Social Media Marketing Agency Services
With more than half of all internet users researching a product on social media before purchase, current shopping trends go far beyond search engines alone. With a professional social media marketing agency, you can nail down your strategy to gain lasting brand awareness and revenue.
Increase brand awareness, build trust and drive conversions.
Every brand has its unique objectives and therefore uses social media differently to achieve those objectives. This is where social media marketing strategy comes into play. A social media strategy defines a business’s social media goals, marketing tactics, and key metrics to gauge success.
Of course, this doesn’t conclude all that a social media marketing plan contains. Many brands choose to partner up with a social media marketing agency for a personalized, experienced approach and scheme a social media strategy tailored to their specific niche.
Would my business benefit from a social media marketing agency?
With social media sneaking its way into nearly every aspect of our lives, most brands have caught onto the importance of having a social media presence. It has become rare to come across brands that aren’t engaging in social media marketing in some capacity.
And with the abundance of great content that’s already out there, it has become more challenging than ever to win over the attention of the average social media user. While there’s no single formula to crack the code of social media success, it is crucial to have a resilient social media marketing strategy to make the odds more favourable.
Let’s take a deep dive into what social media marketing is, how to effectively plan and execute it , and the most popular social channels utilized for business today.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
As you already probably know, social media marketing is the practice of using social media channels to promote and grow a business. The business can be a large organization, small startup, or personal brand. Experience shows that effective social media marketing can be equally crucial for all three.
The use cases of social media for brand promotion can vary widely as well. From growing brand awareness online to expanding audience or boosting conversion rates, social platforms have a lot to offer to businesses.
Every brand has its unique objectives and therefore uses social media differently to achieve those objectives. This is where social media marketing strategy comes into play. A social media strategy defines a business’s social media goals, marketing tactics, and key metrics to gauge success.
Your social media strategy should clearly outline the objectives you’ve set for your brand, the platforms you’re planning to use, the audience you’re aiming to attract, and the type of content you intend to share.
Of course, this doesn’t conclude all that a social media marketing plan contains. Most businesses have unique needs that demand a personalized approach. This is why many brands choose to partner up with a social media marketing agency to scheme a social media strategy tailored to their specific niche.
How to Do Social Media Marketing
1. Build Your Strategy
To make sure your social media efforts are organized, productive, and aligned, you must create a clear strategy. Your social media strategy will give you a bird’s-eye view of where you stand now, where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there.
This step is all about determining and prioritizing your social media goals, the social channels to be used, the type of content to be shared, and the audience to share it with.
Define Goals
Social media marketing goals can be as diverse as the businesses aiming for them. To give your social media endeavours a direction and draw a clear path to success on any platform, you first need to identify your goals.
Before you can think about the “how,” you need to know the “why.” Why is your brand on social media? What are the top three things you wish to accomplish through social media channels? Take your time defining your goals since you’ll be returning to them quite often in the next stages of developing your social media presence.
Here are some of the most common social media goals:
- Growing audience online
- Increasing brand awareness
- Getting more engagement
- Attracting leads
- Increasing revenue
- Creating a sense of community among customers
- Diversifying customer support channels
Brands often overlook the common pitfall of adopting other businesses’ goals instead of carefully setting their own. Depending on where your business is on its journey, your goals might be different from those around you. For instance, if a competitor company is putting a lot of resources into reaching a new audience, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should too.
In order to target the right social media marketing objectives, you need to look at your overall brand strategy. Your social goals need to be in alignment with the general direction your brand is taking. So consider where your company is headed while pinning down your main social media marketing objectives.
Last but not least, it’s vital to set SMART goals for your marketing plan: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. It’s great to set ambitious goals, but they also need to be realistic. So cross riding a purple dragon off your list!
Study the Audience
A lot can be gained from deeply examining one’s audience. Audience research and the data amassed from it will eliminate all guesswork, allowing you to make decisions based on statistical evidence.
If you already have a loyal group of customers or social media fans, begin studying them. Note their demographics and psychographics, online behaviour, preferred social media platforms and types of content, etc. Now ask yourself whether you want to attract more of the same audience. If so, then proceed with providing the type of social media content they enjoy.
Your action plan will be different, though, if you want to reach a new kind of audience or do not have any established follower base. In such cases, you can turn to your competitors’ audiences or those of other inspiring brands in your industry.
