A Quick Guide To social media marketing for Brands

With the current market trends, restricting your media to only traditional channels is no longer an option. Marketing is highly effective and cost-efficient.

If your customers and potential clients are on social media, you need to consider it highly.

Many businesses may not have the time or skill to run social media marketing campaigns themselves, so they opt for Social Media Marketing agencies to achieve their corporate social PPC efforts.

With the growth of social networks in the past few years, it’s no surprise that social media marketing services are a thing presently. Now in more detail:

What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

Social media marketing(SMM) uses social media and social networks for marketing a company’s products and services.

SMM allows companies to engage with existing customers while reaching new ones through their mission, brand culture and tone.

SMM also has purpose-built data analytics tools that help marketers track the success of their efforts.

SMM uses social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, SMM panel, and more to connect with their audiences.

There are also several social media management tools businesses can use to get the most out of their social media.

Social media marketing involves:

Publishing content on your social media profiles.
Listening and engaging with your followers.
Running social media advertisements and so much more.

Whether you are building a brand or growing your business, Pearl Lemon is here to help you succeed.

How does Social Media Marketing (SMM) work?

The way we function as a society changed with the emergence of social media. The way we engage with people, communicate and how we conduct business has been affected.

Social media sites can change user behaviour and tendencies. They also allow marketers to employ tactics and strategies that can help promote content and encourage people to engage with it.

Various social networks allow users to give marketers detailed geographical, demographic and personal information, enabling them to tailor messages to what resonates most with the users.

Below are the five key pillars of SMM.

1. Strategy

Before publishing anything on social media, you need o take a closer look at the bigger picture. To create an effective strategy, you need to ask yourself these questions.

What are your goals?
What social media platforms do you want to focus on?
What type of content do you want to share?

2. Planning and publishing

Social media marketing starts with having a consistent presence on social media. When you are active on social platforms, you give your business room to be discovered by your future customers.

Publishing on social is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image or a video on your social platforms.

However, you need to plan your content instead of publishing spontaneously; publish at the right timing and frequency.

Like I mentioned before, various social management tools can help you publish content automatically on your scheduled time.

3. Listening and engagement.

As your business grows, so will the conversations about your brand increase. You will have people comment on your posts, tag or message you directly, and others will talk about your brand without letting you know.

This is where monitoring these conversations will come in. if it’s positive, you engage with them; if it’s a concern, you respond and offer help where needed.

You can manually check and reply to all these comments, but doing so will not be as efficient, especially when you don’t see the posts that tag you.

Instead, you can use social management tools that cluster all your social media mentions and messages, including those that didn’t tag your business or social media profile.

4. Analytics and reporting

Along the way of your social media management, you will want to know how your SMM strategy performs. Knowing how far the posts have gone is crucial.

You will want to know if you are reaching more people on social media, how many they are, how many people used the brand hashtag on their social media and more.

Social media platforms themselves provide adequate information about such information, but in-depth analysis is always required.

5. Advertising

This involves investing funds into social media advertising. Social media ads enable you to reach a wider audience, more than those who are following you.

Social media ads allow you to specify who to display your ads to. You can customise your target audience using their demographics, interests, behaviours and more.

What should you expect from a social media marketing agency?

You should know that not all social media agencies offer the same services, and not many offer support on the organic side of the spectrum.

Social media encompasses a plethora of user-generated content. Pearl Lemon services include social network engagement, online review gathering and management, influencer marketing, social group management and more.

We offer a mix of organic(Social media SEO) and paid strategies. At Pearl Lemon, we’ve tried several different digital tactics to target, engage and convert audiences into clients.

These tactics root into a few categories which make up our leading service offers.

Below are some of the things you should expect from an SMM agency. They include but are not limited to:

Account management

This is all about publishing and creating content, as well as engagement. Content creation Tasks include;- content curation, promoting and optimising social media content, creating visuals, gathering industry-specific statistics, and defining post schedules.

Engagement includes;- responding to messages, liaising with influencers, securing strategic partnerships, responding to comments, deleting spam content or responding to comments that constitute engagement.

Simply put, all these activities are meant to encourage relationship building.

Social advertising (Paid media)

Advertising is a whole lot different from organic growth. The main advertising channel currently is Facebook, but other large-scale social networks support ads too.

Social advertising is spending more to reach more people, and it includes conceptualising and creating campaigns, defining target audiences, optimising, conversion tracking and more.

Currently, it is impractical to depend on only organic reach; that’s why you need a social media marketing agency to help you.

Meetings

Regular meetings should be part of the package when doing business with an agency. You will need information about campaigns, new initiatives, content, and other things that might come up.

You need to give and give feedback, and an agency-client relationship should be a top priority.

Digital marketing consulting

Even if the agency you choose isn’t the one creating the content for you, they should be in a position to advise you about any strategies taken. They should be able to give you valuable insight since they have a vast knowledge of industry trends.

Social media publishing

A social media marketing strategy should handle all, if not most, of your business’s social media publishing activities.

Your business and the agency should agree upon the set number of posts for each channel, research and analyse popular content across the industry your business belongs to, and develop a content calendar around those topics.

Social media auditing

Your agency will analyse your business’s social media presence and identify the areas that need to be worked on. They will suggest ways to fix issues or develop a distinctive social media marketing strategy for business.

Essentially, a social media audit is meant to give you a detailed report on your overall social media performance. An audit focuses on analysing:

Reach and impressions.
Followers.
Engagement ( through likes, comments, tags etc.).
Post-performance.
Amount of traffic and leads coming from different platforms and so much more.

Competitor analysis

Agencies offer an in-depth analysis of your competitive landscape. Such information helps brands to know how they are performing against their competitors.

Knowing such information can help a brand create a fail-proof strategy that can propel their business to do better in the field.