SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing is a powerful medium for businesses, professionals, and organizations of all sizes to find and connect with regular or potential customers/users. Social marketers thus create corporate Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, Instagram, Pinterest, and other major social networks.

However, not all of these professionals have clear objectives and defined strategies, nor a thorough understanding of how social media interacts with consumers to increase brand awareness, drive up sales and profits, and create brand loyalty. This is why we strongly recommend that you understand social media training and look at the Social Media Marketing Courses to understand how to do this successfully.

Social Media Marketing: what it is and how it works

Knowing the ABC of social media marketing, understanding precisely what social media marketing does, how it works, and how much it requires in terms of time, human resources, and budget, is the basic premise for those who want to do social marketing professionally and effectively. Let us, therefore, provide some clarity by starting with a comprehensive definition of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing: definition

Social media marketing or SMM (also known as social network marketing, social marketing, and by extension, Facebook marketing, LinkedIn marketing, etc.) is a branch of web marketing applied to social networks. This discipline exploits the ability of social media and web-social applications (apps) to generate interaction (engagement) and sharing (social sharing) in order to increase the visibility and notoriety of: a brand, a brand, a product or service, a freelancer, or a public figure.

It includes activities such as promoting/selling particular goods and services (or oneself: Personal Branding), generating new business contacts (leads), and increasing traffic to a brand’s official website.

For promotional purposes, it is good to integrate a social media marketing strategy with other forms of online promotion, such as: Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Social Media Advertising (SMA) or Social Ads, and Public digital relationships or Digital Pr. Social media marketing, together with social customer service, social selling and others, is considered a component of Social Business, therefore it also includes PPC marketing activities.

How Social Media Marketing Works

Businesses and Organizations create, or connect to, “networks of individuals” (communities) that share interests and values ??expressed by the Company on social networks. These users are offered relevant content in various formats (text, images, video, etc.) in order to stimulate discussions about the brand and with it.

Users/customers, with their “likes”, “comments”, “shares”, activate online word of mouth by individually involving their network (friends, fans, followers) in the discussion.

Users/customers, with their ‘likes,’ ‘comments,’ and ‘shares,’ activate online word-of-mouth by individually involving their network (friends, fans, followers) in the discussion.

This greatly increases the possibility that a percentage of these, in turn, end up becoming a fan/follower of the Company/Organization or brand.

Social marketing or social media marketing?

Sometimes on blogs, podcast programs, and other content, social marketing is mistakenly used as a synonym for social media marketing.
In reality, social marketing is a discipline popular in the early 1970s thanks to Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman, in which the ‘product’ to be promoted is not a good or service but is ‘human behavior.’ In fact, the objective of a social advertising campaign is, for example, to encourage people to protect the environment.

What are the benefits of Social Media Marketing?

Having understood what social media marketing is, let us now see what the main benefits of this discipline are:

• Improving customer satisfaction;
• Increased customer loyalty (brand loyalty);
• Improvement of customer service;
• Increasing business contacts (sales leads) and sales;
• Increase in web traffic to the site or blog;
• Improved site positioning (ranking) on search engines;
• Increased brand awareness;
• Connecting and developing interactive relationships with one’s target audience;
• Development of a reputation as an expert or leader in their field (brand authority).

Training through internships as a social media manager allows you to confront yourself in a real-life context and face some manageable difficulties, such as:

• The need for more resources: social platforms are varied and different. Consequently, the various forms of content (text, video, podcasts, webinars, etc.) to be published and shared must be adapted to the specificities of each of them. Similarly, a social media marketing campaign cannot be launched and left on its own. It, too, as in the first case, requires time and human resources dedicated to it. A certain relevance then, especially for many micro-enterprises and SMEs, is the availability of financial resources, which, however, can be partly met by implementing Influencer Marketing strategies;
• The nature of social media: a negative post by a customer, or worse, mishandled, can go viral and thus seriously damage a brand’s reputation.

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Why invest in Social Media Marketing?

