What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is when you use social medias to promote and sell a product to your targeted customers. It is one of the most effective ways of marketing as it can spread information faster than ever before. People could find things and stay updated with social medias rather than hearing it through the news. As most of the people are on social medias today, it is really a no-brainer to not be on social medias to market your brands or products.
Social media marketing is one the marketing tactics that you can try to market your products.
Social media marketing vs traditional marketing
Traditional marketing is where we see advertisement in newspapers, billboards, TV ads, and other print advertising such as leaflets, brochures and many more. Although it does works to reach out to a certain amount of people, but it certainly has its limitation.
Advertising in newspaper or on a billboard may be costly where you have to break the bank to get your brand on them. Leaflets and brochures on the other hand may be effective if you want to target a specific area or your local community only.
So, are there better ways than this?
Social media platforms were created to connect people from all around the world together under these platforms itself. And anyone from different parts of the world can stay connected. Hence, marketing on social media can provide a global outreach for your brands and products. That mean sits outreach capacity is tremendously higher than that of traditional methods.
Now, wouldn’t you want to market on social media?
Although, traditional marketing is still being used today and normally, it’s being used by those big brands and large corporation. Because of why? The cost that they need to bear to be on those traditional platforms is something that they can afford.
For small businesses, it is recommended to start of with social media marketing first.
Here’s an idea of what the cost of reaching out to 1,000 audiences looks like between traditional marketing and social media/digital marketing created by Pixel Studios.
How social media marketing works?
Marketing in social medias can be done in two ways - paid or free advertising.
Paid advertising is where you advertise digitally using the social media ads platform. Even though it still requires you to spend money 💸💸, but it won’t be as high as advertising on a billboard. Plus, it can be more effective as it has the power to target the right people. Which means, your ads would only be shown to the ones that really matters to you and your business, the ones that will buy from you. These ads platforms include Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads, Pinterest Ads, and many others.
To know more about digital advertising, we have covered it here.
Another way of marketing on social media is where it costs you nothing but your effort and your time. It’s really simple actually. You just need to create an account on the social medias that are out there and start posting on them. Start posting on Facebook or Instagram, tweet on Twitter, create videos on YouTube or TikTok, or post a picture on Pinterest. Eventually, people would notice these posts and you would have expanded your reach. If they like the content you’re creating and fancy your brand, they would give you a like, retweet, subscribe, and even follow you. Thus, you would have created a proper following and loyal fans. From hereon then, it’s much easier to promote what you’re selling and increases the chances to get more sales.
Facebook is the main social platform where everyone has an account with. Brands can create a Facebook page to establish presence in the Facebook community. It can act as an intermediate platform between your brand and the target customers. They could probably ask questions through your page and you can engage with them, creating that needed relationship.
It is also a platform where you can post whatever it is relating to your business to make yourself known. And if your audience like what you are posting, they can share it so that it reaches to many more people.
Apart from Facebook, people also are on Twitter. Hence, your brand should too. Have presence on it and start tweeting about promotion, offers, discounts or even upcoming products. You can share news of what your business is currently doing. Above all, you can engage with your target customers. Up to a point where you have established a decent number of followers, it’s easy to disseminate relevant information about your business. And in return, those followers would eventually retweet for more people to know about it.
Instagram is also another platform that is perfect for you to market your brand. It is very simple and straightforward, how it works is that you upload a certain photo of your product/service with an engaging caption so people can click through to your website. Also, with added features such as Reels or Stories, businesses can take the advantage and create videos to really show your brand.
Ever heard the saying: show, don’t tell. It is better if you show your target customers what you can do rather than telling them. And you can do that via Instagram Reels and Stories features.
Be sure to use trending hashtags to increase chances of your post being discovered by many others #️⃣.
YouTube
You can create a YouTube channel specifically for your brand and post videos on it frequently. Nowadays, people are even searching their queries on YouTube and not just Google. So, have presence on YouTube. Your videos might just be the one that they need to refer to, to answer their queries.
Be sure to optimize YouTube SEO for your videos to be discovered. It works similarly with Google SEO.
TikTok
TikTok has become a major social media app that many people are on right now. So, this is also another source that you could try and market your products on. It is very simple how it works; you make a 15 second how-to video or tutorial of your product/service and how it can benefit the person using it. Then, you upload that video to TikTok with an engaging caption so people can click through to your website.
Videos on TikTok has the potential to go viral. So, keep on posting 💪💪. Your videos might go viral. Once it goes viral, that’s where the traffic will come in.
The last social media app is Pinterest. How it works is essential by allowing you to post pictures of what your brand offers and how it could benefit customers if they used your brand’s services or products. Choosing the right hashtag would be useful here to get discovered. And someone can even repins a photo from one of your boards, similar like a retweet. You can put a link down with the photo and they can click through to go to your website.
Social media management tools
Now, that it is clear that it is important to market your business on social medias, there are tools out there that can help plan and manage multiple social medias at a time. Having these tools would really help you to stay organized but also make an impactful presence across all the social medias.
Some of the tools are:
For more choices, you can check out here.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is proved to be effective with lower budget as compared to traditional methods. But one need to understand how it works to really optimize the platforms itself, to get the most out of it.
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