Beginner guide for social media marketing if you want to start a business

Social Media Marketing Guide For Businesses

social media marketing

Everyone is on social media but what it is so good on the platform other than connecting with people online? Social Media Marketing is a powerful tool for any business of all sizes and industries to reach audiences and customers. The huge pool of audiences is allowing brands and businesses to utilize social media marketing to build brand awareness, building trust, loyalty and relationship with customers, increase sales and revenue over time and drive website traffic to gain possible leads for remarketing purposes.

 

What Is Social Media Marketing? 

Social Media Marketing or SMM, is a form of internet marketing or online marketing that involves creating your brand’s objective, creative and interesting content in order to achieve marketing and branding goal and building your own loyal community that converts possible sales in long run. This involves producing great content on your social media profiles, social listening and engaging with followers, analyzing the results from the insight and not forgetting running social media advertisements. The major social media platforms are including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, and TikTok.

We have created this social media marketing guide for businesses to provide you with an introduction to social media marketing and some starter social media marketing tips to improve your brand’s social media presence. With these tips, you can now develop your own killing social media marketing expert plan.

 

The 5 Core Pillars Of Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing Strategies

Objective and Strategy 

Before we started anything on social media, sit down and relax to think about your social media purpose and goals. Apply S.M.A.R.T Framework when you plan for your brand’s objective and goals to achieve so by the end of a period we can measure the performance and result based on KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

 

What is S.M.A.R.T Framework? 

Each of your goals should be:

  • Specific – Be clear, does increase engagement means you want 100 interaction or 1,000?
  • Measurable – Measurable KPI, for eg. 10,000 new followers in 4 months.
  • Attainable – Reasonable and achievable.
  • Relevant – Your goal must be benefited to your business.
  • Timely – Include a timeframe for completion.

Social Media Objective

Who is your targeted audience? 

Other than that, think of your targeted customer persona, group them into a few boards for you to plan on ideas in order to attract these group of people that might likely to be your customers. Here’s an example of a customer personal profile that we can start with.

Customer Persona Example

Which social media platform should you implement for your brand? 

When starting out, it’s better to pick at least 2-3 social media platforms that you think your customer audiences are always on and execute simultaneously.

Here’s some overview of each major social media platform:

  • Facebook – Matured audience, suitable for all aspects
  • Instagram – Lifestyle & younger audience
  • Youtube – Video platform
  • Twitter – Short messages update
  • LinkedIn – Professionals, B2B
  • Pinterest – Creative and inspiration
  • Tiktok – Byte video platform (uprising)

If you still have difficulty to choose the right platform, may consult with us at wink@tinkersociety.com

Plan & Create

In order to implement a good social media marketing effort for businesses, we need to ensure a consistent presence on the social media platform through the contents we created and share. Based on the latest digital 2020 report from Hootsuite, there are 3.8 billion people use social media. So, with the implementation of social media marketing process, you are giving your brand an opportunity to be discovered online by your future potential customers.

What type of content and category would you like to share? 

Always produce creative, appealing and good quality content in our brand social media profile as it portrays your professionalism and quality. Remember that we have mentioned customer persona earlier? With the research of customer persona, it will help you to plan on what kind of content would your customer interested in.

Here’s a sample of content pillars that we can start off with a brand may vary depends on the brand direction, more in-depth of description will be needed to complete such as producing lifestyle content of the product with flat lays to highlight on the table scene, produce a series of #mysecretkitchen videos to show my secret recipes process and etc.

Besides that, we can always change our content strategy based on the performance of the content itself, be flexible and creative.

Social Media Content Pillar

There’s still many of creative way to portray brand’s product and services on social media and here’s one example of how Juice Works promote Valentine’s seasonal drink on their social media.

 

Juice Works Social Media Seasonal Drink Post

 

Advertising & Influencers 

It’s important and useful to allocate an amount of budget on social media advertising and influencers marketing to enhance and accelerate our social media profiles. The social media advertising platforms are now so powerful that you can specifically choose who to display your ads to such as Facebook Business Manager and Google Ads. You can create your favorable target audience group based on demographics, interests, behaviours and more.

Influencers marketing is another new media medium to help brands to deliver the advertisement content on social media. Influencers marketing works because of the high amount of trust that influencers have built up with their following. According to Adweek, the influencers industry is set to reach $10 billion in worth by 2020. However, we need to research the right influencers with creative mechanic ideas to launch an effective influencers campaign.

 

Listening & Engagement 

While your brand’s social media profile grows with a group of community, conversations, and interactions about the brand will also increase by liking, commenting and sharing the content. Other than that, brand advocates also may tag your brand’s account on their social media post or message you directly for inquiries or complaints.

As a social media team, we need to always listen and monitoring the conversation to keep customers happy. Don’t be surprised if you receive some negative comments or complaints, but respond immediately with offering support and correct the situation before it gets worst.

There are also many social media listening tools options to use to monitor all your social media mentions and messages effectively, including the posts that didn’t tag your brand’s social media profile.

 

Analyse & Reporting

After all, we always wanted to know how our social media marketing is performing. How many fan growth throughout the 6 months? What’s the organic engagement rate? How often customers used our brand hashtags on social media?

Every social media platforms do provide a fundamental performance insight for us to study and review. To get more in-depth analytics information, paid social media analytics tools are required such as Social Bakers, Sprout Social, Iconosquare, Locowise and more.

If you need any further more information, please do not hesitate to drop us an email at wink@tinkersociety.com to discuss more or contact us HERE.

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