• Low costs : Creating profiles on social media is free as well as creating and managing social networking campaigns with your own social media management.
• High ROI (return on investment) from advertising investments : The ROI generated by social media advertising is the highest among the various forms of paid advertising. Furthermore, social ads are a type of advertising that allows high target profiling and personalization: the “ads” will only be shown to users who are really interested in the products/services promoted by the advertiser.
• High conversion rate (CR) or conversion rate: more than 51% of social media marketers say that developing meaningful relationships with customers has a positive impact on sales results (source bluefountainmedia).
• Improvement of Customer Insights: unlike content shared through private channels such as e-mail, instant messaging tools and apps, and therefore difficult to measure (Dark Social), various social media marketing tools allow precise monitoring of activities on various social profiles corporate. From the analysis of the numerous data collected (insight) using tools such as Google Analytics, it is possible to obtain important information on the “sentiment” towards the brand, as well as on the demographic composition, interests, behaviors and needs of customers.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing

Why is social media marketing important? Social networks have become a virtual meeting place for people, where:

• exchange ideas on a wide variety of topics,
• read reviews on products and services they want to buy,
• seek information on places they wish to go, such as restaurants or hotels, for example.
• you can even work with social.

Once upon a time, when these social platforms didn’t exist yet, this exchange of news took place in bars or other social gathering spaces. Today, however, people spend much more time on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn and it is there that they often “meet” and talk to each other. What does this mean? This means that companies and professionals should work more and more on the ability to intercept and involve users in online social discussions , because in these online environments it is possible to make them become their customers.

People’s opinions are increasingly influenced by conversations on the internet and this is a fact to take into account if you sell a product on the web, if you do online marketing, or even if you just want to become important and relevant as an influencer.

Why does this trend affect us? Who is a business man, or an online marketer, to reach his audience – his potential customers – must become good at getting noticed where he can find them, that is on social networks. He must be present and be able to direct the opinions of those who have to make decisions and he must do it online, because that is where purchasing decisions are made more and more frequently.

Being skilled on social media is also important for those looking for new professional opportunities to:

• find work,
• be desired by companies,
• have career opportunities and increasing earnings.

In order to be interesting and attractive to companies, one should also become good at handling the software, tools and platforms through which one can reach prospects interested in a product or service on social media.

How to do social media marketing?

The rules for successful social media marketing

There are various ways in which a company/organization can market on social. All social media marketing activities are carried out to be incisive, and however, they can only do with the implementation of an effective social strategy. But how to define and set up a successful social media marketing strategy? As with any digital marketing strategy, this is developed through the definition of a social media marketing plan that consists of a number of precise steps:

Conducting a social media marketing audit

In this first step, the audit activity is aimed at assessing the digital assets (blog, site, app, etc.) one has, also in relation to the competition, in order to detect on each social channel what works and what does not work.

• Which social platforms is the brand currently active on?
• Which social networks bring the most value?
• What kind of content do competitors post?
• What is the Tone of Voice they have chosen?
• How much traffic does each social channel bring to the website?
• What types of content are posted on the different channels? How frequently?
• Are we getting results from our investment in social media advertising?

Defining social media marketing objectives

Having analyzed the digital assets, audience, and competition, the next step in setting an effective social media strategy is to define the goals. It results in one hopes to achieve (leads, customer loyalty, increased sales, and brand awareness?). These goals must be aligned with the overall communication and marketing strategy so that social media enables the achievement of business goals. When setting goals to ensure that these are valid, it is good to follow the S.M.A.R.T. method (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, depending on the time) first used by Drucker in 1954 in his book ‘The Practice of Management.’

Identifying the target audience

To be effective, one needs to be clear about who one’s target audience is for the message one wants to convey on social media. Developing profiles of the typical customer (buyer personas) is essential for the development of a social media marketing strategy. Collecting and analyzing data on the web or conducting surveys allows the marketer to achieve high profiling of the typical customer. Once the audience has been defined by means of Listening activities, they can understand on which social platforms the customer (actual or potential) is present.

How to do social media monitoring?

