Frye’s Instagram account is an excellent example of effective social media marketing since it’s visually appealing, uniquely Frye, engages their 197K followers, and promotes their goods to their consumer market.
Every day (cough, cough…multiple times a day), I see fresh posts and stories from The Frye Company as I read through my Instagram account. I’ve always admired their boots, apparel, and accessories, but I’m also a big lover of the stuff they provide on Instagram.
Their postings are consistent with their brand, innovative, and appealing to the eye. When visitors, like me, peruse their Instagram profile, all of their photographs have the same filter applied to guarantee that they all match – this consumer market strategy makes their Instagram profile appear professional, creative, and organized.
Frye’s Instagram account also fosters engagement between the firm and its fans by giving them an unique hashtag to use so that when they upload a picture with a Frye product, they may be featured on the account.
But what is the significance of social media marketing in the consumer market? Why should you put effort into setting up social media accounts for your company? And how can you create a social media marketing plan that works for your particular industry?
We’ll address all of these questions in this article, but first, let’s define social media marketing.
Related: What is social media marketing?
What Is The Definition Of Social Media Marketing?
The act of generating content to promote your company and goods on your consumer market on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is known as social media marketing. To assist you enhance conversions and brand exposure, your unique content should be adapted to the individual platform it’s being shared on.
It’s all about meeting your target demographic and consumers where they are and how they connect with one other and your business on social media.
While social media marketing as a whole is very advantageous to your business’s development (as you’ll see in the next section), your approach to your consumer market will vary depending on which social networks your target audience uses.
Let’s separate the plan by platform before diving further into social media marketing.
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Users: There are 1.79 billion active users on a daily basis all around the globe.
Generation X and millennials are the target audience.
B2C has an influence on the industry.
Brand recognition and promotion are the best uses for this product.
Related: What Is Lead Nurturing And What Are The Right Tactics?
Users: There are 186 million daily active users throughout the globe.
Millennials are the target audience.
B2B and B2C industry influence
Public relations and customer service are the two areas where you should excel.
Users: 1 billion active users each month
Millennials are the target audience.
B2C has an influence on the industry.
Advertising; natural-looking media, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated material
Users: There are 675 million monthly active users throughout the globe.
Baby boomers, Generation X, and millennials are the target audience.
B2B has an influence on the industry.
B2B partnerships, company growth, and job marketing are the best uses for this tool.
Related: Lead Generation: Can It Be Useful For Your Products?
YouTube
Users: Over 2 billion people log in every month from all over the globe.
Millennials are the target audience, followed by Generation Z.
B2C has an influence on the industry.
Brand awareness, entertainment, and how-to videos are the best uses for videos.
Snapchat
Users: There are 249 million daily active users throughout the globe.
Generation Z is the primary target audience.
B2C has an influence on the industry.
Brand recognition and promotion are the best uses for this product.
Users: There are 416 million monthly active users across the globe.
Older millennials and younger baby boomers make up the majority of the audience.
B2C has an influence on the industry.
Best for: Inspiration; visual advertising
Let’s talk about why social media marketing is important for your company now that we’ve covered the foundations of each social media network.
Social Media Marketing’s Advantages
There are several reasons why your business should engage in social media marketing. We’ve compiled a list of the four most compelling reasons to think about.
Boost Brand Recognition
Globally, about 3.2 billion individuals used social media in 2018. Because of the sheer number of people who use social media, it’s easy to see how ensuring your firm is providing material relating to your goods as well as information about your company through one or more platforms may help you enhance brand recognition.
Indeed, social media has been shown to increase brand exposure via increased involvement. Comments, likes, shares, and re-posts are examples of social interaction. By driving visitors directly to your website, social media may also help you raise brand recognition. Include direct connections to your website in your profile, bio, and posts to accomplish this.
Increase Lead Generation And Conversions
Because you’re advertising to individuals who have chosen to connect with you by following your account, promoting and sharing your items on social media is a straightforward approach to drive lead generation, conversions, and sales.
Here are a few instances of how you may utilize social media to increase your lead generation.
- Create competitions on your social media pages for your visitors and followers to enter.
- In the bio parts of your accounts, provide links to your website and offerings.
- Make product launches and share updates or specifics about exciting news at your firm by hosting live videos.
- On one of your channels, run a social media marketing campaign.
