Social media marketing

Yes, everyone’s on social media—but how can you leverage that for your business? How can you use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to help you with your Internet marketing campaign? Do you even need online marketing? We’re here to answer all those questions and much more!

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What is social media marketing?

Businesses are increasingly flocking to social media for their advertising needs. There’s a good reason for that.

With half the world officially having access to the Internet just before the start of the year in December 2018, companies’ potential for marketing outreach has never looked better. And with eCommerce taking off, access to international markets is becoming ever more pronounced.

Online marketing lets businesses to tap into new markets. It lets them establish themselves there so that in a few years they have a firm foothold and can sell more goods and services than their competitors.

Added to that, digital marketing has the advantage of being able to target audiences more effectively than traditional advertising. Businesses can do this by carefully studying user experience on social networks and promoting online advertisements that are displayed along with user-generated content, with call-to-actions to their goods and services.

Is social media marketing more important than Google Ads?

Advertising on social networks shouldn’t replace your Google Ads. After all, people use both Google and social media platforms so it’s important to run ads on both Google and social networks. They complement each other.

But it’s also important to note that people spend more time going through their social media feeds than they would on Google’s search engine results pages.

When you compare user experience, you see that people tend to stay on Google for shorter periods of time because they’re trying to find other websites to visit. Whereas on Facebook, people will be staying for longer and they might also visit it when they’re bored and want more content to go through.

Social media strategy

Have a strategy is important. Your business needs to know what it wants, plan to get it, and then execute.

There are several things that your business might need to consider when thinking about running ads on social networks. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend money on social media services if it won‘t have a good rate of investment, now are you?

But don’t worry, we’ll go over all the important factors that contribute to a successful digital marketing campaign.

Audience

Bet you saw this one coming from a hundred miles away. It’s always there in any form of content that you produce. But I mean more than just a simple “know your audience” type thing.

You will want to do things a lot more differently based on who you’re trying to sell to.

If you’re selling to teenagers and young adults, you want to promote your products on Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and TikTok. While we’re at it, consider using memes and social media influencers. And no, don’t generalize them into one or two categories. Learn what they want and need; don’t just assume that they all like avocado toast and spend all their money on the latest iPhone.

If you’re selling to new parents, think about running ads on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Memes would work here too as new parents tend not to be too old for them.

And if you’re targeting someone in their 40s and upwards, Facebook and Instagram are places where you’d want to run your online ads.

As a final note, while some platforms might be unpopular in the United States, this doesn’t mean that it’s true in other countries.

Take WhatsApp. Europeans use WhatsApp a lot because their carrier plans often limit how many SMS text messages they can send. WhatsApp is also popular in South East Asia. WeChat and Sina Weibo are popular in China, a lucrative market for many American businesses.

Niche

Depending on the goods and services you sell, you should favor certain social media networks over others.

If you’re cybersecurity vendor, you should be on Twitter. Twitter is one of the most important channels of communications amongst cybersecurity professionals. You may even consider experimenting with Mastodon, a social media service similar to Twitter that’s decentralized.

If you’ve just created a new fashion line, you’ll want to promote it on Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest first before moving on to other networks. Why? Because those are the platforms most people go to when they want to learn about the latest fashion trends.

If you sell infant clothes, Facebook and Instagram it is for you.

Your niche is critical to where your specific audience can be found. Use it to your advantage.

How users use a social network

This is very important if you want to do well on social media. You can’t possibly hope to be taken seriously on social media if you interact with customers on Reddit like you would on Twitter.

Different social network sites have different rules on etiquette. It’s important to follow these rules. Otherwise, you might find your brand name turned a meme. Not a great position to be in when the Internet is making fun of your brand.

One way you can get a better feel for user experience is by seeing whether the social network is primarily used as a mobile app (Instagram) or if it can be used on all devices.

With messaging apps that support advertising, like Facebook Messenger, you want to make sure you optimize your ads for mobile. Try using AMP links if you can, or otherwise make sure that your links serve up the mobile version of your website and landing pages.

WhatsApp Messenger doesn’t yet support ads, though it might in the future. But the reason I bring it up is that it’s a great example of a social media service that emphasizes mobile over desktop. That’s not to say you WhatsApp doesn’t offer WhatsApp download. You can, but it’s essentially WhatsApp Web—which only works if it can connect to your phone via WiFi.

With Facebook, you’ll find that people write more on the desktop version than on the Facebook mobile app. This is because it’s easier writing more on physical keyboards than by using touchscreen keyboards. On the other hand, the Facebook app means that mobile users are more likely to consume your content because they don‘t have to be sat at home to see it.

Social media influencers

These are popular content makers who have tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of fans. They might be bloggers, vloggers (YouTubers), photographers (Instagrammers), or do just about anything that has people addicted to the content that they create.

Depending on your audience and niche, you can work with several YouTube influencers, Instagram influencers and bloggers to help you promote your brand.

Take Dbrand, for example. For the last couple of years, they’ve been sponsoring many YouTube channels covering consumer technology to promote their smartphone and tablet skins. And it’s been successful. I imagine they’ve had many customers because of these YouTube sponsorships.

Dbrand picked YouTube to run most of their ads because many tech enthusiasts like watching videos by their favorite YouTubers. They knew their niche was on the online video site and went all.

Sponsoring Instagram influencers is very lucrative too if you’re doing Instagram marketing. The reason for that is if you sponsor Instagrammers and also run Instagram ads, you’re increasing your marketing outreach.

The reason marketing on Instagram is great is that you’ve got everyone from teenagers to adults to the elderly on it. Just do an Instagram search and see for yourself the content diversity they have there.

Social media management

The way your business interacts with its audience and the wider online community is very important.

Traditionally, big brands have had entire departments dedicated to doing public relations. They would have people meeting with reporters and journalists to help create and foster a certain image with the public.

It’s no different today.

Now, a lot of businesses have community managers and social media managers. These are employees and marketing contractors that work promote brand awareness, introduce new goods and services, and engage with customers on social media sites.

And with more and more businesses relying on social media marketing, there are many social media jobs that need filling.

Reddit and Twitter are the primary go to social media sites to do community management. It makes for a great part of your overall long-term social media campaign.

Email marketing

No, it’s not dead. Email marketing is still widely practised.

It’s important to have a long email list so you can keep in touch with existing customers. By keeping in touch, you increase the chance they’ll want to do business with you again.

An existing customer is likely to visit your website again and again. This, in turn, will not only help your search engine optimization, which we went in-depth about in this blog and this other blog, but it’ll also make them likely to want to buy from you again.

Think about it. By always appearing in their email inboxes, you’re reminding them you’re still in business. You’re reminding them you’re happy to help them find more great products and services that will help improve their lives.

There have been many case studies done showing that email marketing often leads to high returns on investment (ROI) rates for businesses.

In closing

It’s important to promote your business on social media. Thanks to technology, your targeted ads, along with help from popular influencers, is enough to propel your brand to greatness and beyond.

You should be selective about where you’d like to run your ads. Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit or Snapchat—when you know your audience and consider your niche, it’s easy to pick the best social networking platform for you.

Regardless of where you’re operating from—we’re operating out Houston, Texas, ourselves—using social media apps and emailing marketing to your advantage can only do you lots of good.

So go right at it and good luck!