Listening can be done with the help of some social media monitoring tools for marketing automation or manually. Let’s take a brief look at how to do Listening on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn:

• Make a list of keywords that are meaningful to you and indicate your product/service, brand, or need that they can fulfill.
• Enter your chosen keyword in the social search field and wait for the results. In the box of your choice, you can choose between Main Results, People, Pages, Places, Groups, Apps, and Events.
• Enter the data on the comments obtained (date, author, influence, sentiment) in an excel file and archive it. You will then have an overview of what is being said online about your chosen brand or topic.

Creating a social media content strategy

Content is very important to create engagement and achieve marketing goals. With this in mind, it is essential to follow a strategic approach focused on creating and distribution of relevant and valuable content (content marketing) aimed at a clearly defined audience.

For the communication strategy on the various social media to be effective, however, it will be good to plan the management of this content (content strategy). The choice of content and images to be published according to the social, the choice of the Tone of voice with which one wants to present the network, finding a synthesis in the drafting of a social media marketing editorial plan, The definition of days, times of publication, topics, keywords or links are instead the characterizing elements of another important tool: the social media marketing calendar.

For the planning of the editorial plan it may be useful to draw up a content matrix or to use the Pareto 80/20 rule. In the latter case, 80% of the posts will have to be used to inform, train or entertain your audience, while the remaining 20% ??will be used to promote the brand. As far as publication frequency is concerned, given that quality beats quantity, 2 or 3 weekly contents are generally sufficient for an SME. Here are some of the most popular types of content:

• Infographics
• Articles
• Images
• Video
• eBook
• Interviews
• Institutional/corporate news
• Appointments and events
• Assistance (customer care)

Paying attention to Influencers

Research on Twitter shows that 49% of consumers rely on the advice of influencers when making purchasing decisions. Finding those with a large following on social media for advice on the products/services you sell is, therefore, very important. One way a business can gain visibility with social influencers is through the sharing system suggested by Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute, Social Media 4-1-1. For every six pieces of content shared via social media, four must be content relevant to your target audience but written by influencers; 1 must be original content created by us; 1 piece of content must be about selling (a coupon, for example).

To engage influencers, I invite you to consider a possible affiliate program to propose to those in your niche. Affiliate marketing, in fact, involves paying a commission to an intermediary (in this case, the influencer) for each sale or lead he manages to generate among his audience. At Digital Coach, we have a dedicated Affiliate Marketing course to learn all the secrets of this subject.

Choice of social media marketing platform

A social media marketing strategy must also be planned, taking into account the market in which the company operates (B2B or B2C) and the purchase decision phase (social consumer decision journey) in which the customer possibly can be found (research, consideration, decision). Knowing then the differences between the platforms and identifying the best ones to support corporate marketing objectives is crucial. Let us, therefore, take a brief look at the most popular social networks, not focusing on ‘what social media are’ but in relation to the marketing activities that can be implemented with them.

1.Facebook: with almost 2.1 billion users and a growth rate of 15% (year-on-year), it is one of the largest social networks worldwide. With this social platform, one can precisely identify one’s target audience, create engagement from Facebook Groups, and easily implement real advertising campaigns as an alternative to AdWords. The possibility of integrating content in various formats into Facebook is endless, and recently, it is even become possible to integrate it with Instagram content by clicking on a special button. Users of MailChimp, an email marketing software, can then natively create Facebook ads from their accounts.

Facebook social media marketing has many arrows in its bow (Facebook media, Facebook business manager, Facebook live, Facebook connect, Facebook Stories, Facebook news feed ads, and Facebook video ads). Let us briefly look at the features of some of them:

