Social media marketing first started with publishing where businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, increase sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to share content. These days, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. Some ways in which businesses use social media are, monitoring social media conversations and analyzing their reach, views, likes, follows, engagement, and sales.
Social media marketing is simply digital marketing that involves connecting with your audience to market your brand and boost sales for your business or company. Social media marketing activities involve publishing radically different social actions such as sharing short messages/texts, videos, media links, joining events/groups. It also involves the use of paid social media advertising to drive audience engagement, build brand awareness and increase sales.
We’ve created this guide to help you understand the relevance of social media marketing and how to develop a compelling social media marketing plan for your business this year.
The major social media platforms in 2021 are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat
Why is social media marketing relevant in 2021?
While it may seem overwhelming, the importance of social media cannot be overstated. It’s so important that 97% of marketers and 78% of salespeople are using social media for their business. Plus, its benefits extend far beyond increasing sales. However, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of social media marketing. 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their business. That’s an alarming number. Even more concerning is that an additional 25% don’t plan to use social media in the future either.
How Will Social Media Boost Your Business Online
1. Makes it easy to promote your business
2. Help you increase your clients reach
3. Promotes brand recognition and awareness
4. Increase traffic to your website
5. Build your conversions
6. Enhance communication and engagement with target audiences
7. It is mostly FREE!
Do you now see the relevance of using social media marketing to boost your brand online and drive sales? Are you ready to get started with marketing on social media? Here are a few things to consider before you kick-start your social media marketing
1. Start With a Strategic Goal
Social media strategy planning starts with identifying your brand’s goal. Maybe, you want to use social media to increase your brand awareness, generate engagement around your brand, or even drive website traffic and sales this year. Either way, your goals will define your content strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns. Additionally, the goals you set for your business must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound). Starting a social media marketing campaign without a strategy goal in mind is like going to visiting a new city without a map—you might have fun, but probably get lost.
Second, research to know which social media platforms your competitors are and where they have their largest reach/following. Your competitors can provide valuable data for keyword research and other social media marketing insight. Start by creating accounts on the same platforms to beat the competition, but always do it better! You can also figure out which social media platforms you want to focus on.
Aside from the major social media platforms, there are also social messaging platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat you can explore. Always start with a few platforms that you think your target audience is rather than to be on all platforms.
Here are quick questions to ask yourself when defining your social media marketing goals:
Why do I want my brand on social media?
What am I hoping to achieve with my brand through social media campaigns?
Who is my realistic target audience?
Where does my target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
What message do I want to send to your audience using social media marketing?
Your business type should inform and drive your social media marketing strategy.
Last, think about what type of content you want to share to attract your target audience best? Will they be images, videos, or links? Is it going to be informational, educational, or entertaining? With time, you can always change your strategy according to how your social media posts perform by tracking the data using analytical tools.
2. Plan and Create (curate) compelling content
By now, you have managed to figure out your strategy goal through research and planning. But how about your content strategy? The next thing to consider after setting out your goal is to develop your content strategy with great, compelling, and innovative ideas.
Publishing content to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on your personal Facebook or Instagram profile. But in this case, you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, your content must be informative, educational, or entertaining depending on the goal you set for yourself in the beginning. Examples of content you can consider are stories, images, short-lived videos, and showing your audience the human behind the posts they see. To ensure you are maximizing your reach, always publish content at the right time and frequency.
There are a variety of social media scheduling tools that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred time. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.
3. Listen and Interact With Your Audience
As your business and social media following begins to grow, conversations about your brand will also increase if you strategise well. One key to being successful in social media is to listen and interact with your audience. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly. Always find time to respond and address their concerns. This will show you are reliable and they can trust you for a quick response to your products.
So what is social listening? Social listening involves tracking conversations around your brand and in your industry and using the information to review your marketing strategies. Social listening and interacting will help you understand your audience better, where they like to hang out, and what they like to talk about. It is simply finding out what people are saying about you. If you’re not using social listening, you’re leaving a lot of great insights on the table.
Social listening and social monitoring are however two different things. Social listening involves what your audience does and social monitoring is about why they do what they do.
People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse. There are several social media listening tools out there that you can use, explore and find the one that best suits you and your budget.
4. Track your analytics
Along the way, you will want to know how your social media campaign is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media compared to months back? How much positive feedbacks do you get? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts? The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information.
To get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use a wide range of social media analytics tools. For example, Google Analytics can be used to measure your social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned.
