RESOURCE GUIDE
Social Media Marketing
Reach more people and increase awareness.
NETWORKING YOUR BUSINESS EFFICIENTLY
A Complete Guide To Social Media Marketing
Social media is an easy way to reach your audience at a low cost. With almost 4.6 billion active social media users, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of this digital marketing platform.
Plus, it’s a great way to engage with your customers and prospects. You can use it as a platform for customer service and support or to promote your business in general.
Benefits Of Utilizing Social Media Marketing
The use of social media platforms is a double-edged sword. While you have the opportunity to engage with your audience in different ways, you constantly face these challenges:
-Consumers have short attention spans
-Saturated and highly competitive market
-Users have tools to block out unsolicited ads, messages, posts, etc.
Because of the challenges mentioned above, all our social media campaigns at LOJO Marketing adhere to the principles of inbound marketing. Our goal is to provide valuable content to the right audience at the right time.
For more details on how we can help your business in social media marketing, call us today at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message.
Inbound marketing in social media also means engaging with your audience in the most natural way possible. That’s why we use strategies to help you humanize your brand and avoid robot-like, spammy, and intrusive communications.
Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing
You don’t need to be on every social media platform to increase your website traffic, revenue, brand awareness, and recognition.
By conducting an in-depth audience and competitive analysis, our social media managers can help you reach out to your consumers and maintain your current clients engaged with your brand.
Continue reading below to learn more about the benefits of our audience-centric social media marketing strategies.
1. Establish your brand as an industry or thought leader.
With the advent of interactive media, today’s consumers want to be informed rather than sold to.
Consequently, social media is an excellent platform to provide your audience with insights and valuable information that can help you position your brand as a thought or industry leader.
2. Humanize your brand.
People only respond to people—it’s thats simple. For this reason, our social media managers focus on creating strategies that promote pleasant interactions between your brand and your audience. Oftentimes, we follow the rule of thirds when it comes to social media content:
-one-third interacting with the audience,
-one-third sharing valuable news and tips, and
-one-third promoting your products or services.
3. Boost brand awareness.
If you don’t exist on social media and other popular online platforms, chances are you don’t exist in the minds of your target audience.
If you’re not out there, they won’t see you.
As a result, you need to use them to increase your brand awareness. That includes your customers’ ability to recall and recognize your brand under different conditions.
4. Improve website traffic.
Sharing valuable, interesting, and engaging content on social media is one effective way to increase your website traffic and collect relevant data about your visitors or potential customers.
5. Generate quality leads.
Each social media platform has unique advertising formats to reflect the users’ online and shopping behavior. This allows brands like yours to collect quality leads, such as people likely to convert into actual buyers.
6. Increase revenue.
Think of your social media platforms as a critical part of your sales funnel, a journey, or a process. This is where a new contact becomes an actual customer.
7. Segment audience.
Whether you’re a small business or an established brand, you can benefit from social media’s ability to segment audiences. For example, B2B companies generally fare well on LinkedIn, millennials like to “hang out” on Facebook, and Gen Z largely favors TikTok and other platforms that focus on “micro-videos.”
8. Gain valuable customer and marketplace insights.
Social media channels also allow brands to monitor their customers’ interests, opinions, interactions, and other online behaviors. They serve as a valuable research tool that will help you understand your audience better.
This way, you can make the necessary adjustments and improvements to your products and services. Because if you’re not listening to your customers and taking the time to understand their needs, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Social Media Platform Options
With more than 2 billion active users , Facebook is not just the most popular social network in the world. This allows consumers to find out more about their brands.
Facebook also allows you to turn your customer base into a community. Through this, members are more likely to engage with you and are more receptive to your content (or even your sales pitch, provided that it’s not intrusive).
Instagram, which Facebook acquired for around $1 billion in 2012, is another powerful social media platform where brands can sell and promote their products and services. As a highly visual platform, you need stunning photos and videos to succeed on Instagram.
But you also need to take into account that the vast majority of users view your content through their mobile. That’s why your content should be optimized for smaller screens.
While artistic niches tend to flourish on Instagram, brands across different industries can also excel. That’s if they provided their audience with engaging and interesting visual content to share with their followers.
As a popular microblogging social media, you can interact with your audience by posting real-time information. You can also take advantage of its business analytics tools that will provide you with these data: impressions, engagement rates, top tweets and mentions, top followers, video completion rates, etc.
