All posts tagged Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has immense potential in the areas of customer engagement, lead generation and sales. Using social networks, you can not only identify new customers, but also engage your current customers and expand their customer lifecycles. Yet, few social media marketers ever boast of having experienced these benefits. Why? Pain-points. Here are 3 major pain-points that you probably continue to experience and how to fix them permanently.

1. Securing resources and time

According to an eMarketer survey, 46% enterprise companies find securing internal resources extremely challenging. That’s not very surprising. When was the last time you asked your boss to hire an extra hand for social media marketing? If it wasn’t too long ago, you’ll remember the sting of being turned down after ineffectively sharing your workload issues. Everyone assumes that social media managers simply tweet. Why should any company need more than one of those employees?

Solution

The simplest solution to this problem? Subscribe to a reliable social media management tool. Choose one that automates/organizes your most time-consuming tasks, so you can make room for tasks that actually contribute to your goals. Here are a few great examples of tools.

DrumUp for social media and content marketing

Using DrumUp, which a social media manager tool, you can schedule social media posts in advance, store drafts/completed ideas in organized folders, schedule across multiple accounts, curate content that your audience will appreciate, automate content sharing from RSS feeds (of your blog or interesting websites) and automate content sharing from libraries or pre-filled folders of your best evergreen content.

Canva for easy social media graphic designing

Using Canva, which is a graph designing tool, you can choose from optimized templates for sharing graphics on different social platforms. The tool also stocks templates for infographics, blog graphics, and so many other purposes, so you design-time is significantly reduced. If you have standard colors and fonts for your brand, you can also save your work on Canva and reuse the same templates to create quick social media graphics.

Read more at https://www.business2community.com/marketing/how-to-solve-3-major-social-media-marketing-pain-points-that-continue-to-exist-02079682

Read more: How to Solve 3 Major Social Media Marketing Pain-Points That Continue to Exist

Social media is one of the most effective marketing channels for companies of any size. In fact, it works so well that more than half of U.S. small businesses are planning to increase their social media marketing budget this year.

Generation Z is at the forefront of social media — they are extremely active on social networks, with half of Gen Z connected online via their smartphones for approximately 10 hours per day. This generation loves personalized apps, and a poll from SCG notes that 88% of Gen Zers are primarily using Instagram and Snapchat. Because of the new ways in which Gen Z is using social media, they’re changing the outlets associated with these platforms as well, with music at the forefront.

Fabrizio Moreira, founder of recording company VIP Music Records, understands the marketing punch social media can deliver, when executed correctly. The company is expanding rapidly, and recently inked a long-term contract with The Orchard, a division of Sony Music.

However, their primary focus has been Latin America, where they now hold the top spot for music distribution in the youth market. As a global study by Nielsen notes, listening to music is a primary source of Generation Z’s entertainment, with 37% of respondents stating it was top choice. This suggests Moreira is on his way to making his label a household name across the globe.

The fast growth of Moreira’s recording company and the success of its artists is a result of several factors, with a solid social media marketing strategy leading the way. I recently spoke with Moreira, and asked him for his top social media marketing tips for Gen Zers.

1. Test Multiple Social Platforms

According to Moreira, you aren’t going to know which social networks will provide value unless you test them. He says, “You have to think like your target customer, and determine what networks they are more than likely to be active on. Then you need to become active and put out a serious effort. It’s not something you can just play with for a day or two and expect to have a concrete answer.”

Read more: 4 Social Media Marketing Tips Gen Zers Should Learn 

Social media can be a powerful tool for brand promotion and consumer connection, but what happens when buzz goes bad?

Many businesses and marketers have suffered damage from a social media mistake. These gaffes can happen to any organization at any time, especially because social media is still unfamiliar to many.

A marketer or organization might have the best intentions, but too many simply don’t understand how to make the most of a social media presence and platform. As a result, they jump into social media and wind up with a marketing mess. The best way to avoid these fiascos is to be aware of the digital don’ts—before it’s too late.

