The 4 steps on how Social Media Marketing (SMM) works and why it’s important for your business.

Social media marketing (SMM) is creating editing and publishing content on social media networks to achieve the desired goal.

We’re in the stages where you can still make a big splash in your local area if you start building a social media marketing strategy.

This isn’t a secret anymore and word is starting catch that a social media presence now can pay big dividends in the future. At this moment, social media platforms are always being undervalued.

If you leverage a social media marketing plan, you could create a huge impact on your business and create a long term strategy of building profit.

When consumers follow a brand on social media, 77% say they are more likely to buy from that brand over another.
(Sprout Social 2019)

Everybody knows they’re supposed to post on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to help grow their business. The truth is that it’s harder than it looks. This is the reason why everyone isn’t updating their socials as much as they should.

You should care about your social media platforms because they currently hold the attention of most of your customers.

As of October 2019, Facebook and YouTube have over 2 BILLION active users MONTHLY.

Still not convinced?

Here are some of the stats on social media marketing.

• 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Gen X, and 48.2% Baby Boomers are active on social media
• 2:22 Two hours and twenty-two minutes per day is spent on social networks and messaging per day
• 71% of consumers who have a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand to friends and family
• 54% of Social Browsers use social media to research products
  (Overlo, 2019)

In this guide, we will outline an introduction to social media marketing and how the process works and social media marketing tips that will help improve your social presence. Let’s take you to the step-by-step process in learning the social media marketing plan.

Step 1: Set Goals & Learn About Your Target Audience

Setting attainable social media marketing goals should generally align with your business goals, but it should always narrow your focus at first.

Common Social Media Goals Include:

• Improving ROI
• Increase Sales
• Increase Brand Awareness
• Customer Service
• Drive Traffic To Website/Blog
• Generate Leads
• Build A Community

Challenge yourself and set a realistic and attainable goal. Try and focus on how to build your value proposition around the services you offer so you can accurately hit your target.

Goals are set.

Next, we focus on the people who are most likely to be your customers and clients.

People often gather in different groups throughout the internet based on what captivates their attention. Which is why we have things like Facebook Groups, YouTube Channels, and LinkedIn Pages.

More often than not, people tend to more towards groups of things they are interested in. Which works to our benefit when we better understand our specific target audience. Before starting any campaign you have to understand who the target audience is, where they hang out, and why are they using it.

Each social media network has different audiences

1. Facebook – The best place to start for most businesses. Massive amounts of users that can help you target ads towards your perfect audience.
2. Twitter – Twitter can get the word out about your business very quickly. 81% of millennials check Twitter once a day this appeals to a younger audience. Heavy focus on hashtags, topics, and news.
3. LinkedIn – Professional social media network geared to industry and professional networking. This is great for people who work in B2B.
4. Youtube – This platform has an even split of women and men viewership, but men spend 44% more time on the site per month measured by OpenSlate

A multi-channel approach is always the most effective way to reach a larger audience until you find the platforms you perform the best on. This gives you a better idea of where your target audience hangs out at.

Every social media has its metrics of measuring demographics or psychographics.

Psychographics are important because they tell you why. Understanding your target audience down to their outlooks on life will help you create content directed towards them and their needs.

One amazing strategy we will look at will be doing a competition analysis of your competitor’s websites using different software and products to give us an overview of exactly what they’re doing online.

Use Your Competition As A Valuable Resource

Next, we outline how to find niche trending topics, highly targeted keywords, analysis and compare content, ad copy and language, and social media integration.

We essentially ‘hack’ our competition from the top national AND local level to give us a full perspective on industry leaders. The most effective way to start gathering data about your niche is to use the software, either free or paid, that effectively analyzes websites.

You want to make sure you ask these questions whenever analyzing your competition.

1. What is their focus?
2. What key phrases are they trying to rank on google for?
3. What language are they using?
4. What is their content schedule looking like?
5. What is their content about?
6. What are some missed opportunities?
7. What are the common trends within your competition?
8. Best platforms to convert traffic from?
9. Best ad platforms?

Here are a few resources you can go to that have answers to all these questions and more.

BuzzSumo is one of the more popular social media and content marketing tools. Key benefits include:

• Trends and questions the public are asking
• Research popular content and gives you a large index of social engagement data
• Identifies and finds top influencers whose platforms can help give you more reach.

Ahrefs is an all in one tool that handles everything from reports, backlink profiles, organic keyword rankings, traffic, content rankings, and more. They provide an incredible amount of value in an all-in-one dashboard that’s very easy to navigate.