Youtube
Using this video-sharing platform has two major advantages. First, users are more likely to convert because they are more intentional with their searches than on other platforms. And finally, the product placement is easier if you partner with the right influencers.
TikTok
This platform primarily caters to Gen Z, who generally prefers micro-video content, which is excellent for improving brand awareness and recognition.
Contrary to popular belief, TikTok is not just about brand awareness. With the right strategy, you can also use this platform to improve every stage of the sales funnel.
According to a recent study, up to 92% of users have taken action after watching a micro-video on this platform.
As a professional networking channel with around 134.5 million daily users, LinkedIn is an excellent platform to position yourself as a thought leader, find top talent, and promote your brand. You can also join industry-specific groups to boost your brand recognition and reputation.
As a visual-centric platform, Pinterest allows users to pin digital bulletin boards. They can then save and display the content that interests them.
For brands like you, you can take advantage of this feature by using “Rich Pins.” This feature allows you to add information such as product details and location maps to your “pins,” which can be in the form of images, videos, quotes, etc.
Social Media Marketing For Expansion
Social media can help your brand connect and engage with your audience at every stage of the sales funnel. That’s why you don’t want to skimp on these platforms if you plan to expand your market reach, increase your revenue, or rebrand your business.
But how can social media marketing help you expand your business?
Social media marketing is an essential part of the modern marketing landscape. And if you’re planning to expand your brand’s market reach, then you need to optimize your social media presence.
Here are some benefits you’ll enjoy from social media marketing:
-It can drive traffic to your website or landing page.
-You can conduct a competitive analysis to see your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
-It can help you conduct in-depth customer research to improve your product and service.
-Social media leads to high ROI when you post engaging content with easy-to-spot call-to-action buttons.
-Social media can help position your business as an industry or thought leader.
-It can help you identify leads or people who are likely to convert into actual customers.
-Social media platforms can help you humanize your brand.
How to use social media for expansion?
At LOJO Marketing, our social media experts follow a step-by-step procedure to help you expand your business by boosting brand awareness and recognition, revenue, number of followers, and other key metrics.
1. Start with a plan.
The first step is to identify your goals, which can allow you to determine the right platforms and strategies you have to adapt. Remember, without clear objectives, there’s no way you can measure your ROI or success of your social media marketing campaign.
Your plan should also include the following elements:
-Competitive analysis
-Social media audit
-Creation of social media calendar
2. Research more about your audience.
There are many ways to identify and learn more about your audience, and these are:
-Your current data and analytics
-Surveys
-Competitive analysis to know about your direct competitors’ target audience
-Social “listening” and research (e.g., monitor feedback, comments and engagements)
-Interviews
3. Decide which platforms to use.
Through research, you can learn where your target audiences like to hang out and their preferred formats (e.g., micro-videos, easy-to-digest blogs, stunning images and catchy quotes).
4. Build relationships
Social media is about creating genuine relationships with your audience and providing them with relevant, engaging, and interesting content. That’s why successful campaigns are neither overly “salesy” nor intrusive since today’s consumers want to be informed and not sold to.
5. Use social commerce.
Did you know that social commerce, a process that allows brands to sell their products and services directly from social channels, is a $5.2 trillion industry worldwide in 2021? With this, it’s easy for businesses to sell their products and services directly from social channels.
6. Mix up your content formats.
When trying to reach your audience, it can be tempting just to keep throwing content at the wall and see what sticks. But if you want your content to really resonate with your target audience, it’s important to know what they like.
That’s why you need to use different types of content to engage with your target audience. This includes micro-videos, GIFs, quotes, images, infographics, cheat sheets, and text-based content.
7. Use social media tools.
There are a number of tools out there that can help you create, track, and monitor your content. Some of the most popular include analytics, engagement management, content curation, and automation.
8. Monitor to refine your performance.
Your social media marketing strategy is not a static process. That’s why you must monitor your performance and tweak, change and improve it when applicable.
But this is easy to conduct with the use of the analytics and management tools mentioned above. This will allow you to make quick adjustments based on what’s working for them and what isn’t so that you can give them exactly what they want.
Selecting The Right Social Media Marketing Platform
While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the go-to social media platforms, you don’t have to limit yourself to these popular channels. With around
200 social media networks, brands have more options nowadays in reaching a broader or more niche audience.
That’s, of course, depending on what marketing strategy they want to apply.