Get to know your target audience, which social networks it prefers, and what content format it likes to follow and interact with. Your social media strategy will be a lot sharper and more practical once you complete audience research.
Determine Your Metrics
Remember the ‘M’ in SMART goals? The targets you set for your brand need to be measurable. Otherwise, you might end up running in circles and losing track of how close you are to your goals.
Be intentional with the KPIs you choose and make sure they are relevant to your business’s objective. Chasing vanity metrics will only waste valuable resources, leaving you with little to no return on your efforts.
For instance, if you want to increase customer loyalty, tracking post engagement is more meaningful than tracking follower count. Your social media marketing goals should determine relevant metrics.
Draft a Funnel
Every customer goes through a journey before making a purchase (also known as the buyer’s journey). The conversion process begins when a buyer first hears about a brand and leads to the moment they decide to buy (or return to buy again). To make this journey as smooth as possible, businesses employ a marketing funnel.
A marketing funnel maps out a buyer’s path to conversion, considering every critical point of interaction between the consumer and the business. All those key interaction points are known as funnel stages.
There are three primary stages to a marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. However, you’ll also come across extended funnels that include two more steps after conversion: loyalty and advocacy.
Whether you choose to go with the three or five-stage funnel is up to your business needs and priorities. But it’s crucial that you do develop a functional marketing funnel to meet customers exactly where they are on their journey.
You can’t expect generous testimonials and social shares from a user that has come across your brand once or twice through Instagram ads, can you? Informative content will be much more efficient in attracting prospects in the awareness stage.
Each decision-making stage has its appropriate content type that will speak directly to consumers in that stage. So take the time to identify where your target audience is in the funnel and draw a plan to take them to the next stage.
2. Plan and Publish
Once you’re past the strategizing phase, pat yourself on the back because you’re done with most of the mental heavy-lifting. However, there’s still a long way to go to establish strong social media profiles that yield desired results.
Now that you’re crystal clear about your intentions and expectations, you can start planning the specifics of your social media content. This step involves figuring out the type and format of the content you want to share, the platforms that will be used, as well as the frequency and timing of your posts.
Create Strategic Social Content
The previous step should provide enough data to point you in the right direction for publishing social media content. Based on the demographics and preferences of your audience, you can determine the best social platforms to build your presence. In addition to this, you’ll also be able to pick the most relevant content type to publish — e.g., photos, videos, blog articles, short news and updates, memes, etc.
Keep in mind that the way you present your business on social media will shape the audience’s perception of you. So if you’re determined to portray a likable and trustworthy image of your brand, you need to be picky about your social content.
Regardless of the type of posts you share, you’ll greatly benefit from creating a content strategy. The latter will give order and purpose to your posts and create a recognizable online persona for your brand. Think about how often you recognize which brand a specific post belongs to just by its tone and style. That right there is an excellent example of successful social media marketing.
Time Your Social Activity
Timing is a pretty big player in social media marketing. While it’s not the be-all and end-all of social success, it can still influence your metrics quite a bit. Timing gets even more complicated when you account for time zone differences with an international audience.
It’s unrealistic to try to keep up with the individual schedule of each social media follower you have. Ideally, you’d prefer to be available for all your followers at their preferred time. But unless you have a dedicated 24/7 support team, this is not always possible.
When you publish a fresh post, you should ensure someone from your team is available to reply to any feedback and questions you might get. Leaving customer comments unanswered for hours on end will reflect negatively on your online reputation.
Social media is one of the top channels for customer care. Timely posts and replies show that you respect your client’s time and are present whenever they need your assistance. Distribute your resources and social posts wisely, taking into consideration the schedules and habits of your clients.
3. Listen and Engage
People might share comments and feedback about your brand, but not all of those will be directed straight to your account. Social conversations about brands happen all the time, yet not all businesses take measures to monitor what the public is saying about them online.
Luckily, modern AI tools have made it possible to observe social media conversations on a large scale to detect any mentions of a brand or product. This practice is known as social listening, and it’s something we recommend all businesses do once they grow their brand awareness online.
Social listening allows brands to unexpectedly pop into a social conversion about their product and surprise the customer (whenever appropriate, of course). In case the sentiment of the conversation is negative, companies get the chance to offer a public explanation or apology, thus showing accountability.
Once your company reaches a certain point of popularity, it can become a challenge to keep track of all comments, mentions, and messages. In such cases, again, social listening and engagement tools will be of great help.
