With billions of active users worldwide, social media is an integral part of Digital Marketing. Every business, irrespective of its size, and industry should leverage social media platforms to promote its products, establish its brand, and make a strong online presence.
In fact, Social Media is a boon for small businesses and startups that are new to the digital space as it is free and easy to get started. You can connect with target audiences across the world at any time and from anywhere. Unlike websites, Social Media platforms encourage two-way communication, and you can indulge in meaningful conversations with your customers and understand their needs. The more you know about your target audience, the better you can serve them and turn them into your loyal customers forever.
So, how to get started with Social Media for your business? Since it is free and easy to start, it doesn’t mean you will get followers instantly. As many think, it is not just posting random pictures/posts and expecting people to engage. You need to put in a consistent amount of work and have a solid strategy to do successful Social Media Marketing or in other words to establish your brand online. Read on to know the 4 Key Elements for Social Media Branding.
Key Elements of Social Media Marketing for Business or Brand
1. Know your Business Goals
Being clear about your goals will help you achieve them faster and help you go longer in your entrepreneurial journey. What exactly do you want to achieve in your online business? How do you want your customers to perceive you? What can they expect from your products/services? Answering such basic yet logical questions will let you make your vision clearer. To be more precise, would you prefer to offer high-quality products at high-cost or high-value products at a low-cost? Knowing it will also help you decide the budget and identify your target audience as well.
Now that you are clear about your goals and know what you want to achieve through your online business, the next step is to have a compelling logo. Integrate your logo across all digital platforms that you use as your logo is your identification. Develop an enthralling tag line that describes your business. Also, create a unique brand voice that speaks and reflects your brand. Apply the brand voice to all sorts of written messages, visual posts, and offline messages. Your brand voice can be friendly, conversational, sober, or witty, but it should be consistent across all platforms. Being consistent will help you gain people’s trust, and they will soon start recognizing you as an established brand.
2. Research your Target Audience
Target audiences are ideal customers for your business who would be more interested in your products/services. Identifying them and promoting your products/services to them will get you high conversion rates. Unlike before, where companies pay hefty amounts to marketing agencies to create a buyer persona for their business, it has gone effortless now, with the internet and social media. Target audiences are generally categorized based on gender, interests, and buying history. Most of these details are readily available on the user’s social media profile. Other than that, using relevant keywords and analyzing related social media communities will let you identify your target audience much easier than ever.
Using Digital Marketing tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights will help you know their demographic details and interests. Also, by observing their social media behavior, like how they engage with other posts, their hobbies will let you create relevant content for your marketing campaign. The more relevant the content, the easier to attract them. Nevertheless, interact with your audience. Create polls, ask questions, and conduct contests to know them better so that you can serve them better. When you pay attention to their needs and expectations, they will respond better and give you good business.
3. Research your Industry
Whatever industry your business may belong to, you are not alone in that particular industry. There will be competitors and others who make similar products like you. So, you need to pay attention to the current market trends, your competitor’s marketing campaigns, and their pricing as well. Yes. Competitor Analysis and Pricing Strategy are two key factors that are going to impact your business.
Firstly, identify your major competitors. Then, learn about their products, social media presence, content creation, and price strategies. Note the kind of content that gets the maximum engagement and start working towards improving your content creation. Look out for ways to improve your products better than the competitors and quote a better price. In short, knowing your competitors marketing strategies will help you to be the best in your industry if you are willing to put in the extra work. Give a unique reason to people that your products are better than your competitors. When you give quality products and do good business, people will prefer you over your competitors for sure.
4. Choose Appropriate Social Media Platforms
There are many Social Media Platforms out there. However, your business need not be there on every single platform. Choose the platforms that support your business purpose and have your target audience presence. Every business has different marketing objectives. Identify what you want from these social media marketing campaigns. It can be either for brand identity, promoting products, driving traffic to your website, or simply engaging with your audience. Then, pick the platform that serves the purpose.
The next step would be content creation. Always prefer quality posts over quantity and be consistent on it. Adding visuals, informative videos, Infographics are great ways to attract the social media audience. Also, pay attention to the time that has the active presence of your social media audience. Posting on that prime time will get you maximum engagement. You can add CTA buttons to your social media posts and direct the user to your website. Just make sure your landing page matches the post you shared on your social media platform.
Final Words
Thus you can leverage Social Media Platforms to build your brand from the scratch. It is cost-effective, easy to connect with customers, and can do wonders for your business in a short span of time. Many small businesses have started from a single social media platform and moved on to websites and eventually to a physical store. Make the optimal use of social media platforms and grow your business fast, easy, and, in a reliable way.