Almost 53% of the world is engaging on social media platforms right now. This amounts to almost 4.2 billion active social media users on various platforms. Suffice it to say, more than half of the total internet usage is directed towards social media platforms. Although there is a large variety of platforms, all of them have active and even unique users signing up every day.

The aforementioned facts clearly prove the importance of incorporating social media in your digital marketing strategy. While the audience you’re looking to target might be engaging on a different platform, the fact remains that all sorts of audiences can be reached through social media marketing.

Depending upon the niche of your business, there are platforms that can work in your favour should you apply the right tactics at the right time. This is something that will require thorough research, something for which you can consider hiring a digital marketing agency. You need to understand your business and the type of audience that are plausible customers for it.

Only after you’ve reached a point of understanding pertaining to your business needs and goals can you apply the 7 pillars of SMM to your online campaign. These pillars are important aspects of social media marketing and can work for all sorts of audiences, provided you have them narrowed down.

Let’s take a look at them:

7 Pillars of Social Media Marketing

Audience Research

We’ve already established the significance of researching the ideal audience for your business. This is key in determining how well your strategy will go. To keep it simple, let’s just say you won’t be doing yourself a favour by reaching out to doctors and selling them fertiliser. Similarly, targeting the youth to sell cars might seem like a good idea, but your chances of getting sales are significantly lower.

Audiences can be categorised and classified according to their interests, behaviour, etc. It’s critical to know your audience because you can’t target all social platforms.

You need a specific set of platforms that have the highest number of people relevant to your business engaging on a regular basis. If you hire a social media marketing agency, they’ll also spend time searching for target audiences and use any data they can find to narrow down potential masses.

For example, Quora is known to be a hub that has over 300 million users, with 43% being females, 35% being Americans, 65% being degree holders, etc. As a webmaster or advertiser, you can understand that information such as this can be integral in ensuring your social media marketing is targeting the perfect audience.  

Strategy and Planning

Strategising and planning your marketing goals are the next steps to take once you’ve found the right platform and more importantly, the right audience.

Every platform has its own interface and trends with respect to what and how people view content. For example, YouTube only supports videos and thus, you can’t hope to reach people through textual content. 

Similarly, Facebook might allow multiple forms of content but depending upon your target audience and goals, perhaps going with slideshows might be better. People have hired a digital marketing agency that excels in social media strategies just for consultations. Suffice it to say, even a consultation with an expert can be decisive.

You can look towards your competitors in this regard to have a better idea about what works. There can be a variety of ways to make an impression on users and establish a credible identity. Stats show that video content is likely to generate more trust when embedded along with texts. 

As you can probably deduce, this also depends highly upon how well you’ve researched your audience and competitors. Simply put, it is important that you have a robust social media marketing strategy if you desire to succeed in this domain.  

Scheduling and Publishing

This is something that most people often overlook and underestimate. Scheduling and publishing were thought to be irrelevant details of social media marketing before people started to realise the significance of time.

Sure, every social media user is going to log on at some point in time during any given day. However, there are going to be millions of people posting updates that are going to crowd the users’ feeds. 

This is why you need to enhance your audience research and figure out times when your users are likely to log on. An effective social media marketing agency recognises scheduling and publishing as tasks of a critical nature as they can either break or make your overall strategy.

Since you’re only working with numbers, go with the analytical data that will give you the ideal time to schedule and publish your posts. 

While you’re encouraged to have multiple posts in your pipeline, timing them perfectly to land in people’s feeds at the moment of logging on can really improve your chances.

Listening and Engagement

Social media is better than search engines and even your business websites for users. That is because people feel more comfortable engaging with others and even businesses through familiar platforms. Most of social media marketing involves engaging with users online.

It’s vital for any business to generate a credible, trustworthy and authoritative identity in the eyes of the public. Regardless of whichever industry or niche you’re targeting, you need the public’s endorsement. 

This is where some of the most notable examples of companies like Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Wendy’s, etc. are important for consideration.