• Facebook Ads: advertising on Facebook achieves a 30 percent higher conversion rate than on other social platforms and allows a 50 percent decrease in costs per conversion;
• Facebook Places: This is Facebook’s geo-localization service that allows the user to add information about where he is and, based on this, find places, information of interest to him by category (restaurants, shops, entertainment, etc.), and friends who are in his vicinity. The presence of ‘cards’ or Boxes that link to corporate fan pages makes it a valuable tool for social media marketing activities (link to Facebook Places);
• Facebook Media: this is a tool to teach users who have created fan pages on Facebook how to manage them effectively. To access Facebook media, log on to media.fb.com;
• Facebook Bluetooth Beacons: Social provides devices that can be applied to a physical area of your business (beacons) that allow you to send marketing communications (promotional offers, etc.) via smartphone to potential customers passing in your vicinity. To request beacons, you have to register on this waiting list;
• Facebook Business Manager: is a free and easy-to-use tool for advertising and marketing on Facebook. From its dashboard, you can monitor the performance of anything related to your business on Facebook.

Another special feature Facebook offers is the possibility of effective advertising campaigns aimed at a relatively small audience through Dark Marketing activities. Via a Chrome app (Power Editor), it is possible to create ‘Dark Posts’ or ‘Dark Posts.’ In short, Facebook allows advertisers to create sponsored posts that do not appear on the user’s timeline but are accessible to anyone with a direct link or directly by clicking on an ad.

2. Instagram: a photo-sharing application for iPhone, Android, and Windows platforms. At the heart of social media marketing are Instagram stories. They are a way to share photos and videos with followers that will no longer be visible after 24 hours. Instagram lends itself very well to social web marketing: people post pictures and videos, tag friends, insert hashtags, and click on content shared by others, making Instagram the social network with the highest engagement rate.

On Instagram, it is also possible to post a new type of post called a ‘shoppable post,’ which includes a special tag linking the objects in the photo directly to the corresponding e-commerce. Instagram is now testing a new ‘nametags’ function similar to Snapchat’s Snapcodes or Messenger codes, making acquiring Instagram followers easier. Its ‘visual’ features make this social suitable for b2b social media marketing (travel business, e-commerce, etc.).

3.LinkedIn is one of the best professional social platforms to connect with one’s network of collaborators (Linkedin groups) and potential future employers. The social platform allows users to import contacts and integrates services like SlideShare and Pulse. Today, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals in Italy and is considered the most effective B2B social media marketing and lead generation platform. Like other social platforms, managing advertisements (Linkedin ads) on LinkedIn is also possible. The platform allows companies and publishers to run video ad campaigns natively and include videos within their company pages. Using the implemented Linkedin Tracking pixel, it is then possible to measure the number of leads, sign-ups, website visits, and other actions generated by video ads.

4.Snapchat is a mobile application that allows users to send photos and videos to friends. Snapchat stories (montages of photos and videos shared for no more than 24 hours) are an excellent engagement tool. With the release of the new version of the app, it will soon also be possible to share Snapchat stories on Facebook and Twitter. Snapchat is testing new in-app e-commerce options through its Snap store place within the Discover platform, which in the future could lead to collaborations with companies of all kinds? If your products are aimed at a very young audience, marketing on Snapchat is definitely the right choice.

5.Pinterest is a popular photo-sharing service that allows anyone to create collections and more. 93% of its users use it to plan purchases or search for product information. Marketing activities are possible thanks to Pinterest Ads and buyable pins. Pinterest is continuing to grow among SMEs. Indeed, memberships in its Pinterest Propel ad program are up 50% this year. As 81% of its 150 million monthly active users are women, topics such as interior design, decoration, cooking, and clothing are performing very well.

6. Reddit is the social network where the community decides what will have more relevance and what to give more visibility to. Reddit has a subreddit (board) for almost every category. The growth of this social network in Italy is due to 2 factors: the AMAs (ask me anything) format and the peculiarities of the voting system. Marketing activities are possible thanks to Reddit ads. However, one must pay close attention to the vast number of comments received, so constant attention is required.

7. Telegram is a messaging application that allows you to chat with contacts and organize public and private groups, with a series of functions dedicated to visual content. You can add images, emojis, documents, files, and links to messages.

8. Tumblr is a microblogging platform with social networking features. It is widely used by fashion brands, bloggers, and designers to publish highly curated content. People spend more time on this platform than on Facebook, which makes Tumblr a good place to publish posts and advertisements.

