What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the set of activities a company undertakes on social platforms to help create awareness, build relationships, develop leads, generate sales and ultimately grow revenue for the company.
A useful framework for understanding how social media marketing integrates with other digital marketing activities is the Paid, Owned, Earned and Social Media model. This model describes different techniques or “pillars” that a business can use to deliver content to target audiences that are online.
The best marketing strategies use a well-integrated combination of all four pillars. This model forms a powerful digital marketing ecosystem and can act as a strong foundation for all your online and social media marketing efforts.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the set of activities a company undertakes on social platforms to help create awareness, build relationships, develop leads, generate sales and ultimately grow revenue for the company.
A useful framework for understanding how social media marketing integrates with other digital marketing activities is the Paid, Owned, Earned and Social Media model. This model describes different techniques or “pillars” that a business can use to deliver content to target audiences that are online.
The best marketing strategies use a well-integrated combination of all four pillars. This model forms a powerful digital marketing ecosystem and can act as a strong foundation for all your online and social media marketing efforts.
The 4 Pillars of Digital Marketing:
- Paid Media
- Content and messaging delivered from a company to consumers by paying to leverage a channel not controlled by the company.
- Examples: Facebook Advertising, Google Adwords (search engine marketing), Display Ads, Native Advertising
- Owned Media
- Earned Media
- A reaction, comment, share or message about a company that’s passed between consumers as a result of a brand engagement or experience
- Examples: Brand-related comments, shares, reactions, likes, tweets and retweets, earned impressions, Yelp reviews, blog comments
- Social Media
- The content, messaging, campaigns and programs delivered via social profiles and accounts that you manage on social networks and platforms
- Examples include a Facebook business page, Twitter account, LinkedIn company page, a YouTube channel, Reddit community, a Glassdoor company page, or Facebook or LinkedIn Group
Social Media Content Marketing
Content is at the core of our social media marketing services. Whether it’s a well-written blog post, a Facebook post, a Twitter campaign or content for some other social platform, excellent content is at the heart of successful social media marketing.
What is excellent content? It’s content that truly resonates with your audience. Content should also have a business purpose – it should work to create awareness, build visibility and generate leads.
Great content requires two things:
- Understanding and knowing your audience inside-out – this requires real effort to know exactly who you’re trying to target as leads, prospects and customers – their demographics, needs, desires, interests, behaviors, and objections
- Thoughtfulness and creativity – great content needs to be at least two or more of these:
- Authentic,
- Interesting,
- Informative,
- Educational,
- Entertaining and
- Relevant (this one isn’t optional).
In other words, the kind of content that really matters to the people you’re trying to reach.
Beyond great content, another important aspect of social media marketing is continuously nurturing and building your network. This requires listening to conversations and comments, responding thoughtfully, and being consistently engaged with your audience. It’s about being…social.
We help ensure your social media activity is aligned with your other marketing efforts and your overall brand and business goals.
Social Media Paid Ads
Paid social media campaigns are an important component of a successful social media strategy.
But social media paid advertising has become far more complicated than it was even just a couple of years ago. Over time, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn realized they needed to generate ad revenue to become profitable. In just a few short years, they rapidly improved and expanded the capabilities of their paid advertising platforms. These ad platforms are now filled with numerous platform-specific options, features and jargon.
Some social networks offer specific types of paid ads. For example, Twitter offers “Promoted Tweets”, Facebook offers “Boosted Posts” and Pinterest has “Promoted Pins”. Other platforms also allow content and advertising syndication, such as Reddit, Taboola and Outbrain. All advertising on these platforms undergo review and approval processes, and each has best practices and rules of the road.
At the same time, these open communities have seen a massive proliferation in trolls, hackers, bots and fake accounts and profiles. Regulatory agencies are starting to require social networks to overhaul how they handle and monitor advertising, fake accounts and false information. In an effort to combat these issues, social networks are beginning to clamp down on the type of content that’s shown in people’s feeds. This means stricter rules, limitations and reviews of ad content.
And then there are the regulators themselves – industry regulators, state, federal and others. These regulators are catching up with social networks. They are now enacting new advertising rules and regulations at a more rapid pace than we saw in the early “wild-west” days of social media.
The result is a messy, complicated social media advertising landscape. Companies must be vigilant in curating their social media accounts and brand reputation. On social media, hackers and malicious actors have the potential to sideline and damage companies in a very short time span.
