Whether operating in B2B or B2C, no business can ignore Social Media Marketing, because that's where customers spend time and get informed. Here's how to set an effective strategy: the choice of channels, the content to be published, the best-known management platforms, the performance indicators of the campaigns, and the calculation of the ROI
The habit of consulting and posting on social networks is increasingly rooted, especially in the new generations, and that's why Social Media Marketing gains an increasingly strategic role in the company. According to data from We Are Social's 'Digital 2019' report, social media users have grown 9% globally in the last year, and today reach 3.48 billion. In Italy, the penetration of social media stands at 59% of the total Internet users, for a total of about 35 million individuals who post, tag, advice, like. Web users spend an average of 2 hours a day on social networks and this fact gives a good idea of the importance that these platforms have for modern marketers. Realizing a Social Web Marketing strategy is therefore now an imperative for brands that want to expand the market by increasing the customer base or looking for new business opportunities.
What is social media marketing (SMM) in 20019 and what is it for
Having to start from a definition of Social Media Marketing: SMM is a form of Digital Marketing Services that uses social networks and networking platforms to promote a company's products and services. The idea is to be found right where the customer is most accustomed to spending his time, generating visibility on online communities and social networks through integrated and organic communication and marketing management, on all platforms. The goal of Social Network Marketing is to create interactions with consumers and prospects working on the commonality of values and interests, to create affinity with the recipient of the message and attach it to the brand. Communications and marketing actions - it is also possible to sell through social platforms - have the characteristic of being bidirectional and 1: 1, therefore very engaging and engaging. Through social networks it is possible to establish direct conversations with customers and prospects and have real-time feedback on products or digital advertising campaigns. Investing in Social Media Marketing allows the company to improve brand visibility, respond to requests regarding the offer, promote new products and services quickly, directing purchasing decisions on a budget all in all contained.
The social network platforms available
Out of a global population of 7 billion individuals, over 3 billion are those active on large networks. The estimate is made by Insights in its “Global Social Media Research Summary 2019 ', published in late March. The same study also indicates which platforms are most used by marketers for their Social Media Marketing campaigns.
Average monthly users: 2.38 billion
Target: 18-45 + years
Industries (B2B and B2C): e-commerce, fashion, retail, banking, financial services, insurance, entertainment, real estate, healthcare
Whether operating in B2B or B2C, a company cannot avoid having a presence on Facebook. This platform combines the best features of almost all social media and offers the brand the real chance to meet its target audience. The company can use Facebook to share content, engage customers, provide support and display advertisements.
Average monthly users: 321 million
Target: 18-45 + years
Industries (B2B and B2C): news, tech, e-commerce, retail, travel, sport, healthcare
Brands mainly use Twitter for customer service (Customer care), because it is the platform that customers prefer for timely interactions with the brand. Twitter users are those most accustomed to digital technologies and this media has become a hub for finding information on companies, their products, their events.
Average monthly users: 303 million
Target: 25-45 years
Industries (mainly B2B): legal, tech, manufacturing, marketing, HR, education
Being present on LinkedIn is mandatory for a B2B organization because this media offers numerous growth opportunities for the brand's activity. B2C brands use LinkedIn primarily for the search for potential employees but little for promotional activities related to marketing.
Average monthly users: 1 billion
Target: 18-35 years
Industries (mainly B2C): e-commerce, retail, fashion, food & beverage, beauty, entertainment, travel, real estate
Instagram is a mobile platform that focuses heavily on the 'visual' component of engagement, through the sharing of videos and images. Its popularity has grown exponentially in recent years and the trend does not seem to stop because it meets the tastes of consumers, who love vertical videos, live and stories - formats with high visual impact, easy to use and of very short duration. , rarely beyond the minute. Who sells 'physical' products in which the design component prevails cannot help but enable shopping on Instagram, a feature that many experts indicate as the future of social commerce.
YouTube
Average monthly users: 1.9 billion
Target : 18-55 + years
Industries (B2B and B2C): practically any industry and brand can create effective video content for marketing purposes
YouTube is an online content sharing platform that allows users, be it individuals or companies, to view, share and upload video content. The exponential growth of video marketing has led brands to increase the use of this social network to enhance engagement. Just think that YouTube is the second search engine used on the planet after Google.