9. Twitter is another fantastic service that allows users to send posts of 280 characters quickly through ‘Tweets.’ These are characterized by the presence of the hashtag (a keyword preceded by the hash symbol #) in the text. Twitter marketing is often used by companies to maintain contact with their customers, promote their brands, products or services, and to obtain information from consumers.

10. WhatsApp is one of the most widely used instant messaging applications in the world due to its ease of use and quality of service. In 2017 WhatsApp crossed the 1 billion users per day milestone, equaling Facebook. The app offers the possibility to interact with contacts through conversations, and today one can post Snapchat-style status updates, photos, and temporary videos. With the release this year of WhatsApp Business, and the integration soon of the ability to make payments, the brand officially enters one-to-one marketing.

11. Disqus started as a comment hosting service for websites and blogs, this platform is now a real social network where users can initiate debates or participate in existing ones. For management of comments, simply login to the platform with the same account used for social via the ‘share’ button. You can then take the discussion to your preferred social network.

12. YouTube is a network where users post video blogs, video ads, and videos of various genres. For marketers, the ideal medium is to share the content of medium to long duration.

Measuring and testing

It is necessary to constantly analyze the social media marketing strategy implemented to see which was effective and which was not. As part of a social media marketing strategy, it must be decided which metrics or KPIs to use to check whether the set goals have been achieved. Some metrics to be considered to measure the success of a social media marketing strategy are the following:

• Cost per click (CPA)
• Conversion Rate
• Number of followers
• Brand Mention
• Total shares
• Impressions
• Comments and engagement

Social Media Marketing Strategies

Social media are dynamic by nature and, for this reason, are characterized by communication trends and methods that can vary over time (social media trends). Knowing these trends can prove crucial in choosing the most direct and effective social media marketing strategies

Below is a brief description of the social media marketing strategies that, it seems, will most characterize this 2020.

1.Using TikTok for your social media marketing strategy: the social network is growing rapidly and is a must for those who want to reach users under 30 years of age, which currently represents 66% of the channel’s users.

2.Social media wellness becomes key to creating engagement among users: people are becoming more aware use of social networks and the impact they have on mental health. That is why even the platforms themselves are committed to making the user experience pleasant and unharmful. If you notice changes in engagement, don’t panic, but observe your competitors, and if they experience the same reduction, you can rest assured. People are increasingly committed to reducing their time on social media and using the time they spend constructively.

3.Fake news will be limited: indeed, this is very good news and a very positive trend. The fact that fake news is declining does not mean that it does not still remain a problem. For social media marketers, it means that the user will weigh very heavily on what you say about your company and your products. So, please, maximum transparency!

4.Tightened security: another growing trend strongly related to Social Media Marketing is user security. The recent scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is likely to further increase this trend. Privacy protection measures for social network users will have to be increasingly suitable for combating hacking, identity theft, phishing, and various other security threats.

5.A more effective strategy with AR and VR: technology is making huge strides, and you need to be able to adapt to this. Augmented reality and virtual reality will improve not only your strategy but also the experience of your users.

6.Increased use of artificial intelligence: the use of artificial intelligence (chatbots and virtual assistants) will increasingly enable marketers to interact with consumers in real-time and in a personalized manner. Facebook is preparing to relaunch a virtual assistant that will be able to offer suggestions to users and answer all their queries via Facebook Messenger chat. According to Gartner, a multinational company and world leader in strategic consulting, research, and analysis in the field of Information Technology (IT), 20 percent of business content could be generated this year by machines similar to artificial intelligence.

7.Refocus strategy to engage Generation Z: the future generation is increasingly tech-savvy, requiring innovation and creativity from marketers. The coming years will be years of challenges to find new ways to entertain and engage young people by studying them carefully and understanding their needs.

8.Influencer Marketing: Social Media Influencers are able to generate 11 times more ROI than any other digital marketing strategy. It is no coincidence that 94% of social media marketers claim to have achieved excellent results through their collaboration and consider them an integral part of their marketing strategy.

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