Your social media presence may be used to sell your items. On your Facebook or Instagram pages, for example, you may activate the Shop Section or the Shopping function. These capabilities enable your visitors and followers to access details like price, material, and size by clicking on goods you’ve featured in posts. Visitors may then quickly complete the checkout process on the platform and purchase the goods straight from you.
Develop Customer Relationships
You’ll be able to establish long-term connections with your social media followers by interacting and engaging with them. This may be accomplished by connecting with them on your postings, replying to their questions and comments, and offering them any assistance they may need.
To assist you establish trust and show them how much you respect their feedback and support, you might ask your followers questions about your goods, their pain spots, or organize freebies.
Study Your Competitors
Social media is a wonderful method to maintain track of your rivals’ social media strategies in the consumer market, items they’re marketing, campaigns they’re doing, and amount of involvement with followers.
You can use social media to see what is and isn’t working for your competitors, which may help you determine what should and shouldn’t be changed about your company’s strategy. Finally, looking at your rivals’ social media profiles will assist you ensure that your marketing stands out and is distinctive to your business.
Discover How To Do A Competitive Analysis To See How You Can Outperform Your Competitors.
Now, let’s discuss strategy: there are five phases to ensuring that your social media marketing strategy is long-term and beneficial to your company.
How To Put Together A Social Media Marketing Plan
- Examine your customer personas and target market.
- Choose which social media sites you’ll use to promote your business.
- Create material that is both original and entertaining.
- Make a posting schedule for yourself.
- Examine your influence and outcomes.
Let’s go through these stages in further depth so you can start implementing them in your company.
1. Identify Your Customer Personas And Target Market.
The first step in developing a social media marketing plan in your consumer market is to identify your buyer personas and target audience so you can cater to their specific requirements and interests. To do so, consider who you’re aiming to reach and why, as well as how you’d categorize them as a group. If you offer contemporary leggings and joggers, for example, you may categorize your target demographic as millennials who like wearing stylish sports clothes on a daily basis – a style known as athleisure.
You can identify what content will attract the sort of followers and consumers you want to obtain by considering your buyer personas and audience, as well as how to generate compelling material to keep your followers engaged, by considering your buyer personas and audience.
2. Decide Which Social Media Channels You’ll Use To Promote Your Business.
As a social media marketer, you must decide which channels you will use to distribute your content. When it comes to which social platforms your company should utilize, there isn’t always a right or wrong answer-it’s more about your target audience’s demands and where they spend their time.
“It’s critical to be aware of where your target market is now and where they could be tomorrow. Being ahead of the curve is preferable to being behind.” Andrew Delaney, HubSpot’s Social Media Marketing Manager.
For example, if you’re targeting athleisure-loving millennials, you may want to concentrate most of your social media efforts on Instagram, since millennials account for the bulk of the platform’s users.
3. Create Material That Is Both Original And Entertaining.
With billions of people using social media across the world, there’s a good chance that at least some of your followers — or those who are exploring your profile — have seen your competitor’s or other companies in your industry’s material. That’s why you need interesting social media content that sticks out and gives people a reason to click “Follow” and connect with your company.
Consider what your rivals are sharing and how you can advertise your items in a unique way to help you become innovative and gather consumer market. Also, make use of the capabilities that the platform you’re utilizing has to offer. For example, you may use Facebook Live to communicate the most up-to-date information about a product launch or to run a promotion.
Finally, enlist the assistance of your present consumers and promoters in the creation of content. You may accomplish this by re-posting their material or encourage people to use a hashtag to share their own experiences and photos with your items (much like Frye’s Instagram hashtag).
4. Make A Posting Schedule For Yourself.
Using a social media management tool is one of the simplest methods to guarantee your material is spread as intended. You may use these tools to create descriptions, prepare images and videos, and schedule postings ahead of time. They also distribute your material on a regular basis and keep track of all post interactions and engagement for you. Social media management software allows you to concentrate on other things while saving time.
There are a variety of solutions to choose from; here are a few examples.
- Hubspot
As part of its marketing platform, HubSpot provides a social media tool to help you produce and manage content and build genuine interactions with your followers. You may plan and publish your material ahead of time, as well as compare detailed information on the interaction of your articles to better understand the success of different platforms, kinds of content, and publishing timings.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media marketing and management tool that will assist your team in organizing and planning content production, managing campaigns, understanding engagement, and reviewing content reports and analysis.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a content discovery, scheduling, management, and reporting application for social media. You can plan posts across all of your platforms in advance and track your ROI with detailed content analysis.