Average monthly users: 265 million
Target: 18-45 years
Industries (mainly B2C): photography, art, beauty, e-commerce, fashion, architecture, food, DIY
Pinterest is a visual platform that represents a very powerful source of inspiration for artistic activities and DIY. You can find a myriad of ideas in the form of images and cards on many topics and companies dealing with DIY, fashion and catering will be able to find the right audience here for their marketing campaigns.
Snapchat
Average monthly users: 287 million
Target: 18-35 years old
Industries (mainly B2C): retail, health, food & beverage, event management, fashion
Snapchat is another mobile visual platform that has gained popularity mainly due to the short-term visibility of its contents. Images and videos posted on Snapchat disappear after 24 hours. It is a platform still very popular among Millennial and Generation Z and brands use it mainly to spread advertising messages for these targets.
How to set up a Social Media marketing campaign?
Guidelines
The platforms that can be used for a Social Media marketing campaign are different in terms of target audience and purpose. This is why it is essential to carefully plan the activities to be carried out in order to make the most of each media's potential and to achieve marketing and sales objectives by allocating the budget in the most correct way. Let us summarize things to do in a few places.
Conduct an audit
Before setting goals and creating a social marketing plan, it is good to understand what has worked in the past. A good start can be to visit the analytics and insight section of the different accounts and write down all the demographic characteristics of the audience and what type of content has performed well. Even the analysis of referral traffic, (coming from links included in other websites pointing to the company website) can be useful to understand which social networks channel the most traffic. Evaluating competitors' activity is absolutely a thing to do.
Define objectives and metrics
Whether it is to improve brand awareness, engage, generate leads or improve reach (therefore increase interest in posts and tweets), you must start by having a clear understanding of the objectives of a Social Media Marketing campaign. These must also be combined with metrics and KPIs that allow you to understand at a glance the progress of the campaign, which goals have been achieved and which is not. If the goal is to improve brand visibility on social networks, then the metrics to be privileged will be reach or coverage (how many people have seen the post) and the number of impressions. If, on the other hand, the company aims to improve traffic from social, the KPI to be privileged will be the Click Through Rate (CTR), which gives an idea of how many readers intrigued by a post have clicked on the link contained in it and visited the company website. Finally, if the goal is to convert, then push the target of the post to perform an action such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an App or buying, then the metric to be taken into consideration is the Bounce Rate (bounce rate), which indicates how quickly a user who visited the website abandoned it.
Researching the target audience
The audit of the previous point already provides some indications on the company's social audience. The next step is to define audience personas, which represent the typical traits of the target audience - demographic data, content preferences, work, interests...
Define a content strategy
The social content management strategy must be shaped on the defined objectives and audience personas identified as relevant. The contents will intrigue, inform, engage and persuade the audience. The definition of an editorial calendar will automate the post publishing activity through one of the many platforms available.
Define a paid strategy (if any) Paid
Ads on social media allow you to increase traffic on the institutional website, improve brand awareness and engagement, increase leads and sales.
Monitor measure and optimize
Social Media Marketing is an activity that has a strong experimental component. It is therefore not necessary to be overwhelmed by any negative results or not in line with expectations but to understand that the SMM is a matter of continual tweaks and adjustments. What was good last month may no longer appeal today? New social platforms gain users' trust and it may be convenient to include them in the campaign. The followers, then, are often fascinated by new trends so you must always be informed of fashion trends and, if necessary, make them your own.
Define your goals
Setting clear goals is the first step in a well-conceived SMM strategy. You can start from simple goals related to increasing the visibility of content - number of likes or shares - or start from more complex objectives such as increasing traffic on the website, improving the opinions expressed (comments), generating new leads / customers. The comparison with the competitor's activities will allow us to understand where to find the potential audience and understand which networks are preferred by our targets.
It is highly probable that a company today has already activated one (or in many different cases) social accounts so you must first start with those to understand which makes sense to keep active and which it is better to close. The profiles that remain active will have to be optimized, so as to bring more organic traffic (coming from the searches) to the company website. But they will also be promoted on other social networks, to increase the reach of posted content.
