The 5 Pillars of Social media marketing

If you are a small local business looking to get more engagements, social media marketing is a platform you can’t ignore. Along with local SEO for small business, social media marketing offers an affordable way to promote your product. Just consider the compelling numbers that define the potential of social media marketing for your business:

1. More than half the world’s population is on social media right now.
2. That means 6 out of 10 people worldwide have a social media account.
3. There are 400 million social media accounts created worldwide in the last twelve months
4. A user typically spends more than two hours on social media
5. 45% of internet users research a product they wish to purchase on social media

With these numbers, it is no surprise that companies of all sizes use major social media platforms to engage with their potential customers. However, with many companies engaging in their respective social media campaigns, including your competition, you need to follow the principles of social media optimization for your own social media marketing strategy to pay dividends. Using the tools provided by various social media platforms to promote your content to the right set of audiences, you need to understand the five pillars of social media marketing before formulating an effective social media strategy.

Social Media Marketing Goals

Before we discuss each social media pillar in detail, let us first discuss your social media goals. A social media marketing plan should focus on achieving one of these three goals:

1. Building Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is critical when promoting yourself to your target audience. Engaging directly in conversion won’t guarantee success if you don’t take building brand awareness seriously. The first big step businesses should take when engaging in various social media sites is to engage in an effective brand awareness campaign.The content strategy should focus on telling a company’s story, why they provide their services and products, and to whom these products and services are for. It is important to note that the language of your target audience may differ depending on which social media channels they hang out with. Here is when social media influencers are helpful, for instance.

2. Generating Engagement with Your Target Audience: Most social media platforms provide the chance for business owners, or their representatives, to engage with interested prospects. As your social media marketing campaign gains traction, your brand’s reach will touch with hot prospects. You can help them take the next step towards conversion by engaging with them.

3. Conversion: The goal of conversion is to make cold prospects take the next step into working with you. Once they find value in your business, they may click on a link to your engaging website, either because they are curious enough to learn more about your business or purchase. Various social media platforms provide business tools to allow conversions. Facebook has business tools where you can select a post with calls to action that will enable visitors to click on your site through paid campaigns. You can also leave links to your site on your organic social media posts.

Each of your social media posts primarily serves one of these goals. Your content strategy selected social media platform, and social media advertising techniques are defined by which of these goals you are trying to reach. For a small local business trying to leverage social media marketing to achieve its growth targets, properly realizing these goals will always lead to a successful social media marketing campaign.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing: What Should Your Social Media Campaign Contain?

Now that you are aware of the goals of your social media marketing strategy, it is time to know the five pillars, or foundations, of what you should know what your social media posts should contain, the frequency of posting, and which social media marketing platforms these should be posted:

1. Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy:

Your marketing strategy should aid your larger marketing goals. Here, you should know which social media channel your target audience are likely to see you, what content is appropriate based on social media marketing trends, and how you will post your content based on competitive analysis (more on this later). For instance, if your business deals with clothing, your image-heavy content will likely be more engaging on a specific social network, like Instagram. If you are into trendy attire, your content will most likely make the most impact on Tiktok.

2. Preparing and Posting Your Content

Now that you have your goal and strategy and have selected the most appropriate social channels to reach your audience, it is time to compose compelling content from which your target will see more value. A recommended shortcut is to study more successful social media marketing campaigns from players within the same industry niche. Video has a more lasting impact than plain text or images. However, for B2B, a link to a blog post or a blog post written on Linkedin may garner more reach. Whether you choose an image, video, or blog post, they must speak the language your target audience understands. This content should address a need that your business can handle.

3. Engaging Your Audience

Once your social media presence grows, people will begin to message you directly or post comments. Interested prospects will even visit your site by clicking now to links on your post. Once this happens, engaging your audience by answering their questions and providing value for the time they took to know more about your business is crucial. Social media management tools on specific social media platforms enable you to send a message directly without constant attention. Moreover, engaging on social media gives you helpful insights into which direction to enhance your digital marketing campaign overall.

4. Tracking Your Social Media Marketing Performance through Social Media Analytics

There are several social media management tools available where you can track engagement, click-throughs, conversion, and other helpful insights. In the case of brand awareness campaigns, you should be looking at your reach data. Please note that engagements do not directly correlate with sales. However, it is helpful insight to determine that your social media campaigns are likely reaching the right people. You can also monitor your ad spend and lead numbers if you are on a conversion campaign. In the case of Facebook advertising, there is a tool called “pixel,” which helps retarget your social media marketing campaign until you hit the right audience.

5. Generate Advertising on Social Media Platforms

Compared to traditional marketing, the ad spend on Facebook advertising is lower per lead generated. However, it still depends on how well you conduct your campaigns. Nevertheless, social media provides you with a comparatively affordable way to advertise your brand to a broader audience. You can also generate more advertising by publishing user-generated content from relevant posts that will be helpful to your brand.

Takeaways: A Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy Is All About Having the Right Goals

Many social media marketing courses promise quick returns from social media. Though you have tremendous potential customers, having the wrong goals will lead to wasted resources. As an SEO company in Philippines that also deal with social media marketing campaigns, this is a common thing we notice among clients that come to us that were frustrated with social media marketing campaigns that were expensive and not bearing fruit. Astute social media marketers use the first social media marketing campaigns to retarget to ensure more efficient social media campaigns later on once they know their target audience, the language they speak, on which social media platform they hang out, and generate content that will likely excite them. The first campaign will most likely lead to knowing your target audience more than your target audience knowing about your business. These five pillars and goal setting are the most crucial aspect of social media campaigns.