To help you avoid backlash with your social media marketing, consider these top seven social media mistakes that you can’t afford to make:

1. Assuming social media marketing is free
Joining an online network might itself cost nothing, but an effective social media strategy demands at least a small investment or it will be a waste of time. Because online platforms don’t prioritize business posts in news feeds, these messages are often buried beneath a slew of others. As a result, it’s impossible for marketers to ensure their posts are seen.

It helps to spend a little money to broaden a company’s social media reach and target specific audiences. Even though this might call for a small investment, it’s likely to have a big payoff in online exposure and engagement.

2. Spending time and money on the wrong social platforms
With so many established and emerging social media platforms today, it can be hard to know which channels are best for engaging the target audience. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a business to waste a lot of time and money on the wrong social platforms. This social media mix-up could be due to incorrect audience research or a prior marketing mistake, but it can cost a company a great deal of effort and expense.

Read more: 7 costly social media marketing mistakes 

As social media marketing enters a level of unprecedented maturity, communicators who use it as a tool in their arsenal are starting to realize its benefit as a true revenue generator.

Most social networks tend to curb the reach and influence a post can have if it is not promoted (i.e. paid for), but that hasn’t stopped brand managers from finding ways to take advantage of these platforms and find new ways to turn social media storytelling into dollars.

A new infographic from MDG Advertising provides an eight-point checklist of the steps you should take to turn your social media marketing into profit. Those steps include:

1. Strategy

2. Auditing

3. Technology

4. Paid Media

5. Content Development

6. Customer Response

7. Compliance & Risk Management

8. Measurement

When a brand manager can master all these aspects of social media marketing simultaneously, success (and profit) becomes easily achievable. However, be aware that as soon as you master these steps, a new crop of best practices will probably spring up.

Get details on each of the eight steps to social media profitability in the infographic below:

Read more: 8 ways it pays to build social media marketing campaigns

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) cannot be effective without well-executed content. And that’s where social media marketing kicks in. SEO and SMM (Social Media Marketing) go together like peas and carrots.

Social Media Marketing helps you to get your content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the web. Today marketers today are calling it “top of mind.” Which is the new way to say, “brand awareness.”

The better you promote your content across marketing channels, the more referring domains you will receive.

Which Channel Should You Use?

Social media marketing can be tricky because you have to understand your audience, and the level of their sophistication, and familiarity with a channel before you can decide to market yourself on it.

For example the older generation, that is becoming my generation, are more familiar with Facebook and Twitter than we are with Snapchat. Therefore, if you’re trying to reach generation X then you probably want to be on Facebook.

Understanding how to use that channel properly to reach your audience is also paramount. Facebook is very difficult for brands today to reach their audience because of the amount of money you now have to spend on advertisement. Twitter is a microblog and so every few seconds a new tweet goes out for something by someone, somewhere. You can see the stats on this at this link. Understanding the heartbeat of every channel and how to reach your audience is going to be very important otherwise your post will just end up in the ether.

Storytelling with social media

One of the things about social media marketing is it has the ability to take a series of pictures and tie them together into a slideshow in order to craft and weave a story together for your audience.

Read more: Why Social Media Marketing Is Still Important

Social media marketing has arguably survived the initial wave of backlash that came when marketers first started leveraging platforms like Facebook and Twitter to reach new audiences. It was said that social media was a fad, or at least that it was impossible to generate a positive return on investment (ROI) with it. Now, more than a decade later, marketers are still leveraging the power of social media for greater brand exposure, more traffic, and more revenue-generating conversions, among many other benefits.

Even so, there are some critical things social media marketers still commonly get wrong:

1. Followers are the most important metric.
2. Paid advertising is the only sure way to get visibility.
3. The more platforms you’re on, the better.
4. Posts should be automated.
5. Hashtags make everything better.

Read more: 9 Things Social Media Marketers Get Wrong