Social Media Marketing – What Does It Include?

You’ve all heard about Social Media Marketing (SMM), but do you all know what does it imply for the customers who want this sort of digital marketing service? What does Social Media Marketing mean?

,,Earning attention and engagement on social channels is vastly more difficult than ever before, but if you have the right targets, the right message, and the right amplifiers, there’s still extraordinary potential” said Rand Fishkin on SparkToro. For having a clear understanding from the very beginning, we only say that Social Media Marketing deals with promoting certain products or services by using social media channels.

What Are The Main Social Media Channels To Promote Your Products And Services On?

Guess what? There are no “main social media channels”, generally speaking, but there are some media channels more adequate for certain products or services.

Also, the favorite social media channels of the users differ from country to country and from age to age. Ask a 30 to 45 year old internet user from Europe and he’she will tell you his/her main social media channels are Facebook, Instagram/Pinterest and Linked In, in this order.  If moving to America, you’ll be surprised to find out that the favorite social media channels for the same age are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

If asking a 20 year old girl, she’ll answer that Snapchat is one of her favorites, along with other social media platforms you have never heard about, as they are just in phase Beta or just developing.

Anyway, you get the point: in order to find out what social media channels to use in order to promote products and services across internet, first you have to do your homework: find out what social media channels are used in that country or area by the targeted audience. Only after that you can establish the social media strategy…

Social Media Marketing – The Strategy

The steps in order to create a proper social media marketing strategy are the following:

• first of all, you have to establish the proper social media channels to promote your products on; this is done by studying the consumers’ behavior on that market and the way they interact with ads on the social media channels. You have to study the behavior of the targeted group when on social media channels – you might find out that, for people of a certain age within the targeted users, one social media channel is more important than others
• second of all, you have to adapt your content on the social media channels identified to the targeted group; you’ll never show inadequate content or content which present no or less interest to the targeted audience.
• third of all, you have to set the posting frequency and (if possible) the budget for the Ads, if any. Suppose you have no budget at all, then you have to come up with engaging content, posted at certain times of the day, when you found out your targeted audience interacts more with your posts.  If having a budget, then you have to set up everything else – what posts should be promoted, what budget for each post, what kind of promotion to be run and so on.

Steps To Be Taken During The Social Media Marketing Process

1. Establishing the goals to be reached through social media marketing 

This is the first step: establishing the goals. In this stage you pretty much try and answer questions like “what kind of audience would I like to attract?”. “what segments of the audience am I going to focus on?”, “what is the expected engagement?”, and so on. Of course, last, but not least, “how many leads is this strategy going to bring?”. It’s better for you to answer this question not by guessing or enthusiastic expectations, but by experience.

2. Creating the adequate SMM strategy

The adequate SMM strategy is based on the goals you’ve established in the first phase of this process.  The goals tell you about the type of content, the dimension of the budget and about the sort of marketing to apply in order to create the best SMM strategy for that case.

3. A/B testing and optimizing the SMM campaigns

Once up and running, the SMM campaigns should be A/B tested, as the first trials are not always the best. Besides, the SMM campaigns should be optimized based on the results analytics.

4. Segmenting and targeting the audiences

Suppose you get some pretty good results, say more than 1000 viewers of your content published on social media platforms. It’s just a number, so don’t compare it to your actual results.

Now, you’d like to segment this audience – some of the viewers clicked on a certain areas of your page, some clicked or viewed some pages of your website and some even went directly to the products or services page after reaching the promoted content.

Of course, you’d like to know which one went where and you’d like to retarget those who seemed to be interested in the first place. This is done by remarketing means.

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