Here, we explain how you choose the right social media platforms to focus your marketing efforts, time, and resources on channels that provide the highest ROI.
Consider your brand.
Your brand personality is a branding component that humanizes your business. It’s one of the most critical factors in determining the ideal social media platforms you should use.
The same is true for your brand story or the cohesive narrative encompassing the emotions your company creates or prefers.
Your business type also determines what social networks work best for you. For instance, highly visual brands like those in graphic design, fashion, and real estate should explore Instagram, DeviantArt, and other image-centric platforms.
Take a look at your audience.
Go where your audience hangs out–it’s that simple. This means that no matter how popular Facebook and Instagram are, they won’t matter if your target customers are not on these channels.
Meanwhile, certain social media channels appeal to specific demographics. For instance, Gen Z makes up the largest user base on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, whereas on Facebook, it’s Gen Z and Millennials.
Conduct a competitive analysis.
The goal is to research your direct and indirect competitors to learn about their marketing strategies and identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can then fill in the gap in the market to give you a competitive edge in your industry.
Consider your overall marketing goals.
Social media is just one of the venues where you can engage with your audience, position yourself as a thought leader, and convert leads into actual customers. So make sure you choose platforms that align with your overall marketing strategy and goals.
For example, Twitter and Facebook should be on top of your priority list if one of your goals is to improve customer support. These two social media platforms are the best tools for interacting with customers in real time.
Understand the platforms' "personality".
Each social media channel has its unique way of communication and “personality.” For instance, LinkedIn’s professional “ambiance” makes it ideal for B2B companies.
On the other hand, Instagram and Snapchat’s visual-centric nature makes them great for fashion and design-related brands. Just take a look at how celebrities have used these platforms to promote their fashion lines.
Consider your resources.
You don’t have to use dozens of social media platforms to generate leads or boost your brand awareness. Instead, the goal is to choose a number you can easily manage and nurture long-term based on your staff, budget, and other resources.
LOJO's Social Media Marketing Strategy
At LOJO Marketing, our social media strategy delivers high ROI and conversion rates. This is why we conduct in-depth market and audience research and competitive analysis and adhere to best practices.
At LOJO Marketing, we follow this step-by-step guideline when creating a social media strategy:
-Establish your SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely)
-Audit your current social presence
-Identify your target audience
-Identify key success metrics (e.g., reach, brand mention, conversion rate, total shares, sediment, etc.)
-Create engaging content
-Invest in social media management tools
-Track, analyze and optimize your content
To beef up your social media marketing strategy, consider complementing it with advertising. This is ideal if you want to boost your sales, expand your market reach, and increase your brand awareness in a shorter matter of time.
Aside from quicker results, social media advertising also delivers a more targeted audience. This is especially reflected on Facebook, which uses outside data sources that offer marketers additional targeting options.
What are the benefits of social media advertising?
If you’re anticipating growth, it’s ideal to invest in social media advertising. That’s because it delivers one of the highest ROIs among other platforms. Continue reading below to learn more about how you can benefit from LOJO Marketing’s social media ads.
Low-Cost Advertising
Most social media platforms follow the pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-view (PPV) model, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. In short, you only pay when someone takes a desired action.
High-Conversion Rates.
Social media advertising delivers impressive conversion rates thanks to a highly targeted audience. But you can only achieve this if your ad copy or video is based on in-depth market and audience research.
Increased Brand Awareness.
Social media is an excellent platform to beef up your brand awareness, allowing your audience to recall and recognize your business under different conditions. That’s why investing in brand awareness campaigns is a NECESSITY in today’s cutthroat, highly-saturated market.
Improved Brand Loyalty.
Social media is a great platform where you can share customer testimonials and case studies demonstrating the value you bring to your customers’ lives. It’s also the perfect channel to improve brand loyalty and nurture relationships with existing clients.
In-Depth Analytics.
In today’s world, having access to relevant and actionable data gives you a competitive edge. Plus, powerful analytics tools can help you tailor your future campaigns better and optimize live campaigns to deliver high ROI.
At LOJO, we believe in social media as a tool for connecting with our customers and building our brand. We’re not just talking about posting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter.
We’re talking about a holistic approach to social media marketing. This includes an analysis of your audience, an understanding of how they use social media, and creating relevant and engaging content.
For more details on how we can help your business in digital marketing, call us today at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message.