Metrics you can measure with analytical tools
1. Reach
The number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts.
2. Clicks
Refers to the number of clicks on your post or account. Tracking clicks per campaign are essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourage people to buy.
3. Impressions
The total number of times all of your posts have been seen.
4. Engagement
This refers to the total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions and sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact. It can also be measured by the number of times your post was liked, saved or commented on.
5. Hashtag performance
What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand?
6. Saved
This refers to the number of unique users that saved your post.
7. Profile visits
Times your profile was viewed.
8. Following
The number of accounts that started following you.
Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
5. Advertising
When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, an area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than those who are following you. These platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviours, and more.
When you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you can consider using a social media advertising tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads.
CONTACT SEO DIGITAL NOW TO HELP YOU DEVELOP A COMPELLING SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
At SEO Digital Ghana, we use social media marketing to build your brand and boost your sales. Get all the benefits of social media with SEO Digital Ghana Now!
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing or internet advertising is a big deal these days. Internet usage has doubled over the past decade. This shift has massively affected how people purchase products, services and interact with businesses.
So, what is digital marketing? It is simply the use of the internet, emails, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach the right consumers. All these forms of marketing help introduce people to your company and convince them to buy your products. One key element of digital marketing is that, it requires the use of innovative approaches to attract and understand your potential customers as compared to traditional marketing.
Digital Marketing Assets and Strategies That Can Boost Your Brand
Digital assets and strategies are vital in today’s market and if you don’t keep up, you will be left behind. Let’s take a look at what your business needs to maximise its marketing plan and start reaping profits.
Digital Marketing Assets
Assets are values owned by a group or company. Marketing items used to project your business and get potential clients attracted to buy your products are termed Digital Assets. Are you using the available digital assets you have at your disposal to boost your marketing? If you’re unsure, don’t worry, here are few examples:
Strategies for digital marketing is also constantly evolving. Some strategies businesses use are:
1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC advertising is any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
2. Paid Search Advertising
Google, Bing and Yahoo allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to target potential clients who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With SEO, you can rank pages or blog posts on your site organically and not have to pay directly for every click, but this usually takes quite a bit of time and effort.
4. Paid Social Media Advertising
Social media platforms like Twitter allow you to run ads on their site to increase your business’s visibility with audiences.
5. Social Media Marketing
This is free and organic however, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort but in the long run, can deliver much cheaper results.
6. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is the art and science of improving your online user experience. Most of the time, businesses use CRO to get more conversions (leads, chats, calls, sales, etc.) out of their existing website traffic.
7. Content Marketing
This is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc.) to build brand visibility, drive clicks or sales.
8. Native Advertising
Ever get to the bottom of an article and see a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising and mostly fall under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks.
9. Email Marketing
This form of online marketing is the oldest and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.
10. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.
How Powerful is Digital Marketing Now?
With technology continually evolving, so do the behaviours of consumers. As a result, we have seen how traditional forms of advertising has continued to decline. We have also watched how digital advertising have grown from strength to strength. Some reasons for this include, an increase in the way we access information, news and an increased activity on digital devices. In addition, digital marketing is affordable, which allows any sized business with any size budget to target specific markets effectively. Today, just having a website is no longer enough to engage your audience and convert them to new customers. It is now important to consider implementing a complete digital plan that works across multiple channels.
With this in mind, here are 7 reasons why you need digital marketing for your business:
1. Increase reach
With the growth of the internet, more people are spending their time online. Over 7.7 billion people use the internet across the globe. It has become an integral part of everyday life to conduct searches, check social media, and purchase products online. Your customers are online, which highlights the importance of digital marketing. They’re browsing the web looking for your products or services. If they can’t find your services/products because you’re not online, you risk losing those leads to your competitors.
To drive the best results for your business, you need to build your online presence. This will help you reach more audience that want your products or services.
2. More Advanced Analytics
With digital marketing you know the following about your ads and audience:
Whether they actually saw it. With traditional marketing like TV and radio ads, you don’t even know that much.
What they interacted with
If they liked it
If they lingered on it
What they viewed
If they shared it with a friend
Did it prompt another action
If it led to a sale
You also learn much more about the people interacting with your ad:
Who’s most interested in your ads
What are they like
What makes them more likely to take an action
Who is easiest to convert
Who spends more
What do they do online
Gives you their demographics
What terms do they use to find you online
Which websites do they visit that lead them to yours
All of this easy to with free analytics software like Google Analytics. You can gain even more insight with paid tools. In addition, you can use what you learn to cut costs where you aren’t seeing an ROI and increase efforts where you get the best results.
