Why using Social Media?

By using social media for marketing allows small and medium businesses to reach further for potential customers. The customers are networking with different brands via social media, thus in order to sustain their attention an excellent social media marketing plan needs to be put in place. Marketing and social media are supplementing together and if applied appropriate could lead extraordinary success to the business.

If you want to engage with your customers and also find out what their opinion is about your product or service and how they perceive your brand, Social Media is the ideal way to achieve this and also create a network with thousands of people (Brown, 2012).

What is actually Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing (SMM), is online marketing which by using different social media networks allows businesses or individual to communicate with others and represent their goals. There are different ways of communicating your goals using SMM such as: blogs, vlogs, images or pictures with marketing determination, also paid Social Media Ads .

Before even considering using SMM, you should think of your goals and what exactly want to achieve through SMM. Also very important aspect of SMM is to know who is your target audience, otherwise you may reach people not interested in your product or service, therefore you want be able to acquire new customers. The message you want to send via SMM should be clear and not dubious and ambiguous.

What are your Goals?

Using social media marketing can help with achieving a number of goals, such as:

• Growing website traffic
• Creating Conversions
• Showing the existence of your Brand
• Building your brand identity and networking
• Creating good communication and relationship with targeted audience

Is it enough just to address goals, but not to measure your Return of Investment (ROI)?

Most of the small businesses tend to forget about that important measurement, which means that these businesses don’t know whether they benefit from the particular SMM or not. According to (Cohn, 2013) as high as 70% of the online businesses have ignored ROI. Okay, I agree with this, but is ROI really for you? Do not focus too much on ROI until you know that this is exactly the right measure for your chosen social marketing (Evans & Mckee, 2010).

Social Media Marketing Tips!

Now, I am going to list some of the most common tips when it comes to SMM, which will keep you focused on your Social Media Campaign. You might say that your strategy implemented couple of years ago is still working – I doubt it!!! The pace the internet is changing is enormous. Some of my tips are as followed:

• Engage with social media participants: influencers and bloggers/vloggers

Probably, you have heard of the fact that many brands use such influences in order to acquire more customers. Nowadays most of the people are influenced by family, friends or one of these (famous) influencer, hence this method is used for advertising goods or services. It is also seen as more productive and trustworthy rather than the usual paid Ads.

For an example if you are selling cakes, try to get in touch with somebody (influencer) who is followed by thousands of people in social media( YouTube, Instagram, Facebook…) and ask them to promote your product. The way it works is exactly the same when you see a celebrity advertising different products. People assume that the celebrities are using these products, so they should be worth it.

• Live Streaming

Live stream become very popular in recent year and more in particular in 2016. The live stream could give the target audience customers or businesses a view behind the scenes. In this way you could build brand loyalty or acquire new customers, but why not potential investors as well. This could be as easy as just getting an Apple or Android app. This way people can see what is happening just by one click on their phone or tablet even if they are on the go.

• Social Media Advertising

When using social media and seen ads is the most popular way that the social media users find out about new business, new product, discounted products or services and so on.  Using social media as an advertising platform gives you an advantage due to the fact that most people are social media users. It is not only young people who use social media, nowadays different age groups are users of different social media platforms.

According to (eMarketer, 2016) almost half of the worlds digital buyers (45%) are using social media and stated that social media activities influence their behaviour whether to buy or not. Also as a shopping behaviour influencers are considered the discounts.

• Special Deals and Discounts

When giving a special deals and discounts to your followers you can sustain even larger audiences and generate new customers while also being able to take a better measure of conversions. There is even a possibility for building loyalty with customer.

• Keep an eye on your competitors

It is imperative to keep an eye on your rivalries due to the fact that they may share data for key research, where to accumulate links about the industry you are in, and also other social media marketing tricks and tips.

You can always spot a good tip, which works for your competitors and adjust it to suit and serve your needs, but try and do your best. Social Media Marketing is considered as one of the most popular tools – of course if you get to use it properly.

How to measure socal

But just using social media for marketing is not easy as it sound as it has number of Disadvantages and Risks.

In order to keep your SMM in a good pace it takes time, a lot of effort and not least cost. The person in charge should know the companies ins and outs, new and developing products, which means that the SMM is not entirely free due to the fact that somebody has to be paid to do it. Also whatever information about a service or product you post should be updated regularly, otherwise it could end up overwritten by other posts.

In general Social Media includes several risks such as negative comments from rivalries, unsatisfied customers or angry employees. Often these comments can not be removed and could affect the business as they can become viral very quickly and we all know the consequences of Word of Mouth – WOM.

Follow my tips for your SMM and you will definitely get the benefit of it.

Good Luck. 

 

References:

Agrawal, A., 2015, Social Media Marketing: 5 Tips to Get It Right in 2016.  [Online]

Available at: http://www.inc.com/aj-agrawal/social-media-marketing-5-tips-to-get-it-right-in-2016.html (Accessed  March 29th 2016).

eMarketer, 2016, How Social Media Influences Shopping Behaviour. [Online]

Available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Social-Media-Influences-Shopping-Behavior/1013718 (Accessed  March 29th 2016).

Cohn, M., 2013, How to Measure Social Media ROI – Is It Even Possible?  [Online]

Available at: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-measure-social-media-roi-it-even-possible (Accessed Martch 03th 2016).

Sandilands, T.,  2016, Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing. [Online]

Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-social-media-marketing-21890.html (Accessed April 4th 2016).

 

Brown, I., 2012. Working the Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Businesses. 2 ed. s.l.:British Computer Society .

Evans, D. &. M. J., 2010. Social Media Marketing. The Next Generation of Business Engagement.. 1st ed. s.l.:Sybex Inc.