Even with all the challenges, there are still significant opportunities in social media. Many companies are already reaping the benefits of the scale and power of social networks. A clear digital and social media marketing strategy is essential for a regulated business to be successful.
It can be daunting if you’re trying to decide how to get the most “bang for the buck” with social media advertising. Many companies aren’t sure if they have the right approach. We create smart, targeted social media campaigns using both paid advertising and organic content on social networks. We provide comprehensive social media paid advertising management services, including Facebook Advertising, Twitter Sponsored and Promoted Ads, Instagram Ads, Snap Ads, LinkedIn Solutions and more.
We help you navigate the complexity of social media advertising. Our goal is to make sure your ad spend is effective, your risks are managed and you see results.
Influencer Marketing
Trust has always been the primary currency in influencing opinion. In the era of 24/7 information access, digital influence has become a key element of how decisions are filtered and made by your customers.
So what is digital influence?
It’s the impact of digital networks and relationships that earn likes, shares, comments and conversations about your products and your business. That influence has real value and can make or break the hard-earned reputation of any business, large or small.
Today, companies that are truly digitally savvy are using social influencers to grow their audience, build trusted relationships and gain a competitive edge by establishing strong relationships with influencers who are aligned with their own company values.
Remaining credible in a sea of digital noise has become an imperative. Consumers are 84% more likely to trust personal recommendations and a solid influencer strategy can help your business tell your story. Effective influencer marketing means telling that story through the voices of the people that matter the most to your customers – the people they care about, the people they listen to, and the people they trust.
Reviews Strategy and Management
Customers love to post reviews about their experiences with companies. It’s very possible that your customers have probably already posted reviews about your business online. Sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have built their entire business models around reviews and no wonder. All that user-generated content is really rich material for search engines, because the content is authentic and written by real people.
For those reasons, search engines consider reviews to be of very high “value”. The result is that reviews score highly in search engine algorithms, and websites that include users’ reviews are ranked more highly in search results.
Making sure you know what’s being said about you on reviews and ratings sites is also good for business. In regulated industries, it might even be required. In some circumstances, it can make sense to respond to reviews on 3rd party sites – but not always.
We’ll help you navigate the customer reviews arena with confidence.
Check out the latest Social Media Trends for 2018
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Part of your digital marketing plan should include getting your business found in search engines like Google. Of course, nowadays, people also use social networks to find information. In fact, YouTube and Facebook consistently vie for second place in the search engine race. We use SEO and SEM tools and techniques to help drive traffic to your social networks (where people already hang out) and your website (where you want them to be).
Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are techniques that focus on analyzing content in detail and then using that analysis to improve how your business shows up in search engine results. The higher you are in Google or other search engine results, the more traffic you’ll receive when people click on the links in those results.
The first step to getting your business ranked higher in search engine results is to to use SEO and SEM techniques to conduct a keyword analysis. This involves finding out how many people are searching for particular words and phrases that are relevant to your business. The keyword analysis and insights are the foundation of a keyword strategy – deciding which keywords to use, where and when. We then use that keyword information, along with many other factors that affect search engine rankings, to develop a content strategy. The final result is that the content you develop is actually relevant and targeted to your audience and prospects. It’s also far more effective at driving traffic to your website and/or social media channels.
Search Engine Optimization is both an art and a science. It requires in-depth knowledge of how keywords impact content, how Google’s algorithms work (and other search engines), and how to optimize those keywords for both humans and search engine algorithms. SEO is a critical tool in online marketing and can be enormously successful in driving traffic to both websites and social networks.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) uses paid advertising to increase reach, create awareness and drive traffic on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. SEM includes pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising.
We can help you use SEO and SEM to benefit your business.
Community Strategy and Management
Building an online community of your customers is no small feat, whether it’s on a dedicated community site or across your website and social media channels.
Nurturing a sense of community with your own customers takes strategy, patience and effort.
Make sure you’re cultivating reasons for your customers and community to keep returning and participating in the conversation. The benefits to having a vibrant community are immense, from the user-generated content that’s created, to the rich authenticity of real people having conversations online. The feedback and suggestions you receive can even help you further understand and improve your business.
Our expertise in Social Media Management with online engagement and communities can help you to build an audience that’s engaged, passionate and loyal – all great attributes for new, current and returning customers. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation to discuss your Social Media Marketing needs.
Let’s talk…
Contact us now to talk about your challenges and opportunities in social media and how we can help.