SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: The Ultimate Guide to Help Grow Your Businesses

Introduction

Social media enables connection, interactions, sharing and information exchange across the internet. This tool has grown to a big social media marketing platform where businesses can interact with customers and prospective buyers, from sharing products, services to customers feedback, conversation and reaching people world over.

Every day you chat, upload pictures, upload videos and upload recent happenings around the world via social media. But do you know that you could make your business a boom with this same social media?

According to research, about 90% of marketers agreed to the fact that social media marketing led to an increased exposure for their businesses. A term which has been in existence for a pretty long time now, but yet quite metaphysical to some, social media marketing is simply the generation of traffic, popularity or attention for your business via social media through the creation of tailor-specific content. Today there are countless social media sites.

These include but not limited to
Facebook
Twitter
Eskimi
Google+
Instagram
Snapchat

Starting as what was just meant for chatting and staying along with friends and family, social media has grown to become a very significant part of marketing strategy and the benefits it offers to businesses is indisputable, to the extent that business pundits have tipped social media to be a panacea for business growth.

Joining social media platform allows you to start a conversation or join the ongoing conversation. As new users join the conversation and start sharing with friends, the conversion reaches more people and becomes big and goes viral.

When you share a product or service, people’s comments can portray confidence for the next buyer. In this way, your customers are doing some level of promotion for you. You can share anything from videos, posts, images, gif etc.

Anyone including you can tap into the power of social media and make your products and services available to users. If you are not doing that already or you are not getting the desired result, read on.

There are two types of social media campaign(Paid and Free)

Before we go into details let us analyse the benefits of social media marketing

Quick highlights of the major benefits of Social Media Marketing:

#It can help raise the status of your business to an unimaginable height
#Introduce new products to wide range of people who can in turn share with their friends
#You get to interact with your customers and get feedback on how to improve on your products or services
#Generate leads, raise customer base
#You can create a targeted audience campaign
#With tools available you can gather data from audience research to improve.
#You can follow up on potential customers

Let us look closely at some in more details
Increase in Business Visibility: When it comes to increasing your business visibility, social media marketing is the most affordable and effective digital marketing strategy to use. This is because sharing your business on social media means you’ll be exposing it to possibly everyone in the world. What you simply need to do is to create a business profile on any of the top social media such as Facebook or Twitter and get your business partners and employees to share and like your profile as well as your posts. By investing just some few hours to create highly targetted content, you can expose your business to a whole new network of individuals and potential customers.

Increased Customer Sales: With increased exposure, no doubt, the result will be increased customer sales and conversion rates. Each post about your business will get more individuals to know about your business. And as your business exposure increases, individuals will gain trust in your business and will thus become potential customers and eventually customers. It is also important that as you get new customers, you liaise with them often. Thus you can know what your customers need and create better products.

Increased Satisfaction of Customers: Posting your business and business products online will give customers the opportunity to air their views about your products to the general public. When you know what your customers like and what they don’t like, you will be able to create products which will satisfy your customers better.

More Brand Authority: When you win the heart of your customers via creating products which suits their needs, you also indirectly give your brand a higher authority in the marketplace. Your customers will tell their families about your products and with time, you will get an increased fan base and a higher reputation amongst your competition.

Affordable: An amazing benefit of social media marketing, is that it is a very affordable method of marketing. It is more affordable than outbound marketing and is the most cost-effective digital marketing product. On Facebook, you can announce your products to over a thousand persons in two days for not more than $5.

Increased Search Engine Ranking: Another amazing benefit of social media marketing is that your business gets ranked higher in search engines. Today, almost everyone knows Google. It is so easy to get a product you want regardless of where you live or whether or not you have any knowledge about the product. Thanks to Google! With a very good and targetted content for your business, you give your business the edge to be ranked higher in search engines.

I Don’t want to bore you with the long list of social media benefits. That’s enough for now. Now that you have seen the potentials, now it’s the time to dive in. Base on your products or services you can narrow down your social media channel so as to target a specific audience, so you need to choose the platform. Let say you want to target professionals, you will be thinking Linkedin platform, to target celebrities, Intergram should be your choice.

Now that you have decided which platform you want to use, don’t get overwhelmed

You need to set a social media goals

Here are some tips to help you set your goals

1) What do you want to achieve with it?
2) Create a faster way to respond to customers requests
3) Reaching new and existing customers and encourage them to buy your products or services
4) Think of more ways to grow your business, be creative
5) Create a buzz with your new product on social media, raise awareness about your business

Why you should create a plan to succeed in social media marketing.

To keep up to date with social media tasks is not easy. You can get lost in there replying comments, messages, posting contents. (You have to create content and images before you post online is a lot to do. You should have a plan that will be between 6-12 months.

Tips for creating a plan

1) Choose the right social media base on how you want to connect with customers. Eg if want to target professional you can use LinkedIn.
2) Create a profile with necessary info, customize your page to look ok
3) Treat your online customers with respect as if they are offline.
4) Create a social media widget on your site.
5) Start with existing customers
6) Create events, offers, face to face meetups
7) How often do you want your page updated?

Recent Trends in Social Media Marketing

As the year continues to roll by, so has social media marketing continue to expand. This year has alone witnessed two major advances in social media marketing.

Chatbot: A chatbot is a robotic machine which is designed to chat like a real human. Chatbots are designed to chat with individuals in such a way that the individual hardly realizes that it is a machine who is chatting. Chatbots are incredibly useful especially if you are a businessman who is always busy and might not be able to attend to all your customers at once. Chatbots give your customers the feeling that you are always available and ready to meet their needs.

Videos: Videos are another advancement in social media marketing. Recently, it has been shown that just a single video about your product is capable of giving your product a 95% boost in terms of exposure.

Conclusion
Social media marketing, though a very powerful tool to increase business productivity, will really prove productive if well utilized. Thus, it is often recommended that you get the services of a social media marketing expert.

Please stay tuned for part 2 of how to be successful in social media marketing.

https://techstackinc.com/2018/09/10/social-media-marketing-the-ultimate-guide-to-help-grow-your-businesses/

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