What is Social Media & Social Media Marketing?
Social Media: Forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content.
Social Media Marketing: A form of Internet Marketing utilizing social networking sites as marketing tools, thereby gaining traffic, brand exposure and interaction with customers through social media.
The Marketing “Trifecta”
In the world of marketing, there are three different types of media:
Earned Media: This is free exposure that you get from customers and are consumer generated content.
Owned Media: This channels the firm controls and can be fully owned or partially owned.
Paid Media: This type of media marketing includes advertising your products on websites and working to promote your brand to help gain awareness.
4 Steps to the Social Media Marketing Plan
In social media marketing, there are four steps in the “Social Media Plan” that help to build your websites identity and help get your website out to the public.
1. Determine the Objective
Building Brand Equity: This helps to increase consumers’ positive mental associations with brand. It also increases brand loyalty and encourages people to purchase frequency.
Building Brand Equity = Positive Associations with Brand
Inducing Additional Purchases: This directly gets consumers to purchase through the social media site, fan page or account it is on. It is easily measurable, but depends on the product.
Sell / Induce Purchases: Allows customers on social media to make purchases immediately, along with many targeting opportunities. It also attracts people and can reach more loyal customers.
Building brand equity can also focus lots of other objectives like improving customer service, reaching new customers, providing info and support and collecting customer feedback.
2. Plan the Content
Planning: Being able to plan when and what you are going to post on your social media platform can greatly impact how customers view your content.
Providing VALUE through your content can be done with adding; humor, deals / discounts, contests / drawings, useful ideas and practices, insider knowledge, product updates, training / education and community.
Content / Editorial Calendar: Being able to have a shareable resource for your marketing team, visualising how the content is distributed throughout the year can greatly impact how your media is approached by consumers.
Content Format: Using different types of formats can help improve your content.
Examples of Formats: Video, white paper, webinar, infographic, blog post, podcast, article
3. Distributing & Promoting Content
There are six STEPPS to becoming Contagious
- Social Currency: Self-enhancement and identity signaling
- Triggers: Help to remind consumers of the product
- Emotion: Connecting products with strong emotions leads to sharing
- Public: Allows decisions to affect what everyone else is doing
- Practical Value: Seeking advise allows people to look for content that is helpful
- Stories: Allowing communication through stories
4. Measuring Success
Measuring Volume / Acquisition: Looking at the total number of likes and follows, new likes and the number of lost likes or followers.
Engagement: Seeing the number of impressions / views, re-posts, shares, pins, likes, comments, CTR on posts and the overall engagement rate with content.
Conversions Rates: Looking at the purchased rates and total number of users who have seen the content, along with the purchase frequency and who engaged.
Putting it all Together
Allowing the use of these 4 steps can make for a more improved social media marketing outcome for both your business reputation, along with your income.