When It Comes To Social Media, How Frequently Should You Post?
You may now be asking how often you should update your social media platforms.
As a general guideline, only post on social media when you have valuable stuff to contribute to the consumer market. There’s a purpose you’re sharing the information, in other words. This is how you’ll find the proper balance between publishing frequency and quality. If you update too seldom, your fans are likely to forget about you. If you publish too often, your followers will grow irritated. Both scenarios have the potential to result in a drop in followers and engagement.
To prevent this, there are several research and tools available that describe the frequency of social media posts by sector and platform. Every company is unique, so figure out what works best for your target market. Then you may start experimenting with more or fewer posts, as well as other variables like the time of day you publish on social media, to see what gets the most interaction.
5. Evaluate Your Influence And Outcomes.
One of the most crucial components of social media marketing is ensuring that your efforts are effective in assisting you in achieving your objectives. You’ll need to keep track of all of your postings across all channels to figure this out. This may be accomplished by looking over and monitoring your social media data.
Metrics for Social Media
Data on the performance of your postings and their influence on your audience and clients on multiple platforms are known as social media metrics. Data regarding your level of engagement, likes, followers, shares, and any other activities on each platform may be included in these measures.
Here Are Some Of The Most Crucial KPIs To Keep Watch On:
Clicks, comments, likes, and responses on your social media postings are all examples of engagement. There are additional platform-specific sorts of interaction, such as Instagram’s “Saved” posts and Pinterest’s “Pinned” articles.
Your reach is defined as the number of individuals who have viewed any material related with your page or profile.
Followers: This is the amount of individuals who have clicked the “Follow” button on your profile and see your stuff in their feeds on a regular basis.
Impressions: This is the number of times your audience members view a post from your profile or page, regardless of whether or not they click on it. When someone scrolls through their newsfeed without clicking on anything, this is often what occurs.
This is the amount of views each video receives on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social media platform with video capability.
Your number of profile visits is the amount of people that have visited your social media page.
Mentions: This is the number of times audience members have cited your profile in their posts.
Tags: When a member of your audience adds the name of your company’s profile or a hashtag to another post, this is known as tagging.
Reposts: When a member of your audience shares a portion of your material on their profile, this is known as a repost.
Shares: These are the posts that your fans and viewers share with their networks after seeing them on your profile.
Using the same strategies you’d use to create leads and drive conversions, you can affect all of these metrics, grow your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile. You may also communicate to your followers more often by tagging them in material, replying to their queries, like their posts, encouraging them to use your hashtags, and encouraging them to share your content (and you can also repost user-generated content).
Metrics In Social Media: How To Measure Them
You may look at social media stats in a number of ways, including using the analytics tools integrated into the networks you use. Listed below are a few examples:
- Twitter Metrics
- Facebook Insights
- Observations on Instagram
You might also use a service like Google Analytics to monitor and analyze your data in the consumer market. If you want to monitor your social media and website stats, this is a wonderful alternative. Finally, as we said earlier, many social media scheduling tools include monitoring and tracking functions by default. All of these metrics monitoring tools can help you learn what your followers and audience react favorably to, as well as what you should do to boost engagement.
Let’s talk about the numerous tools available to aid you along the path now that we’ve discussed the advantages of social media marketing and how to develop your plan.
Resources For Social Media Marketing
You may utilize a variety of social media marketing tools in consumer market to develop a social plan for your business. With the aid of the following courses, training, and books, you’ll feel more secure about working on your company’s social media marketing campaign.
Courses & Training In Social Media Marketing
If you believe it is important for your unique company circumstance, here are three methods to get a social media marketing education.
1. Get A College Diploma.
Although there isn’t a “social media marketing degree” for undergraduates, you may acquire a certificate, MicroMaster’s, or master’s degree in the discipline by taking online courses offered by a variety of colleges and organizations.
2. Make Use Of An Online Learning Platform.
Another excellent instructional resource is Lynda.com. This online learning website provides training, tutorials, and courses on a broad range of social media marketing subjects.
3. Obtain A Certificate Issued By A Business.
You might opt for a company-issued credential, such as HubSpot’s social media accreditation. This free certification will educate you how to better interact with your consumers and convert them. You’ll also learn how to improve your approach, expand your reach, and track your social media ROI.
