Marketing strategies have changed radically in the last decades. Digital content is one of the factors that determines the good performance of a company. But… what is Social Media Marketing and why are we interested in learning it?
In the following article, we provide you with all those basic notions about the most important (but still unaware) of Social Media Marketing. Thanks to the tips and strategies we will help you to improve your social skills and the situation of your company, at least in everything related to the area of marketing and sales (1).
Summary
- Social Media Marketing is a new advertising revolution. It is a new way of communicating and persuading potential customers, so the way of interacting with them has forced companies to adapt.
- The customer is no longer just a customer, now he is also an audience. This means that they have opinions, reactions and preferences that force us to constantly improve.
- Social Media Marketing allows us to obtain a lot of information from the target audience so that campaigns can be personalized or targeted appropriately. For this reason, following a good strategy is fundamental (2,3).
What you should know about Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, we all spend many hours glued to electronic devices, and not only that, but we interact with each other and with brands through social networks. So, marketing has also had to adapt to this area to increase the numbers of their companies and get a profit.
What is Social Media Marketing?
We refer to Social Media Marketing as the process of creating content with the objective of promoting a brand or business on social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok. It is intended that each company generates its own content in order to be known among the target audience and, thus, can generate higher sales and, consequently, economic benefit for the company.
Social Media Marketing is one of the parts that currently make up a marketing strategy. While other strategies aim to sell a product, Social Media Marketing aims to get the public involved with the brand through a link.
What is Social Media Marketing for?
As we have already mentioned, the objective of
Social Media Marketing is to create your own content to make the brand known. What benefits can all this effort translate into for the company?
- It improves the customer’s perception of the brand, company and product.
- By creating a bond with the public, loyalty to the company increases.
- It allows for improving customer service because we know what they specifically need.
- Increases the volume of sales and commercial contacts.
- It allows increasing our presence and traffic in networks and webs.
Why use Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing has spread through a multitude of media and has developed many tools in a very short time. Thanks to these characteristics, companies can benefit from its dynamism, flexibility and new strategies that are constantly being developed.
The main reason why we surrender to Social Media Marketing is that it allows us to generate debate, opinions and relationships between potential consumers and the company, which allows us to obtain information about what interests them, what could be improved or simply to get closer to the customer.
The reasons why we are interested in learning how to use Social Media Marketing are:
- It has a low cost since the social networks with more users are free.
- Its investment allows us to obtain a high return, since the cost of a Social Media Marketing campaign is cheaper than, for example, the use of Social Ads.
- An adequate Social Media campaign allows us to obtain good opinions and generate a brand image among customers.
- We can have access to statistics and data that allow us to know if the content is reaching the public.
Advantages and objectives of Social Media Marketing
The success of Social Media Marketing lies in the fact that it improves the data in those objectives set by marketing departments and that previous strategies have not yet been fully satisfied. The Social Media Marketing strategy has a series of advantages that have turned it into the ideal resource for brand advertising campaigns in a short period of time. Some of these advantages can be seen in the following table.
| Advantages | Goal |
|---|---|
| Allows interaction between the user and the company | Improve brand image |
| Generates customer loyalty | Increase in sales volume |
| To make yourself known to your target audience | Getting more traffic on social networks |
| Reduces the cost of marketing for the company | Obtain greater profitability from marketing campaigns |
What are the risks of Social Media Marketing?
Although it seems that everyone knows how to use social networks, it is advisable that Social Media Marketing strategies are carried out by a professional, since he/she will be able to analyze the corresponding data, communicate correctly with the public, elaborate an adequate cost plan, among other reasons. The most common risks of this strategy are:
- Leaving the Social Media Marketing campaign in the hands of non-experts.
- Not developing an adequate communication strategy between the message, the company and the target audience.
- Exceeding the cost of the budget allocated to Social Media Marketing due to poor management, lack of analysis and data management (7,8).
What are the best social networks for Social Media Marketing?
Currently, there is a multitude of social networks, but which is the one that best suits us? Here is a list of the social networks with the most users and their characteristics to choose the one that best suits your business.
| Social Network | Goal | Audience | Advantages | Inconveniences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allows users to interact with each other, share text content, images, videos, etc. | Mostly used by people between 18-39 years old, followed by users between 40-65 years old | Easy to use and you can follow themes according to your tastes | Data protection issues | |
| Share opinions, photos, audios and videos in a few characters | Most users are between 25 and 39 years old. | Allows easy access to information | Not as intuitive as other networks | |
| Allows users to share images and videos | It is the youngest social network, with the majority of users between 16 and 23 years of age. | Intuitive and lots of user interaction | The positioning algorithm is very demanding | |
| Tik Tok | Allows you to create and share content | The majority of users are between 16 and 25 years of age | Easy use and access to share content | It is the most recent social network |
What factors are quantifiable in social networks?
