money or use Facebook payments or buy digital products.
• Application Users: People who use a specific app.
• Connections: Your fans and followers.

Data Analysis (the game of numbers)

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If your motive was to get more engagement, you’re going to want to look at the average engagement rate.

If it was the reach, you want to check the average reach.

If it was conversions, you need to check average link clicks or signups.
After that, you’ll also investigate the demographics and locations that are loving your content so much.

Try to create content specifically for them in the future.

It’ll work really good.

You see these people saying that Facebook is dead.

Sure, the organic reach has been declining rapidly, but it still has great potential to influence your market as a whole, nevertheless.

There are over 2.4 billion monthly active people using Facebook right now.

That’s more than a quarter of the world’s population. You have so much to do with it.

But how can you succeed when you don’t have much reach?

Simple answer – with Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads are simply amazing. If you’re a beginner, it’s the right time to learn them well.

Here’s how to start:

First, go to business.facebook.com, and then hit register.

Once done, the next thing to do is – hover over to the top menu and go to Facebook Ads Manager.

Next, click on ‘create’ to create a new advertisement. These are the objectives you’ll be meeting while beginning the process:

From traffic and brand awareness to conversions and store traffic. You have it all.

Next, there’s a custom audiences option.

If you already have a list of people with their contact information who bought products or services from you, you can upload a ‘Lookalike’ audience, and then what Facebook is going to do is – it’ll match another 2 million accounts that resonate with your buyers.

This will boost your conversions like crazy for you’ll be getting tons of highly targeted people onboard.

Also, you’re free to create custom audiences.

For example, people who visit your website, your Instagram fans, people who like your page, people who added your product to cart, and so much more. That’s all up to you.

You can easily set up Facebook Pixel to do it. Here’s a guide about Facebook Pixel that you can check out.

Next, there are detailed targeting options where you could include specific interests and behavior of your ideal customers for better targeting.

You do have a choice to narrow down or broaden your audience according to your wishes.

Also, as Instagram is a product of Facebook, you can run the same ads on Instagram as well by choosing placements.

Now, as long as your ad creative and landing pages are optimized, you can expect some good results for sure.

That’s how you win with Facebook in the present situation.

By the way, here are some common Facebook Ads mistakes you should avoid making.

Other than this, if you’re interested in starting a social media marketing agency (SMMA), then you might want to read this post that tells you how to find more clients easily.

Instagram is again a popular beast with over a billion monthly active users.

But a piece of good news with this social site is that you can still grow organically.

Yep! With proper strategies, you can still kill it on there.

Here’s how to make your Instagram marketing work.

#1 – Optimize Your Bio

Optimizing your bio is one of the key things to succeed with IG.

If you don’t give people a reason to follow or consume your content, they’re not going to do it.

As a business or a representative, you need to talk about the benefits that your ideal clients and followers can reap.

Just look at an example below.

#2 – Consistency, Creativity, and Congruence.

The second thing you’ve got to keep in spirit is to post consistently.

But often, consistency leads to compromising with quality and creativity. You don’t want to do that. Instead of posting 10 mediocre posts, it’s better to post 2 super quality posts.

Other than that, keeping congruency is also vital. If you confuse people by posting content with different styles, they’ll get off of your profile and go somewhere else.

Your theme should be the same no matter what you post. Just like an example shown below (profile – Peng Joon).

#3 – Hashtags Still Work

I must say hashtags are not going anywhere anytime soon. 

They still do work very well and if you’re not using them, it’s not good.

But there are some points to keep in mind about hashtags: 

1. Don’t go for saturated ones. Try small and average hashtags. 
2. Never use the same set of hashtags over and over again. It’ll not help.
3. Don’t use more than 20.

Here’s a tool that I use to research hashtags for my clients: Ingramer.

#4 – Build Relationships

I can’t emphasize that enough. Building relationships is the only way to get high. Period.

Bonus: How to generate revenue from Instagram (10 ways).

LinkedIn is no longer a tool for finding jobs. It’s become a huge content platform now.

With over 600 million monthly active users, it’s making a difference. Hence, you want to produce content for LinkedIn.

The organic reach right now is crazy on LinkedIn.

Here are the top 5 content formats that are killing it on LinkedIn.

Twitter has been around for a while now. It became so popular in its partnership with Google.

Currently, there are over 300 million people using it (including me).

For a business, Twitter should be regularly used.

Why?

You can get the answer by reading the 18 statistics about Twitter that will convince you.

Yes, I’m talking about the same visual platform that you’ve stolen a lot of home designing and fashion ideas from.

It’s an extremely persuasive website with over 335 monthly active users that just love using it and do nothing else.

As you’ve been bored reading so much text, I’ve got a video for you now.

Quora, a question and answer website that you have stumbled upon a lot of times searching for something, can drive you a lot of business.

They have over 300 million monthly active users. That’s still a lot of people.

Since I’ve written a step-by-step guide about Quora for marketing, I encourage you to check that out and learn more about how it can help you get more customers and leads.

Turning The Table To You Now

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