Google Keyword Planner is let’s you do targeted keyword data on your competitors whether it’s paid or organic traffic. Find more long-tail keywords by signing in to Google’s Keyword Planner and search some of the keywords you harvested to find long-tail keywords.

Start with the root word then find long variations of your keywords. Checking out the competition is the best way to figure out the state of the niche and figure out what’s out there.

Step 2 – Build A Content Bank Of Value

We understand the target reader, got some channels to focus on, and know what questions and content our target audience wants. Now, we give them value. The more value you provide the faster you grow. Providing education is always the best principle to go on.

Imagine you consistently help provide valuable information, tips, hacks, entertaining items, a small percentage of promotional material, and practical advice.

Eventually, people will look at you as the authority and come to you whenever they’re ready to work with you. Your target audience’s problems should be your primary concern.

Once you start understanding the questions they’re asking you can start to build your content strategy around that.

Questions that you should try to answer include:

• Why do they want to learn about [your niche]?
• How important is [your niche] to them? (i.e., is it a hobby or part of their job?)
• How do they like to learn? (e.g., video, text, audio, etc., and on what type of device)
• What common questions do they have about [your niche]?
• How knowledgeable are they about [your niche]?

To answer these questions you have to observe your audience.

Answerthepublic.com is another great choice when figuring out questions people ask in your niche.

Simply type in a keyword and get a massive amount of information about what are the most popular questions asked about the keyword you entered.

Look through Subreddits and get a visual of how posts are being created either using text, pictures, videos, links, or articles. Find out how the community likes to consume information.

Type into a Google Search “[your niche]” and you’ll get a list of results. Look through there and try to get an idea of how your ideal customer communicates.

Use the strategies above to gain access to all the insights that will help guide you to the best type of content marketing strategy that will best serve you and your business.

The Best Content Marketing Strategies and Ideas

• Blog Posts / Blogging – This type of content marketing is one of the most popular types of small businesses. Blog posts improve SEO and help boost organic traffic.

• Social Media Posts – Jokes quotes quick tips images, GIFs, and Memes most shareable types of content marketing on the web.

• Video Content – Video content always performs the best on social media more than any other type of content and is expected to make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021. It grabs your target attention and engages them quickly. Jumping into this now is vital to stay competitive in the future.

• Interviews – This is a great way to connect with your niche, by interviewing industry experts or businesses related to your field. Focus locally then expanding will help grow a local niche following and give you the foundation to build a large audience. Host live interviews through webinars or live streams, record content uses it for an episode/series channel on YouTube, transcribe interviews into text for a blog, and actively seek opportunities to be interviewed by third-party sources.

• Case Studies – One of the most valuable types of content marketing. Case studies cover the customer’s story and how your product or service helped them achieve an end goal. These stories help others understand how what you do can add value to their lives or their business.

• Infographics – This is a form of visual content marketing that gives a captivating view data, like statistics, so they can see the value of something or how it works. They help educate the audience in a useful way that adds value. These are often very shareable much like memes and GIFs

• How-to Guides – How-to guides have often gathered a lot of traffic within the last few years especially on YouTube. Providing a helpful walk through tutorial with the viewer helps build long-lasting trust and loyalty with the audience. 
• Influencers/Paid Ad Content – Influencer content marketing helps build trust and shows authority to the company they are promoting. Your brand awareness improves as a result of being introduced to a new audience. This gives you major reach and visibility to Millennial and Gen Z consumers.

Consistency Is Key In Social Media Marketing

If you share content for a few weeks then drop off for a month you won’t continue to grow. Even your search engine rankings will be penalized if you don’t continually update and produce new content on your website.

You have to publish content and must be active on social media to grow your target audience online. Keep a variety of certain types of content when you’re posting. You want your content to come off as authentic and relevant.

You know when you’re accomplishing this whenever your audience engagement and reach start to increase.

Step 3: Automate For Success

Trying to stay consistent and post each status on each social media platform would inevitably take up all your time. Using tools and software can help make this process effortless and save you hours in the process.

You can automate and post-date each status, tweet, pin, and more on each social media platform by using the help of software like HootSuite. These software help you automate and schedule all your social content on over 35 popular social networks all on a single secured platform.

They have a free trial version too!

Planning out strategically how you should post and how many times a day is what you will figure out with this kinda tool at your disposal.

Engagement And Optimal Frequency To Post

The “social experience” in social media is amplified by the interactions you have with other people on these platforms. It’s important to focus your attention on these target audiences and engage whenever possible.

