What is social media marketing?
Social media platforms provide a powerful means for people to connect and share. By actively engaging on these platforms, your company can effectively raise brand awareness, foster relationships with your audience, enhance customer service, drive sales, and accomplish various other business objectives.
How do you get started with social media marketing?
Once you have selected a platform, it’s time to set up your page and make sure it is optimized with your branding, current contact information, business hours, and keywords. Next, connect your platform to your Constant Contact account to start creating and scheduling content! Remember to use a content calendar – this worksheet is a great place to start. Let us know any questions in the comments!
What are the benefits of social media marketing?
It's important to understand how social media marketing can benefit your business. The first step in gaining more customers is making sure they know about your brand.
Social media is a great way to spread the word, grow your brand awareness, and show people what makes your company unique. Continue to market your business on social media and take advantage of all the benefits:
- Gain better insights into your target audience – Social media platforms collect data on users, so you can see which demographics are interested in your posts. You can also interact with your audience and learn more about what they care about and like to see.
- Provide customer service – Customers expect businesses to be available on social media, so you can provide customer service through platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct message. You can also use social media automation to be available to your customers even when you're not online.
- Drive traffic to your website or landing page – While not every social media post should be about sales, you can always encourage your followers to click on links that lead to your website. You can share product information, helpful tips, and snippets of your blog content to drive traffic to your site.
- Rank higher on search engines – By integrating keywords into your social media profiles, you can improve your ranking on search engines like Google. This is important for both your website and your social media presence.
- Increase sales – As you raise awareness of your brand and drive more social media users to your website, you increase your chances of making sales and gaining loyal customers. You can track your sales conversions by creating landing pages for specific campaigns and monitoring them through Google Analytics.
- Improve cost-effectiveness – Organic marketing on social media is free, so you don't have to pay for what you post on your business pages. However, you can also invest in paid social media marketing, which involves purchasing ads on the platform. When you target your audience effectively, paid ads can have a good return on investment.
Once you get started, how do you define your goals?
The first step in measuring social media effectiveness is to establish clear goals. When you define your goals, it will help you determine the metrics you need to track. Think about what you are trying to achieve with your social media marketing. Do you want to increase brand visibility, drive website traffic, generate leads, or boost sales?
When setting these goals, it's important to make them SMART. They should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
For example, if you want to increase your social media following by 10% within the next quarter, set a specific time frame and track the success of your social media campaign using data directly related to that goal. To achieve this, you could run a social media contest on Instagram. This will help increase your reach and attract new followers, ultimately helping you reach your goal.
📣 Have you tried out Campaign Builder yet? Build a multi-channel campaign, including social media marketing, in a matter of moments!
Try focusing on one or two major goals at a time, this way you’ll be able to tackle multiple different efforts. Once you learn how to incorporate your goals into your overall marketing plan, you can break them down into actionable steps or measurable objectives that are specifically aimed at achieving those goals.
Social media marketing is an effective way for businesses to reach new people and build strong relationships with their customers. Social media is always changing and evolving, which can make it tricky for business owners to figure out how to use it to their advantage. But with a smart strategy, you can find success with social media marketing.
Have you run any social media campaigns in the past? Tell us about your experience in the comments and share your wisdom with your fellow community members!
