Social media marketing (SMM) is the most important tool for building the trust of your audience and the opportunity for the latter to enter into direct communication with the brand. Thanks to SMM promotion, you can achieve any business goals, from growing brand awareness, launching new products to the market, ending with sales growth and image building.
Recently, SMM is gaining momentum and becoming a popular tool in online marketing. Social networks are a large audience of potential customers, customers or simply loyal visitors. Today, SMM is not only comments, reposts and likes, but also real sales.
Many business owners try their hand at SMM marketing, trying to independently promote their products or services on Facebook, Instagram, Vkontakte, etc., but in most cases they fail, and they simply “merge” the advertising budget into nowhere.
Social networks are not only about creating a group, filling it with pictures and inviting work colleagues there, it is your face, like the site. This is an additional sales channel.
Now every company strives to enter social networks and create its own group or public. Especially if the company sells goods or services to ordinary users (B2C companies). Promoting a group on social networks makes it possible to bring your brand to a new level and become closer to your consumers. Having established a dialogue with users, you can learn about their desires, and interests and form the most interesting offer for them.
What actions can include SMM?
- Creation and management of communities in a social network.
A community or a brand page on the web is a full-fledged platform for communication with the target audience. This is where brand loyalty is nurtured and sales are stimulated. Communities in a social network help to increase brand awareness, attract traffic to the site, and increase the reach of potential customers.
- Attracting targeted traffic to the community.
Each group on a social network is valuable for its subscribers. Real. The group’s subscribers are already interested in the product, in fact they are fans of the brand.
- Advertising in a social network.
Targeted advertising is an effective source of visitors and brand followers. Their presence helps to create a “viral effect” of advertising messages, and provides an increase in traffic in a group or on a site. An important feature is the possibility of point targeting, that is, the orientation of advertising to a specific audience.
- Reputation management in a social network.
Creating a community will help to focus the opinions of the target audience on one platform and quickly respond to user questions. Working with a reputation in a social network is aimed at improving the image, and establishing feedback.
It is important to understand that SMM is not only about placing posts and pictures. This is painstaking work to build a loyal community.
A well-executed SMM strategy contributes to:
increase in online sales,
strengthening the brand image,
maintaining a positive reputation
operational communication with users.
How SMM specialists work with a brand on a social network:
determine the main goals and objectives,
analyze competitor strategies
determine the target audience, and create a portrait of a potential buyer?
form an SMM strategy for the brand,
develop a content plan
determine performance indicators and budget,
implement the SMM strategy,
analyze the results and optimize the strategy.
SMM promotion methods
Social networks offer their users a huge amount of various advertising. The main thing is to attract the attention of the user. At the same time, it is necessary to demonstrate your company not as a sender of useless and useless spam messages. It is necessary to attract users without excessive intrusiveness. Everything should be based on the fact that the user himself is interested in an interesting video or an offer to play a game, take part in a contest, and so on.
An SMM campaign requires a thorough analysis of the target audience and its specific preferences. Such work can be compared with the work of marketers. The specialist must have good communication skills, quickly respond to any need of users. It is also important to have good taste, to select interesting graphics and video material.
Network marketing in social media, or SMO (Social media optimization) is a set of measures that are aimed directly at the influx of the target audience from social networks, blogs, forum sites. In most cases, work within the framework of Social media optimization comes down to working with the content of the resource to increase the effectiveness of its use in social network communities.
Black and white ways
SMM has a white hat and black hat methods. Black hat optimization can be easily compared with ordinary spam. The social network is literally flooded with a huge amount of information. Many regards such information flows as an invasion of personal space. But even such a method can provide a quality result since you receive information directly from the target audience.
White SMM is based on other principles. It is a specific optimization technique that provides for an unobtrusive impact on the consciousness of the target audience. Such a marketing method will be useful for the promoted resource and most of the users of social networks. As part of the white “run”, the well-known traditional journalistic methods are often used – a press release, promotional material. Here it is most important and fundamental to make the company’s resource more popular. The user should have a sense of trust and respect for your brand.
The most important SMM tools
Interesting articles in the social network, telegram channel, on the forum;
New target channel, forum threads, public or group in a social network;
Setting up cross-posting from the site to social media (RSS marketing);
Working with the catalog and marketplace (for example, VK, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Twitter). Using SMM Panels to gain initial social proof. You need to choose the right smm Panel to do this task. One option we recommend is this Social Media Panel.
We can safely say that website promotion can occur using various methods. The most popular methods in modern conditions are SMO and SMM. Their demand is fully justified, since they bring real benefits to business. SMM is very relevant and important for online business.
Why is social media promotion beneficial for business?
Social media can and should be used today by all companies that work to increase brand awareness, offer services or products online. This is effective for many reasons, including:
1) social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, Instagram have a huge audience, part of which is necessarily the target segment for your business;
2) the modern user of social media has close relationships with other people. It shares statuses, news, photos and videos with friends. All this allows you to create the effect of viral marketing, and at no cost to the business (minus the cost of creating viral content);
3) provide brand promotion of sites using social media much faster than using SEO and other online tools. Today you told community members about a new product, and tomorrow it is bought on the site across the country. Sometimes, for the success of a business in social networks, you don’t even need your own web resource, which only reduces the requirements for a business when using such a tool;
4) with the help of social networks, free and paid pr website promotion in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities is possible. So, you can cooperate with various non-profit projects, interact on mutually beneficial terms with popular bloggers and opinion leaders;
5) the process of communication in social networks is convenient and simple. Businesses do not need to come up with something new to communicate, monitor or control potential customers – the leading social media interface provides everything necessary.
Final words on SMM
Any marketing strategy is based on knowing the needs of the target customer. But in each case, business owners are faced with different approaches to determining the portrait of the buyer. Which ones are better?
To create a portrait of the target consumer for search engine optimization, you will need a deep analysis of the niche. The main thing is to answer questions like:
What problem does the product or service solve? Next, determine the circle of those who are in any way connected with the indicated difficulties. There may be multiple audiences. Therefore, pages with identical products appear on sites with completely different designs (and sometimes separate web resources that meet the priorities of specific groups). So it turns out that in SEO only content drives. If the sharpened page does not meet the expectations of the target audience, the project will not bring the desired effect.
In social networks, advertising is set up for a fee and there is the possibility of connecting targeting. This is the choice of age, place of residence, hobbies, method of entering the site (mobility, etc.). Some social networks allow you to add “lookalike” audiences. Due to this, without much effort, an expansion of the coverage of the circle of users is achieved.
Statistics show that 74% of consumers use social media to make purchasing decisions. Keep in mind that you can add an audience from recommendation resources to this value.