4. Use Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and reports on your social media performance are the much-needed reality check to assess how well your strategy is working. If you have followed the previous steps and already have your KPIs, now is the time to put them to work.
A profitable social media marketing strategy is based on accurate data rather than assumptions. And the only way to identify how well your social campaigns are performing is to track results, analyze, and adapt.
The reports you need will vary based on the goals you’re aiming for. Are you trying to expand your reach or boost conversions? Focus on the pieces of data that relate to your set objectives, analyze the information, and adjust your future campaigns as needed.
Most major social media platforms offer free analytics tools that, although limited, can still provide valuable insights. More advanced analytics tools are also easy to find and access if you don’t mind spending a bit of money.
5. Consider Advertising
Social media advertising can be a great supplement to your marketing strategy, helping to extend your following. Paid advertising will require an additional budget, but it’s very powerful in connecting you to a new audience that might be interested in your offers.
You can target a particular demographic with your ads to increase your chances of reaching the right people. Social media algorithms have grown intelligent enough to segment users according to their age, interests, behaviours, and so on. The algorithms will then let you choose a specific audience to share your ads with.
Of course, paid ads aren’t the only way of advertising on social media. You can promote your content organically and share it in various social groups. But for businesses starting out with a small or no following, paid advertising is an effective way to build an audience around the brand.
Understanding Top Social Media Platforms
Each social media platform has its unique audience, best practices, opportunities and can thus help you achieve different goals. Before deciding on a channel — or multiple — to use for social media marketing, you need to do the following:
- Consider where your target audience is most active;
- Research which platforms your competitors use;
- Weigh out the pros and cons of every platform.
Since we’ve already touched on the first two points, let’s explore the third one — the pros and cons each major social media platform has to offer.
As the most popular social media platform, Facebook is present in almost every business’s social media marketing list. It’s not difficult to see why that is. Facebook has the largest number of active users (2.85 billion), offers highly targeted advertising, has one of the most robust algorithms, and the list goes on.
Facebook Business Suite is packed with valuable tools to set up, manage, and promote business pages. It’s an integrated platform for managing ad accounts, pages, reporting, and more. Another big advantage is that it’s free to use, making it an excellent tool for small businesses.
From Facebook stories to live videos, the platform gives you an enormous variety of content you can publish. However, keep in mind that Facebook is highly competitive, making it difficult for brands to achieve significant organic growth.
Mainly focused on stimulating visual content such as photos and videos, Instagram is the second most popular channel for social media marketers. What makes this network special is that it has the highest user engagement rate.
Considering the visual-based and lighthearted nature of the platform, Instagram is not the best choice for long, text-heavy, and highly educational content. If you choose to publish or advertise on Instagram, try to make your posts eye-catching and engaging. For the businesses that sell physical products, it’s the best place to portray high-quality product photos.
Instagram is also the top network for influencer marketing. So if you’re looking to invest in influencer partnerships, Instagram will give you the most options.
As opposed to the relaxed, casual essence of the previous two social platforms, LinkedIn is strongly professional. This makes the platform incredibly useful for B2B marketing. It can be a great place to present your business as an employer, highlighting its culture, values, staff, and the like.
Industry news, articles, and other educational pieces make for excellent LinkedIn content. LinkedIn Groups are a powerful resource for brands to interact with like-minded people, establish themselves as thought leaders, and collect quality leads as a result.
Understandably, LinkedIn won’t be the first choice of B2C companies and ones that target a younger demographic. Users aged 15-25 only amount to about 19% of the LinkedIn population, while over 40% of LinkedIn users fall between 46 to 55.
The bottom line
So, we hope we can all agree that social media marketing involves more than coming up with a cool post idea and hitting the publish button. It’s a rather elaborate concept comprising five core pillars: strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and, finally, advertising.
Not all platforms will work for your brand, so it’s vital to consider your goals, target audience, business industry, and competitors before picking a platform to commit to.
What Do Social Media Marketing Agencies Do?
The scope and depth of cooperation between businesses and social media agencies vary from case to case. Some agencies offer to handle the entire process of strategy creation, planning and publishing, social listening, and reporting. Others might help with specific ad campaigns or social media graphics.
Many businesses choose to partner with social media agencies because they offer specialised expertise and skilled professionals — something that businesses often lack due to time or fund restrictions. Agencies acquire information about the company, its requirements, and industry and craft a tailored plan to help the client achieve its social marketing goals.
