Five core pillars for effective social media marketing

Social media marketing can be defined as using social media websites and networks to promote or market a company’s product or service. Traditionally, marketing was mainly done through word of mouth or advertisements placed in newspapers and journals.

Today, with so many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube, marketing has revolutionized. Most companies and businesses are using these social media platforms to reach their audiences to build their brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. But an effective social media marketing campaign can be difficult to achieve.

With so many businesses and companies competing to get more customers to purchase their products or services, having an excellent social media marketing strategy can go a long way in ensuring that you keep and stay ahead of your competitors.

Effective social media marketing should have the following core pillars.

Five core pillars for effective social media marketing

1. Strategy

The first step in creating an effective social media marketing campaign is by having a good strategy in place. Don’t just wake up one morning and start publishing something on your social media handles.

Think about your strategy and what you hope to achieve at the end of the campaign. For example, some of the critical questions that you should ask yourself include;

• What are your goals?
• Which social media platform you want to use to publish your content.
• Type of content you want to share on your preferred social media platform.

2. Planning and publishing

After you have laid down your strategy, the next step should be to plan how frequently you want to publish your content. Having a consistent presence on social media allows your brand or service to be seen and discovered by potential customers.

Imagine this, almost three billion people use social media daily. These numbers can be turned into potential customers by keeping and maintaining your product or service on social media platforms.

While coming up with content for publishing, such as blog posts, images, or videos, it is essential to create content that will appeal to your audience. Also, keep in mind that the frequency of publishing and the right timing is equally as important.

3. Listening and engagement

Your strategy is in place, and you have published some content on your social media platforms, so what is next? Once you start targeting various audiences through the content that you post on social media platforms, the chances are that your brand or service will begin not only to get recognized, but people will start talking about it as well.

It is good to listen and engage the audiences, having conversations around your brand at this stage. You can take the initiative to reply to comments on your social media posts or messages that could be sent directly to you.

Follow through and monitor all social media conversations as this will help you know what the people think about your brand. If you cannot scan and respond to social media comments on your brand, you can search marketing agency and engage its services to manage your social media platforms.

4. Analytics

As your brand grows, you will want to know if your social media marketing campaign has been successful. The success of any campaign is based on the number of people you have reached since its conception. How many positive comments you have received about your brand and the number of people who have used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts.

5. Advertising

In social media marketing, you only get to target the people following your posts on your social media platforms. However, with your business’s growth, you can go ahead and incorporate social media advertising alongside social media marketing.

With social media advertising, you get to reach a wider audience, and you can also create your target audiences based on their interests, behaviors, and demographics.

Conclusion

Whether your brand is new or established, social media marketing gives you the platform to bring your product or service closer to the people. It also allows you to monitor and analyze consumer behavior, thus allowing you to design your brand based on various audience preferences.