While some of these companies resorted to sponsoring influencers and have them promote the company’s products, others have sought endorsements through gifts and donations. This has worked because people believe a lot of things they hear on social media. 

The recent Venmo cash campaigns have worked wonders in terms of influencing people and getting conversions. All good campaigns have been followed by massive user engagement and while you can’t satisfy everyone, you are required to do as much as you can and more.

However, the key to succeed here is hiring a reliable and reputable digital marketing agency that specialises in social media marketing. For instance, hiring Zoom Digital can ensure that your audiences are engaged and kept updated on everything your business is up to.

You need to engage with your peers and clients, especially if you’re new to the business. Not only will you face criticism and bad reviews, but you’ll also have to respond to customer complaints and update them on what’s to come.  

Use of Tools for Analytics and Reporting

Not knowing how well you’re doing is how you jeopardise your chances of success. You can’t judge how your strategy is faring by comments and a few engagements.

Rely on hard facts, stats and analytics to keep a track of what’s happening. There are many tools provided by various platforms such as YouTube Studio, Facebook Ad Manager, Google Analytics, etc. You can even find tools like Hootsuite and more that aid in social media marketing. 

These tools can provide you with detailed insights into how every post has performed. You can take a look at the reach, impressions, interaction and engagement, retention, design and schedule posts and a lot more. Social media marketing also revolves around analytical reports that comprise data collected through various campaigns, often improving with trial and error. 

These stats are crucial in helping an advertiser understand how they can improve upon their strategy. Whether it’s the content that needs improving, the scheduling that needs revision or even narrowing down target audiences, your strategy can become significantly better by regular reporting on analytics.

It’s understandable that the work this entails can be frustrating and stressful. This is why we recommend getting in touch with a digital marketing agency that specializes in social media marketing. After they’ve crunched the numbers, they’ll let you know the gist of the important stats that can help you look for creative solutions.

Branding and Promotion

Once you’ve established all of the above, you’ll already be in the process of branding your business. Considering how different platforms provide different campaign options, you can choose to reach out to the masses. While quick and immediate paid campaigns can promise instant outreach, you need a viable long-term plan. Unless you hire a digital marketing agency to help you with it all, you should get started long before executing it.

Promoting your business will become significantly easier once you’ve figured out what your audience likes and wants. By engaging with them on a regular basis, you can find groups, pages, communities, forums and much more to promote your business. Make sure to include relevant links and information that your peers will find interesting, helpful and engaging. Much of your social media marketing should be focused on engaging the user before encouraging a call to action.

You don’t just want people to know that your business exists. You want them to know what it provides and how credible an authority can be considered for any given niche. Don’t be afraid to cover news pertaining to your industry even if your business isn’t directly involved.

Advertisement

Lastly, paid advertisements to come into play after you’ve made sure that your social media marketing is going adequately well. While you can do it on your own, it’s strictly recommended that you resort to hiring a digital marketing agency or social media marketing professionals who can save your budget.

Paid advertisements are of many types depending upon the goal that you’re trying to attain. Even a million-dollar budget can be spent in a few seconds unless the advertiser hasn’t set proper goals and narrowed down audiences to target. Whereas, a thousand-dollar budget can help you reach out to clients and generate the maximum number of sales.

All platforms provide their own advertising tools and interfaces. You can find all of them offering some or other types of classification and categorisation options that allow you to narrow down audiences. For example, you can use Facebook to target CEOs or Co-Founders of any organisation regularly spending budget or showing interest in specific niches/products at any time. Similarly, other platforms also offer targeting options that can greatly save your advertising budget.

Conclusion

Social media platforms are showing no signs of slowing down in terms of garnering more traffic and signing up even more unique and new users. As of 2021, the average person spends around 2 hours and 25 minutes on social networks. The numbers only prove more useful when considering the youth who’s found using social media platforms for almost 3 hours every day.

You can find stats like these changing every day only to prove that it’s high time to target social media for your business marketing campaign. We recommend getting in touch with an expert at Zoom Digital to make sure that you get off on the right foot.