Social Media Marketing: Advancing to the top of the Marketing Chain

What do you understand by the term Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of marketing carried out on the Internet through various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. With the introduction of these social media sites, life has become easy for businessmen, Entrepreneurs, corporates and every single person trying to market his/its product(s) or service(s), to efficiently and conveniently advertise. They can create awareness and gain responses for the same. Social Media Marketing has gained an upper edge in the present times over other marketing methods. This is because the internet has become a need and requirement for anything and everything on day to day basis. The only catch is how well can you do it?

Using social media can help every kind of business to expand their reach to more customers and attract mass attention from public and consumers. They can be probable customers for tomorrow. Customers interact with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.

Social Media Marketing basically enables you to cover primary activities of marketing your business. It can be done through various ingredients of media like images, videos, sound, written content, etc. It gives you a perfect receipe to introduce and grow your business with less cost and high returns. In layman terms, social media can be explained as:

• Social – can be termed as interaction on interpersonal as well as on mass level
• Media – can be termed as a channel for the interaction.

How to engage people using Social Media as a Marketing tool?

There are a couple of approaches that you can follow for user engagement:

Passive Approach – Social media can be a useful source of market information and customer voice. Blogs, content communities and forums are nowadays common mediums to share reviews and recommendations of brands, products and services. Hence, Social media has become a convenient and inexpensive source of intelligence which can to a great extent help the marketers to identify problems and opportunities. They can work on them and put it to the best use to grow your business.

Active Approach – Social media can actively assist in public relations and direct marketing. It can be directly used as a communication channel to target and tap specific audiences using social media and as customer engagement tool. Using customer influencers (for example popular bloggers) can be a very efficient and cost-effective method to launch new products or services

Engagement

An engagement, in a social web context, portrays customers and stakeholders as participants rather than viewers. Anyone and everyone is allowed to share their views, ideas, opinions and suggestions along the business’s path to market their product, when it comes to social media in marketing.

Initiating a Social Media Campaign

You should consider your business goals and resources before you plan on creating a social media campaign. Once you have evaluated and understood the goals, you can create a social media marketing plan and brainstorm about your goals:

• What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
• Who is the target audience you want to make an impression on?
• Where would expect to tap your target audience and how will the social media they use can be of the best use for you?
• What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
• You must have the answers to all these questions in order to execute an effective campaign.

Social media marketing can help achieve business goals, such as:

• Website traffic
• Conversions
• Brand awareness
• Forming a brand identity and developing a positive brand association
• Communicating and interacting with target audiences.

Only by establishing your goals can you measure your social media ROI.

Whether you are running a small, local operation, or heading a global, enterprise-level effort, your customers are online. They are interacting in social channels with their friends, colleagues, and other brands in search of information, recommendations, and entertainment. If your company is not around to answer, a competitor will be. In doing so, your competitor will quite likely take away the customer at hand, along with anyone else listening.

Do share our post if you think it has enlightened you about social media marketing and has helped you with a better understanding of it. Feel free to post your queries and suggestions and we will be happy to attend and discuss them.

We will be back with some of the most commonly used techniques for social media marketing in our next article. These techniques will give you an idea as to how you can effectively carry out social media marketing for your business.