In case we decide to apply the Social Media Marketing strategy to our social networks, we must take into account that we must analyze a series of factors to be able to correct the course of the strategy, give the customer what they are interested in and obtain greater notoriety (4).
These factors are:
- Visibility: This is the number of visits or clicks our account receives. It lets us know if the strategy applied has increased our notoriety.
- Interaction: Not only clicks are important, but also whether our content interests users and they decide to follow the account, leave comments, like it… in other words, they react to the published content.
- Influence: It measures the impact of our content on users, if it is shared or if they interact with it (5).
As we can see in the graph, the volume of users who use social networks is very high, so Social Media Marketing is an opportunity to communicate our business ideas to a much more targeted audience than through traditional strategies.
How to make a Social Media Marketing strategy?
To develop a marketing strategy we must be clear about the objectives of the company. Thus, once the goal is defined, we can determine how to reach it as successfully as possible.
Therefore, the steps to follow to develop a Social Media Marketing strategy are as follows:
- Determine objectives: To do this, it is enough to ask questions such as: What are we looking for? What is our brand? What is the number of users I want to follow online? Do we have enough web traffic?
- Knowing our target audience: To know who our product is aimed at, it will be necessary to study the characteristics and tastes that determine them and thus be able to develop content according to them to generate greater interaction and influence.
- Establish which social network will be used for Social Media Marketing: It will depend on the objective to be achieved and the target audience, since, as we have previously explained, each social network has a predominant age group, so we must know to whom we are trying to communicate our message.
- Create content according to the audience: This is the most important thing since it is what will allow the customer to become loyal to our brand. This content should be based on the knowledge we have of the target audience and the social network being used.
- Determine and analyze numbers: Closely related to the objectives, since it will allow us to know if we are following a strategy that works or not. There are multiple tools that allow us to extract graphs and results to analyze the reaction of users and its effect on the brand (6).
What tools can I use in Social Media Marketing?
The tools developed for Social Media Marketing that we present below allow us not only to create and publish new content for our users but also to analyze and study the reports in order to manage new strategies.
| Tool | Tool |
|---|---|
| Buffer | It is a platform for the management of social networks. It allows the scheduling of publications to achieve a constant update. |
| Hootsuite | It has both free and paid versions. Allows you to schedule content and perform impact statistics |
| SocialDrift | The tool is mostly used by large companies. It allows to increase the number of users, extract useful information for the company and, being based on machine learning, improves its protocols to adapt to the target audience. |
| Sendible | Suitable if the customers are very different from each other since it allows to adapt the strategy to each of them. It is possible to develop an editorial calendar to update the content correctly. |
| MavSocial | Gets graphics and videos for social networks. Focused mainly on social content, so it allows you to preview before publishing. |
| Storyheap | Creates analytics on the stories published on Instagram accounts. Generates reports on the popularity and evolution of the account. |
| Unsplash | Provides visual content |
| nTuitive.social | The tool provides analysis of publications in order to know the algorithm that favours the social network in question. |
| IFTTT | Serves for specialized marketing, as the platform runs specific components |
| Socedo | Collects data to analyze trends and adapt marketing strategies |
Are Social Media Marketing courses useful?
As we have previously mentioned, one of the main mistakes regarding
Social Media Marketing is to assume that, just because we use social networks on a daily basis, we know how to use this knowledge in the business area as well. For this reason, we believe that if you are going to dedicate part of your time to developing a Social Media Marketing strategy, the best thing you can do is to hire a course, to learn more quickly and easily the concepts and tools necessary for this area of marketing. Below, we propose a series of characteristics that we must take into account when choosing a
Social Media Marketing course. We are not only interested in the content, but also in the way it is taught, the activities, the level and if it adapts to our needs.
- Pay attention to the institution that teaches the course: Currently, there are a multitude of courses both online and in-person, so it is necessary to verify if the organization in charge of teaching the course has properly trained professionals.
- Course content: Taking into account the level of knowledge about Social Media Marketing with which we start, we will decide which course is best suited to what we are looking for.
- Methodology and practical work: The best learning methodology is based on ‘learning by doing, that is, working on projects while a teacher guides us in order to assimilate all the contents of the course and apply them correctly.
- Duration: Depending on the time we have available to dedicate to the course or our workload, we will have to look at the duration to complete the course.
Conclusion
Social Media Marketing is a marketing strategy that studies, analyzes and experiments with the data provided by marketing campaigns through social networks. All these tools allow to improve the presence of the brand in the networks and to change the opinion or generate loyalty with the users, besides knowing them in depth.
It is the present and future of marketing since the constant emergence of new technologies, devices and social networks force companies to modernize and adapt to new communication channels in order to transmit their message and attract new potential customers.
