Doing digital marketing in social networks is booming and progressive growth, especially thanks to the emergence and popularization of digital media such as social platforms.
In this sense, marketing in social networks has arrived as a branch of digital marketing focused on designing, creating and implementing strategies that directly and effectively impact users who use these platforms to discover and communicate with their favorite brands.
Do you want to know more about this marketing methodology? Keep reading!
What is social media marketing?
In short, marketing on social networks is a strategy that implements positioning actions, brand expansion, and even mechanisms related to sales on social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other.
In a few words, they are all those initiatives that focus on identifying and attracting the audience that uses social networks as an important means of communication and information discovery in their day to day.
In this way, companies have the opportunity to carry out brand awareness, engagement, conversion and even sales actions through these channels.
Now, it is important to clarify that, despite the common thought that marketing on social networks is only posting photos or videos, this goes much further.
In fact, this discipline that emerges from digital marketing involves:
- To plan.
- Create engaging and relevant content.
- Interact with the target audience.
- Run digital ad campaigns.
- Optimize other marketing strategies.
- Monitoring of indicators.
- Among others.
Thus, it allows companies and brands to adapt to the needs and context in which buyers currently live and generate processes that bring them closer to audiences related to the business in which they find themselves.
Benefits of social media marketing for businesses
As we have seen, social media marketing is much more than posting photos on social media about the products and services offered by the company.
This branch of marketing raises the positioning of organizations and expands their radius of action to levels that can catapult results.
In this sense, below we will explain what are the main benefits that a business can obtain when it implements a marketing strategy in social networks.
Brand recognition
Brands are currently in a very competitive and in some cases aggressive field, due to the large number of organizations that seek to attract and satisfy customers.
As a company that seeks to maximize its customer base, marketing in social networks is the bridge that connects all the goods that it is capable of offering with those potential consumers who are looking for products and services that help them improve their quality of life.
In this sense, relying on this type of strategy will generate predictable and coherent mechanisms to provoke empathy with customers through content that is really useful to them and nourishes them from an intellectual and, of course, emotional point of view.
Website traffic
In social networks, much of the interaction originates and ends within the platforms. However, companies that think about building long-term relationships bet on taking all these contacts to a website that is capable of expanding the idea they have and showing them all the benefits they can obtain.
A good use of a marketing strategy in social networks will always generate more traffic on the website with the aim of transforming them into leads and, later, into consumers of the products and services.
Search engine positioning
SEO has become in recent years an essential tool to obtain notoriety and authority in digital media.
Supported by a consistent and solid SEO strategy, brands can gain a presence on search engines like Google, which helps them generate large amounts of organic traffic and, in conjunction with social media marketing, results can be accelerated.
Thanks to the consideration that Google takes in this aspect, external references such as visits to the Instagram profile or interactions on Facebook have an influence on the results of the search engine results pages and will allow us to gain a better position on these sites.
Grow on a small budget
Another of the great benefits that social media marketing provides brands is that social platforms are much less expensive than, for example, a Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaign.
Likewise, these interfaces provide certain tools such as disseminating products with a really attractive cost-benefit ratio. However, this is not a rule, as many businesses grow and achieve levels of awareness without investing in advertising.
Whatever your budget, through social media marketing you can grow, as long as you offer relevant, interesting and useful content for your audience.
With that said, you’re probably eager to find out how to do social media marketing, are we right?
7 Social Media Marketing Strategies
Now, social media marketing strategies are as varied as the platforms available. Therefore, below we will give you some advice and guidance so that you can make the most of all the possibilities that are available.
1. Take advantage of the flexibility of formats
One of the great advantages offered by social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or even Twitter is the diversity of formats they support.
For companies, this means an opportunity to diversify the way they deliver materials to the audience and adjust their strategies according to the buyer persona or the intent of the campaign.
For example, Facebook incorporated 360° videos as a format that allows the user to be immersed in the experience. Giving you an amplified perspective of what you can find.
Taking advantage of this function to offer virtual tours of the company’s facilities or create a 360° experience of the product to see it from all angles will be a differential for your business.
Another format is lives or live videos that, although they are not particularly new, offer a number of benefits to connect with your consumers and generate engagement that brings them much closer to the identity of the organization.
2. Find prospects in “similar audiences”
One of the great potentials that social networks have is their segmentation capacity that refines users according to their behavior and interests to provide ads related to their tastes.
However, based on the customers that brands engage with, these platforms can “recommend” similar audiences to you that you can integrate into your sales funnel in an automated way.
On Facebook or Instagram this function is available and it is an excellent strategy to test different types of audience and measure the performance generated by your posts on them.
3. A/B testing
Tests are an analysis and research tool that allows you to check the effectiveness of small initiatives related, for example, to your content and identify which “draft” is the most efficient.
Imagine that you are about to launch a product and you are designing the entire strategy, however, you have not defined whether a video or an image will be the ideal format for it.
To do this, you use an A/B test where you “pitch” the two posts to a narrow audience and measure the effectiveness of both. Depending on which reaches the greatest benefit, your business may opt for one over the other.
4. Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the great innovations in marketing on social networks, since they allow solving multiple problems and doubts of a company’s customers, for example, through WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, in an automated way.
By implementing this initiative as part of your social media marketing strategies, you will free your employees from the task of meeting the same basic customer requirements over and over again and you will be able to position them in much more analytical or creative areas.
One of the great benefits of some of the chatbot tools that exist on the market is the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as a basis to obtain solutions that “learn” from interactions and are self-managing.
In this way, you will have at your disposal intelligent channels that evolve over time and that are capable of generating important insights into the behavior, needs and tastes of users to promote actions in customer service, sales or marketing.
5. Lean on influencer marketing
Another of the great advantages that social networks provide are communities that grow around a personality. We are obviously referring to influencers who manage to “influence” their audience in many aspects.
Therefore, an excellent strategy to get your products, services or the name of your brand in the eyes and ears of your potential consumers is to associate with these personalities of the Internet to expand the impact that you have.
To do it correctly, it is important that you carefully analyze the characteristics of the audience that you have created, the interaction with which you have in your profile, how they respond to ads and, of course, the relationship that exists between the influencer and your products. organization.
If everything makes sense, you can start creating quality content that brings many users closer to your business and, of course, they find in you a valuable alternative.
6. Use cross promotion
Cross promotion or cross promotion is about linking the different platforms that your company uses to get closer to the audience and create a unified experience on all fronts.
For example, you could upload a video to YouTube and Facebook Watch at the same time to provide both audiences with the same value.
Now, the success of cross promotion depends on several factors such as the main content and the supporting content.
The first is the one that entails a higher level of production, generation of ideas and the one that rules the roost in terms of the results of your strategy. On the other hand, the support are those publications that will complete the main content on various platforms.
A simple example of this would be creating special material for your YouTube channel, but reinforcing the strategy through Stories on Instagram, TikToks, or even a post on LinkedIn explaining the value proposition.
7. Optimize content on each platform
With the intention of enhancing the reach of the publications in the different social networks, it is necessary to optimize each piece according to the best practices of each social network.
And it is no secret that each of them has stipulated a standard for the format and characteristics of the materials with the aim of making them more “correct” for the interface.
For example, YouTube suggests taking advantage of the tags or relevant labels of the content to position it in lists that attract more users.
Instagram relies on hashtags that embed posts according to tags that are created alongside the content and allow materials to be brought to users who may never have seen other posts from a particular account.
On Twitter, conversations take place within “trending topics” that can be positioned on users’ timelines based on their behavior on the platform and the interests they have shown over time.