Social Media Marketing with Confidence

Running any type of marketing effort without including social media means missing out on a compelling array of benefits.

From increased user engagement to better brand loyalty and even more sales, social media marketing assists all types of businesses with their bottom line. Discover the tips for social media marketing and optimization in this comprehensive guide.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to a controlled effort to help a brand achieve its goals through the use of social networks.

These goals could include anything from promoting products and services to increasing brand awareness and creating a loyal following for companies.

In today’s media landscape, it’s almost impossible to promote anything without using social media. Statistics show that around 4.48 billion people worldwide use these networks, with the average person accessing around six social media accounts daily.

These platforms bring together a significant number of your potential customers, empowering your company to engage with them directly.

Developing an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Communicating through social media based on intuition or without a specific plan in mind rarely yields the many benefits these platforms have to offer.

Instead, companies must develop a comprehensive strategy to strategically approach social audiences by:

1. Defining Their Goals

First, brands must decide what objectives they aim to fulfill through social media. Even if the platforms will take on multiple purposes, a comprehensive campaign should have a singular goal that serves as the basis for the individual methods chosen to reach it.

For example, brand A’s main goal through social media may be to increase brand awareness, as it’s a new company looking to form an audience. Brand B may already have an established audience, but it needs to increase levels of engagement.

Both brands may use social media for the same secondary purpose (customer support, promoting new services and products, running promotions, etc.), but they will have different approaches to meeting their primary goal.

2. Know Their Target Audience

Communicating on social media is different from how brands talk on their websites or emails. Social networks, in a way, humanize the company and allow them to create personalities through which to engage their customers.

But it’s worth knowing who that audience is and what they’re most likely to respond to in terms of tone of voice, type of content, and more.

3. Choosing the Right Platforms

Not all social networks may prove valuable to you. The golden rule here is to go where your audience is, meaning choosing the social networks where most of your clients (current or potential) are present.

Apart from this, you can also choose your networks based on the type of business you run, your goals, and the type of content you can promote.

You can find a more in-depth article on how to create a social media strategy here.

Leveraging Social Media Advertising

Social media empowers brands to reach a wider audience than the people who follow and subscribe to their accounts.

Running paid advertising through social media can help brands get their products and services to new audience members who already have an account on these networks. From there, the process is optimized for the customer’s benefit. They can quickly click on a Facebook ad to either visit your landing page or view your business page to learn more about what you offer.

Many of these social networks offer enhanced targeting capabilities. From Facebook to TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, these platforms all gather crucial user information, which you can use, to an extent, to find your target consumer.

Optimizing Social Media Presence

Social media optimization is a strategy designed to improve how a brand presents itself on these social networks.

It can assist in creating a stronger brand, improving visibility, and even increasing engagement as you improve how your company is perceived.

Some methods to optimize your social media presence include:

1. Updating profile information
2. Improve account branding (logos, cover photos, company bios, etc.).
3. Creating engaging content
4. Using hashtags efficiently
5. Participating in social media trends, etc.

Implementing Social Media Campaigns

There are three major steps in a social media campaign: planning, executing, and measuring its success.

The planning stage can involve, among others, the following efforts:

1. Set campaign objectives: Decide what the overall purpose of a social media campaign is, be it general (to increase brand awareness) or specific (to increase the sales of a new product). The goal will help when you’re establishing the other steps in your overall strategy.

2. Creating content: All the posts included in your strategy should be centered around the main goal chosen in the first step. You should also take into account your target audience and the type of content they are more likely to respond to.

3. Choosing relevant campaign metrics: Assessing the success of any campaign comes at the monitoring and reporting stage. However, it’s worth establishing the most relevant metrics for your success beforehand and keeping an eye on these numbers even as the campaign is running to make timely changes if necessary.

4. Choosing additional social media tools: Third-party tools may provide more in-depth insights into campaign performance than native tracking solutions. These can include post-analysis tools and even social listening software.

Promoting Branding Through Social Media

Branding can be a key focus of a social media strategy. These networks enable companies to establish, promote, and reinforce their brand identities like never before.

The visual nature of most social media sites helps brands engage audiences and offer them the opportunity to make a memorable impression, whether the viewer follows the account or not. To ensure your branding efforts pay off, it’s crucial to be consistent across all social network accounts your brand is associated with.

This can involve anything from using key visual elements to promoting the same brand message and tone of voice across all accounts.

Using Mandala AI’s Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media advertising and marketing are made much simpler through certain third-party tools that can help you gather more insights into what your customers want, your campaign performances, and even what your competitors are doing.

Mandala AI aims to support brands in gathering all this data through intuitive and effective AI-based solutions such as:

1. Mandala Cosmos
2. Mandala Analytics
3. Top Channel Monitoring, etc.

Through these tools, brands can streamline their social media efforts and gain valuable data to optimize their performance, sometimes even in real time. This can enable your company to make more data-driven decisions throughout all your marketing efforts, therefore increasing the chances of gaining the results you strive for.

Social media marketing is a priority for most companies, given today’s landscape. Consumers often turn to these websites to fulfill several needs, from finding new products and services to researching a new brand or even staying in touch with what brands and industries have to offer.

Companies that don’t leverage the full power of social media advertising and marketing may be missing out on some of the most efficient channels for promotion. And by using data to drive your decisions at all stages of a campaign, the chances of a successful campaign skyrocket.

Mandala AI can help you gather that data with ease. Get started by signing up for a free account today, or register for one of our competitively priced plans to unlock the full potential of our solutions.