3. Keep up with your competitors
Online marketing is highly competitive and your competitors have already taken advantage of it. They’ve created social profiles, adapted their website for SEO, and run paid advertisements to reach new leads. This reason in itself is one of the reasons why you should use digital marketing. If you want your business to compete with others, you have to do what your competitors are doing and even more. By neglecting digital marketing, you’re already falling behind your competition.
Your competitors are gaining traffic that could be yours if you’re also investing in digital marketing. Customers online won’t know that your business is an option and will automatically choose a competitor. You must invest in digital marketing to get leads to consider your business as an option.
4. Target the right audience
The ability to target the right audience is one of the most obvious reasons why digital marketing is important. Imagine being able to market directly to people who have an interest in your products or services. You have the capability to directly reach leads interested in your business.
With digital marketing, you can target your audience more precisely than traditional methods. You can input important information about your audience and use that information to shape your marketing campaigns. It makes it easy for you to reach the right people. When you better target your audience, you drive better results with your campaign and reach more leads.
5. You can monitor and optimise your campaigns for better results
The importance of digital marketing is that you can easily track and monitor your campaigns. When you invest time and money into your campaigns, you want to know that they are working. Internet marketing makes it easy for you to track your campaigns, which allows you to adapt and drive better results.
It can be challenging using traditional methods to know the results of your campaign. If you run a TV ad, you may have to ask every person that comes into the store about what brought them to your business. It would be a very time-consuming effort that could annoy people who visit your business. You don’t need to worry about bothering your audience with online ads. Every campaign you run is easily trackable to see if it is driving valuable results for your business. In addition, metrics such as impressions, clicks, views, comments, conversions, and more can be analysed.
When you track your campaign’s performance, it’s easier to fix it and adapt to changes. With traditional advertising campaign, you typically can’t make changes until the campaign is over. It only benefits the next campaign you run, which can feel like you wasted money on the previous campaign. Whereas with online ads, you can see if they are successful or need improvement. If they need improvement, you can make immediate changes and implement them at any point during your campaign. In addition, online marketing helps you spend your budget more wisely to get more out of your campaigns.
6. Best return on your investment (ROI)
If you want to know the importance of digital media, look at the results it drives for businesses. Marketing strategies online have awesome return on investment (ROI). When you invest in these methods, you’ll get more out of them. For example, email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing method. Every $1 spent, you have the potential to earn a whopping 4400% in return. This is a great opportunity for you to grow and earn a profit from your marketing efforts.
Internet marketing is also cost-effective and hence, leaves room for a great ROI. It doesn’t cost much to run a social media ad campaign, compared to certain traditional methods, and this gives businesses an opportunity to grow.
7. Easy to Scale & Adapt
For small businesses, it becomes very clear when you see how easy it is to scale and adapt as your business grows. Example, with social media campaigns, you can choose a daily budget and know how much it will cost without having to renegotiate an ad spot on TV. As you continue to convert that traffic, you just increase your daily spend and revenues with it. If you got a massive order from a customer and need to scale back to avoid getting backlogged, it’s just as easy. The power of digital marketing lies in the fact that, you can get instant results and analyze data fast to reduce wasted ad spend.
Digital Marketing Strategy
At SEO Digital, we recommend a professional online plan to raise awareness of your business and engage with prospective customers. Hence, strong digital marketing strategy should consist of the following elements:
1. Website
Build a functional, professional and easy to navigate website. Include a blog on your site to update and inform your customers of any news in your industry. Also, consider inbuilt functionality to streamline office processes and make the customer experience better.
2. Search Engine Optimisation – (SEO)
Your website needs to include high quality, relevant content about your business and services. A number of SEO techniques such as high quality content, and keyword research can all help with your online presence. Keep this up to date and integrate it with a website measurement tool such as Google Analytics to improve your chances of being found online. Additionally, using strong quality content and relevant keywords on your website can improve your organic search results and make you visible to people.
4. Mobile responsiveness
If your website is difficult to read, the chances are prospective customers won’t make an enquiry. Make sure your website is optimised for mobile devices and creates a pleasant user experience.
