Social media marketing, also referred to as “e-marketing” or “digital marketing,” is a marketing strategy that utilizes social media-based platforms like social networks and social media websites. This type of marketing has become an integral part of a holistic marketing campaign as this enables companies to reach a much larger audience with significantly less effort than making use of traditional marketing strategies. You don’t have to be an accountant to understand that the costs of digital social marketing is also much less.
To have a better understanding of exactly how powerful the social media marketing tool can be, it’s important to have the right strategy in place.
Because social media marketing allows you to reach out to a much larger audience, you need to take into account that you won’t be creating content for a single social media platform. There are numerous social media applications and websites to consider and you need to understand that the content that you will be creating needs to be tailored to the context of each different type of platform.
Creating the right type of content means doing research on which market segment produces web traffic on which platform. By understanding this, you can custom create the most relevant content in the most effective medium for each platform, ranging from photographic content to videos or text-heavy content. There is a right formula for each social network.
Another aspect of this type of marketing campaign that needs to be considered, is the way in which your target market will be able to interact with the content that you create. The ideal is to create content that individual users would want to share with their friends, family, or co-workers. By placing this type of content, you are effectively getting social media users to do the marketing for you. The impact is also much greater when the message is received by a friend instead of directly from the marketer, as it creates a greater sense of trust and authenticity.
While there are a lot of benefits to this type of marketing strategy, you should always be mindful that individuals have a voice of their own and are also capable of launching their own impromptu “marketing campaigns.” Negative publicity now also travels much faster. For example, a user could post negative reviews about a company. These types of reviews should be addressed and handled truthfully. An upside to this is that it can be handled well in full view of the public eye and putting a positive spin on potentially negative marketing.
This leads to the last section of this article. Social media marketing allows companies to track the success of their campaigns by making use of tools that allow for this. By utilizing the use of keywords and phrases, tracking URL shares, and following re-posts, comments, and replies, you will have a greater understanding of how effectively your campaign is running. And as mentioned in the previous paragraph, you can proactively drive the image that you desire.
Digital marketing, when used right, could be your greatest tool in your advertising toolbox.
Infographic created by Clover Network, a credit card processing company