Remember that your target goal is providing valuable content to help create interest in your product or service. Be mindful that you don’t come off spammy because your target audience will unfollow you and could get you reported.

That being said, there is no definitive standard when it comes to how much posts should be about adding value vs promotional.

We’ve seen averages that range around 90% value 10% promotional. Usually, you can follow an 80%-90% posts that usually should educate, entertain, inform your audience with the other percent should be to promote your brand and promotional content.

Measuring post frequency while avoiding diminishing returns.

¼ social content promotes your action-oriented content that converts readers and generates profit

¼ social content shares ideas stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded business

¼ social content involves personal interactions with your audience

¼ social content involves partnerships and heavy focus in local events

• Facebook – It’s common to see once per day with a maximum of two posts per day. At a minimum, you should post Facebook 3 times per week.
  • Best Time To Post On Facebook- Lot’s of studies say early afternoon. Try Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Use Facebook Insights and test every week.

• Twitter – Many studies vary from 1-50 tweets a day. Start with something more general around 3 to 15/day.

• • Best Time To Post on Twitter – Twitter is constantly updating with news and events so timing tweets throughout the day is important. With the feed changing rapidly the shelf life of a tweet is small. Figure out when to post and all twitter analytics here.

• Pinterest – Post frequency ranges from 3-30 pins per day. Generally, you can schedule 5 pins per day and add more throughout the day as a “live” pin.

• LinkedIn – The average consensus is at least twice a week but no more than once each business day.

• • Best Time To Post On Twitter – This one usually has the highest success during the morning. Try different hours during the morning to find the best conversions.

• YouTube – Some tips we recommend that can help grow your channel is to have a YouTube posting schedule. Be sure to give yourself time and only upload a couple each week max.

• • Best Time To Post On YouTube – Usually once a week is good enough here. Follow your schedule mentioned above.

• Instagram – We recommend posting at least once per day and three max. Here are great references for the best free analytics tools specific to Instagram.

• • Best Time To Post on Instagram – This can sometimes follow your Facebook posting schedule, but we highly recommend you start there and test after that.

Often a month or two are planned just to stay consistent for any situation. As new events take place or new thoughts can also just be added throughout the week whenever you see fit.

I would recommend you also increase your ideal posting rate based on how many followers you have on each platform. As you reach +10k followers or likes, it would be a good time to increase your post rate.

After you have all the content created and your content schedule automated, we have to start test what works and doesn’t.

Step 4: Track Results Or Fail

Tracking is everything. What gets measured gets accomplished.

It’s not hard but often overlooked. To grow properly you need to understand these metrics not read them. We have to figure out exactly where your audience is coming from.

This helps choose which networks are the most effective way to get your message in front of your audience to become followers.

Using Google Analytics For Tracking

The best place to go for this is Google Analytics because it’s free and the amount of information they provide is hard to match.

Set up an account there if you don’t already have one. I’ll walk you through a quick overview of how Google Analytics works. They provide a thorough outline of every detail of your website. On the dashboard read different categories of reporting and metrics.

Here is a quick breakdown of what this looks like and the benefits of each one.

1. This section gives you an overview of important metrics such as:
   1. Demographics
   2. Interests
   3. Geo
   4. Behavior
   5. Technology
   6. Mobile
   7. Cross-Device

After you compile some data on your website you can use these metrics to help create targeted audiences’ for ads in the future.

1. Acquisition Reporting Overview – Dashboard overview of Top Channels whether it be through direct or organic search. You’ll also see New Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Pages/ Sessions, and Avg. Session duration. 
2. Behavior Reporting Overview – This gives you a visual of the journey your visitors go through whenever they visit your website. This information can help you improve sections were you’re experiencing a high bounce rate. The report also gives you great information on which pages are the most popular too.
   
   
3. Conversion Reporting Overview – In this report, you’ll set Goals, Ecommerce Tracking, and Multi-Channel Funnels. Goals are a versatile way to measure target objectives you set for your visitors ie:
   
   1. Place Orders
   2. Create Account
   3. Contact Us Forms
   4. Read Reviews
   5. Get Callback
   6. Live Chat
   7. Update

You know how to navigate Google Analytics. Be sure to play around with all the features and set goals.

This will help you track engagement more accurately in the future.

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing is one of the fastest ways to connect with your customers, increase awareness of your brand, and boost leads and sales.

These are some of the basic guidelines to follow to help you reach your social media marketing goals this year. Be sure to check out some of our other resources regarding this topic and subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Rival Report.

Are you looking for a social media marketing management agency for your business? Give us a call at (1-314-384-5025) or contact us online here.