5. Social media
The development of social media platforms will grow your online audience, and assist with online marketing. Social Media allows you to speak directly with your customer base to provide valuable information and build trust digitally to to increase your audience.
6. Online Advertising
Consider using various online advertising streams to increase your brand awareness. Common online advertising strategies such as Google AdWords allow you to target specific demographics and set your budget to suit your business. Online advertising is a highly effective way to add impact to your business and brand.
7. Nurturing your leads
Your digital strategies need to engage your customers to get them to take the next step and make a purchase. You need to have clear ‘call to action’ strategies built in to your digital platforms and make it easy for the customer to take that next step.
CONTACT US NOW FOR A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY
Digital marketing is becoming more complex, as we develop new ways of effectively reaching clients and driving revenues online. Your digital marketing strategy and assets are essential in driving business success. Contact SEO Digital today on info@seoghana.com or +233 50 664 3847 if you would like to review your business’ online marketing to increase your client base and profits.
This article has been prepared with the understanding that will allow you to build a foundation to serve your brand, your customers and helps achieve your business goals through the proper understanding of social media marketing. Bulleted are practical tools that would help you achieve success in your career as a social media marketer.
It’s important to listen to what your target audience is saying
Your social media marketing efforts will be way more effective if you listen more than you talk. Try and understand what your target audience is saying online, join in their discussions to get to know their views and truly feel what’s important to them. These insights will help you create relevant content that is engaging and will allow you to spark conversations that they will want to participate in.
Have a speciality and don’t be a jack of all trades
It’s always better to be great at one thing than be just about average in everything. A content marketing and social media strategy that is focused on one thing is known to have a better chance at success than a broader strategy that attempts to focus on everything all at once.
Quality is better than quantity
This is the case in real life as well. Quality is always better to have than quantity. On a social media set up, it is better to have 500 fans who share, read and interact with your content, rather than 1.5 million fans who connect with you just once and then disappear.
Success on social media doesn’t happen overnight
The process of seeing success on social media happens over time and is not an overnight thing. You need to prepared to commit to the long haul if you want to see lasting results in your campaign.
Focus on creating content that sells itself
Relevant content that is engaging and sticky and interests users will work on its own to be shared, commented on, liked and retweeted, by fans and followers. You won’t really have to do much after you create your content to propagate it. If it is valuable enough, your fans will do the needful and share it on their Facebook and Twitter pages, on their blogs and more. This discussion and sharing of your content allow search engines like Google to locate it in keyword searches, thereby offering an SEO perspective o your efforts too. This could snowball into more and more ways for your target audience to find you and interact with you online.
Spend time finding the right people to interact with
When you target the correct audience, they are more likely to interact with your set of products and services. There are certain online influencers who you need to locate, who have their own set of loyal followers. Targeting these influencers means acquiring access to their set of followers and widening your follower base too.
How much effort do you need to put while choosing a domain name for your business? Is it that important? Well, the answer is definitely a big yes. The domain name can make or break you. It is the key element of your website. Let’s see why it is that much important?
It is the first impression: First impression is the last impression. Url is the first thing your users will see. A good and impressive website name makes a long lasting and positive impression.
It highly affects SEO: While (EMD) exact match domains are no longer a need but having targeted keyword is still in demand. It helps in SEO ranking.
It improves brand popularity: The right domain increases brand recognition.
Now the question is how to choose a good web name?
Easy over generic: Don’t forget, your domain name is how users and visitors will remember, find and share your business on the web. The site name is the foundation of your online presence and brand.
Instead of having a new web name, it is better to go with an already existing domain. The existing site will definitely have high authority as compared to a new one. It will help in ranking good in the search engines. You can book the desired domain using several tools available like .in domain drop catch for India or if you are looking for the global market you can try .com drop catch.
Easy to type: If I ask you to provide a list of 5 websites that comes first in your mind, your answer may be Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo etc. Do you know why? Because these are easy to pronounce and type. Easy to type domain name saves users from mistyping and leads them to some other website.
Never use numbers and hyphens: As I told you domain name should be easy to type and pronounce. Well, numbers and hyphens both make the domain name difficult. For example, let’s imagine Facebook. What if it had a hyphen in between Face and book (Face-book). Not good, right? So, never use hyphens and numbers while choosing a domain.
Last but not the least, always choose the right domain extension. If your targeted audience is country specific that means if you are targeting Indian customers only, go with .in extension.
These are some of the points one should consider while choosing a perfect domain name.