The Complete Social Media Marketing Guide

Today it is estimated that over 80% of people with internet access are active users of various social media platforms. As of 2021, Facebook alone is estimated to have close to 3 billion monthly users, which is a huge number. Other social media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest and X have become hugely popular and continue to increase user counts at an incredible rate.

On average people spend close to 2 hours per day on social media, making it an essential platform for advertising opportunities. If you are running a business and looking to increase sales and client leads, investing in a marketing campaign on various social media outlets is an absolute no-brainer.

Why do social media marketing?

1. It helps you increase your brand awareness. It is important to brand your social media posts with a logo or product name, ensuring that people will recognize it the moment they see it. As your posts go viral, people who start recognizing your brand will come to consider you as an established business or product which is associated with a higher quality and value. 
2. You can generate leads through social media marketing by using likes, clicks, and shares to collect valuable demographics data on people who are interested in your business. Engage with them and convert them to leads by having your sales team following up to generate new business through these leads.
3. Engagement is crucial in social media. Comments by potential customers must be addressed, particularly if you receive a negative or critical review. You must either thank the customer or attempt to resolve an issue in a professional, friendly manner. You will get all types of comments and you must be prepared to handle them effectively. The more you engage with your followers, the more benefits you get. 
4. Active participation and engagement with your clients and followers on social media marketing can give you a distinctive advantage over your competitors by being perceived as the more trustworthy and reliable brand.
5. Social media marketing is easy to implement. It is not too complicated, all you need to do is create useful and eye-catching content and share it on a regular basis. Creating social media profiles is free and will immediately start to generate followers as long as you keep sharing content. Creating a large fan-base in an organic way takes time and patience. If you want to boost brand awareness rapidly, you can engage influencer accounts for a fee to quickly boost your followers and likes numbers. This can be a cost-effective way to actively reach out to new customers who are not aware of your brand, although in the longer term the strategy may incur a penalty with the platform’s algorithms.

How to create a successful social media marketing campaign? 

The first thing to do is to create a marketing strategy, you need a clear cut plan on what you will do and what results you want to achieve. There is no common marketing strategy for all business types, your approach will depend on whether your business offers a product or a service. 

High quality content and copywriting are usually the most important factors for effective social media posts. It is also vital that this content is released at a consistent and frequent rate to keep your followers engaged. It is preferable to create 1 post per week over a 10 week period rather than 10 posts in the first week and nothing for the remaining 9.

If your business is focused on marketing and selling a product, hiring a professional photographer to create high quality retouched visuals can be a good investment to elevate the image of your brand. If you are an advertising or real estate agency, you can market concept designs of your product or property development by hiring a professional artist or studio like Cleanpix Graphics to supply high quality 3d rendering services, creating life-like computer generated visuals.

When it comes to copywriting, ensure that your messages have good flow and descriptions but fairly succinct. Most social media platforms are image based and users don’t want to be bombarded with huge blocks of text. Most of them will only skim through their feed content so it is better to get them interested with effective imagery. Once you have their attention, they will find a way to get in touch if they want to find out more details.

Be sure to include some relevant hashtagged keywords at the end of your posts. This will ensure that your posts will be recommended to users who are interested in the themes and topics that your posts address.

Conclusion

A wise use of photos, 3d visualizations, copywriting, infographics and videos will help make your social media posts attractive and increase your reach to a wider audience. A well-planned and properly implemented social media strategy can help you earn rich returns. Your customers will start engaging with you online and you can build on this to boost your business and brand name recognition.