Say you’ve recently completed a business degree – such as an accredited MBA online, for example – and you’re now in the process of building your own brand.
Creating a comprehensive brand strategy is essential, but have you considered the importance of social media marketing to build, cultivate, and develop your brand’s online presence?
With over 4.59 billion social media users worldwide, if you’re a business owner who’s not harnessing the power of social media marketing to reach your target customer audience and grow your brand awareness, you’re doing it wrong.
Here’s how to get it right.
Social Media Marketing: What is It?
To understand social media marketing (SMM), we first need to understand social media. So, what is social media, and why is it so important for businesses, marketing, and branding?
Understanding Social Media
With humble origins in the early 2000s, the concept of social media erupted on the digital scene with the first digital platform of its kind – Myspace, which allowed online users to create their very own online profiles and begin to cultivate and create social presences online.
From there, social media platforms took the world by storm, with Facebook quickly taking the lead as one of the most used social media platforms in cyberspace. Instagram was another newcomer on the scene and has since facilitated the easy sharing of digital images.
Today, we have become far more savvy with our social media usage, and we’re now using it for more than just posting photos of our breakfast. Businesses in particular have learned the importance of tapping into social media to not only build their online presence but also, to enhance audience reach and brand awareness – giving rise to social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing: An Essential Marketing Tool
Now that we know how to use social media platforms to their full potential, businesses have caught on to how essential social media marketing is to growing their brands. Utilizing social media to advertise and promote products and business offerings is advantageous for many reasons.
As well as being user-friendly, and for the most part, free to utilize (virtually anyone can set up a social media profile free of charge, at any time, from any location), social media marketing has the potential to reach a wide range of global online users with relative ease.
The best part? Businesses can use social media marketing to target specific niche audiences using algorithms that allow them to display ads only to the most relevant customers. How do social media algorithms work?
Essentially, they tap into and analyze the content social media users engage with most, to identify their interests. Once identified, businesses can target their SMM campaigns to audiences who are most likely to engage with their marketing messages.
Harnessing the Power of SMM: How to Master Your Social Media Marketing Strategies
So, we’ve come to understand social media, and why it’s essential for businesses to use it in their marketing campaigns. Now, here are the steps to mastering a social media marketing (SMM) campaign:
Step 1: Set Up Your Social Media Profiles
The first step to creating a social media marketing campaign for your business is, of course, to establish your business’s social media profiles.
With so many social media platforms available online, it’s important to create a social media presence across each of these, and also, to ensure your brand voice remains consistent across each of these platforms so that it resonates with your target audience.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
By undertaking market research, you will come to understand who your target audience is. Identifying this niche is a crucial step to running successful SMM campaigns, and targeting them to the right customers.
Step 3: Analyze Social Media Algorithms
Analyzing social media algorithms is critical if you want your marketing campaigns to reach the right people. This is where data analysis tools come in. Using these can help you understand and identify your target audience.
Online users who interact with social media content that relates to your business offering, for instance, are more likely to engage with your SMM campaigns.
Step 4: Launch Your SMM Campaigns
Finally, it’s time to launch your campaigns. Targeted social media advertising is key here. Some businesses find that utilizing strategies such as user-generated content (UGC) is most effective for reaching target audiences, and in creating SMM campaigns that resonate with their customers.