What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing.

How do I promote my business on social media?

Your presence alone is a great way to reach customers. Create new content regularly and share your attention-grabbing blogs/articles on your social media sites. And make your content is easy for users to discover and more likely that they’ll share it. The more shares, the more people love your content.

But social media is becoming more ‘pay to play’ so you should think about creating ads to target potential and existing customers. Most social media sites still have very reasonable advertising costs, particularly if you have thought through your advertisements well. Below, I will discuss some high level steps you should be accounting for in your social media strategy.

1. Be clear on who your customer is - You’ll be better able to craft your social media messaging. You’ll also be in a better position to take advantage of the paid traffic methods provided by social media platforms. When creating ads, you’ll want to choose to target customers based on their demographic, device, age, interests, and a load of other characteristics.

2. Decide on your goals - Get clear on what your media campaign goals are. if you want to join the group that generates a significant ROI from social media marketing, the best way to do that is by being clear about what you want to achieve with a media campaign and, therefore, applying social media best practices. Do you want to drive traffic to your website, drive conversions (sales), promote your Facebook Page or business website, get engagement on your post, or something else?

   In general, there are two main goals that you can hope to achieve with social media marketing –

   • Brand Awareness - You’re looking to become a thought leader in your space and you’re trying to build familiarity with your brand across social networks. You may also be more concerned with shares/likes/retweets and/or fan page growth,

   • Conversions - You’re taking steps to ensure that you can see a direct return on investment on your social media marketing activities. This might happen when you’re actively promoting a piece of content, using paid traffic, that is designed to get people into a funnel that will ‘convert’ them and direct them towards your media account. For this type of campaign, you’ll be more interested in ‘website visits and click-through rates.’

3. Decide on your approach - Your approach relates to how exactly you’re going to market yourself on social media, in order to achieve your goals. Think about what content type you’ll use to achieve your goals - images, videos, and text posts etc.

   • If you’re looking to reach people in the Consideration/Research phase, then you’ll need to think about how you can create actionable content that teaches your target audience how to solve a specific problem.

   • If you’re creating content for potential customers in the Awareness phase, you need to think about why people need your social media campaign offering in the first place.

   • If you’re looking to create content on your media account that is purely for brand awareness purposes and that you’re not looking to attribute a direct positive ROI to, then you might want to consider creating videos/blogs as part of your media campaign that detail stories of and related to your company.

4. Generate credibility - Simply create a lot of content that is high quality and informative whilst demonstrating you are using social media marketing best practices.

Pro tip

Most social media sites have some sort of analytics, or data, that tells you how your ads and business site are performing. Make sure you check on it regularly to make the most out of your ad budget!