Also This article will define these two strategies before looking at how to implement them in a step-by-step way to increase the success of your business.
Social media marketing uses an appropriate social media platform to target a particular audience organically, to grow that audience over time, driving more traffic to your website, increasing sales, and promoting your brand. Other benefits include being able to distribute your content quickly and gain continuous, real-time insight into trends in your marketplace, including the ability to monitor the activities of your competitors.
Social media advertising, in contrast, is a kind of digital marketing that makes use of paid advertisements to target your audience in a much more precise and immediate way, with the benefit of speed to reach your target market directly. When social media marketing and advertising strategies are applied together in a step-by-step manner, they have the potential to generate greatly enhanced visibility and conversion for businesses.
Find Your Target Audience
The first step of a social media marketing and advertising campaign is to identify where your target client spends their time—meaning what social media platform they are most active on. Are they on LinkedIn? If you are selling business to business (B2B), then this could be the ideal location to connect with new clients.
However, If you’re targeting business-to-consumer (B2C), then Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram may be the best platforms to run with. Twitter can also be used for B2B effectively and Youtube is quite effective on both. At this point, Facebook might be a better option to target an older demographic, while Instagram is very popular with young people.
At least, in the beginning, make a decision and start with a single platform. It’s a mistake to dilute your energy and try to juggle numerous platforms as a beginner. Both time and effort are required to master just one platform for social marketing and advertising, and spreading yourself thinly is a poor strategy for a novice entrepreneur or social media marketer.
Understand the Algorithms
As difficult as they may be to pin down, it’s also worth taking the time to study the gatekeepers of the particular platform that you have chosen to do business on—the algorithms. Although algorithms change regularly, they have a huge effect on the content that users experience on the platform and need to be understood well.
The relevant algorithm will, from a generally random beginning, become increasingly specific and unique for each member of the platform as it analyzes their online habits and behavior. It will quickly learn the preferences and interests of each user and begin to send them content that is steadily more aligned with this to keep the user on the platform longer.
Another key point is to ask yourself what your particular strengths as a content creator are—Are you a good writer who can create excellent content in the written word (LinkedIn), are you good with photography (Instagram), or, are you highly skilled at making engaging videos (YouTube)?
It’s important to take your personal experience and talents into consideration and not make unnecessary mistakes. Making a careless mistake in social media marketing and advertising can result in your marketing going viral for the wrong reasons—very publicly.
Use the Right Tone to Engage the Right People
Once you have found the audience and platform, ensure that you are using the correct tone to relate to them. There is a time for skillful copywriting and a time for taking the time for detailed, educational content. When you use copywriting—the language of emotion— in social media marketing and advertising, you need to get the tone just right.
The tone used by a top US baseball coach to sell a course to teenage athletes will be different from a former politician in the UK endorsing cryptocurrency courses for the general public—and worlds apart from a cosmetics brand marketed for ladies in India.
That’s not to suggest that any of these three examples are in some way illegitimate, but the tone is another variable that could either sink the product or push it over the finish line to convert.