Prepare the editorial plan
Quality. This is the key word for success on social networks. Marketers should therefore envisage a real Social Media Marketing plan. The document must indicate all the objectives of the SMM strategies, the actions to be taken, the target personas, the accounts to be used to achieve the purpose, the various types of content envisaged and the calendar of the relative releases. The plan must specify who will create the content, the dates and times of publication of the messages (posts and tweets), the tone of voice to use - considering, for example, that easy and spontaneous language is to be reserved above all for customer engagement, while a less informal language is preferable when promoting the image and values of the brand or if managing customer assistance.
If you do not have clear ideas, a good starting point to understand how to structure the editorial plan in Social Media Marketing strategies is to use the so-called ' Third Party Rule ' which provides that:
1. 1/3 of the contents disseminated on social media must promote the company's activity, its culture and its values, to convert surfers into prospects.
2. 1/3 of the contents disseminated on social media must promote ideas and stories concerning the sector to which they belong.
3. 1/3 of the content disseminated on social media must promote the brand or products by leveraging 1: 1 interactions to convert and generate profits.
Select the management platforms
The management of social accounts is often entrusted to a Social Media Manager even if in some companies this activity belongs to the marketing department. It is a task that can also be very time consuming. This is particularly true with the progressive intensification of the publication of content that Social Media Marketing strategies impose. Companies get to receive several thousand mentions and questions every day and it is impossible even for the largest social team to give an immediate response to these requests. There is, however, numerous software that allows you to publish monitor and manage the various corporate social accounts from a single interface, automating most of the activities. Here is a (non-exhaustive) overview of the main tools of Social Media Management.
Buffer: Buffer is the most popular dashboard to centrally create and manage social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, measuring the performance of posted content in real time.
Hoot suite: it is a tool that allows you to schedule posts on about twenty Social Media Marketing platforms. It offers features for scheduling, editing and increasing the effectiveness of the content posted by working on the best time of publication. In addition, it tracks all mentions and other audience engagement activities. Supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.
Sprout Social: this platform offers all the most useful tools for scheduling posts, monitoring competitors' activity, tracking all keywords. The Smart Inbox function allows Social Media Managers and specialists to reply from a single interface to all messages received from different social networks.
Social Mention: it is a tool to monitor and track all activity on social media. It allows to know who mentions the brand, the company or the topics defined as relevant for a specific SMM campaign. It aggregates all user-generated content on the various social networks, which will therefore be easily analyzed, and offers a very useful influencer ranking tool.
SEMrush: this suite monitors all corporate social profiles and compares their performance with those of the competition, identifying the most performing contents and keeping track of all the interactions of the social audience.
Revive Old Post: is a tool that allows you to re-share content already posted in the past. Its plugin allows you to set a time interval between the two posts (the original one and the recovery) and the number of posts that you want to reshare. The free version only supports Facebook and Twitter, while if you want to reshare posts from other platforms such as Pinterest or LinkedIn you need to buy the premium version.
Snaplytics: this is a tool designed specifically for managing activities on Snapchat, the App that allows users to create and manage very short stories (on average 20 snaps, about 2 minutes). Snaplytics allows you to organize stories through the use of tags. It offers insight and analysis on the progress of the stories and also includes a database of all the contents created in the past, to understand how they worked and, if necessary, to be able to republish them. It also supports deferred publishing functionality.
Brandwatch: it is a social listening tool that scours forums, news sites, blogs and social networks in search of useful data to support the social sentiment analysis features. It therefore allows us to understand if the brand and the company enjoy the respect and trust of web users.
Hubspot Social Media: this Social Media Management software is included in the Hubspot marketing automation platform. Its main advantages consist in the ability to simplify the management of social networks, prioritizing the connections between the different platforms; monitor engagement and mentions on the main networks.
Zoho Social: offers a simple but effective user interface to manage the brand's activities on social media and allows you to monitor the trend of conversations and brand quotes on the target keywords in real time.
Tweetdeck: has become the indispensable management tool for corporate Twitter accounts. It allows you to filter followers' messages and monitor all activity on ashtags, tweets, messages, notifications and trend topics from a single console.
StatusBrew: is a Social Media Management platform designed for cross-cutting use between the sales, marketing and customer care departments. It allows you to manage Social Media Marketing campaigns automatically and keep track of all engagement activities, also integrating with marketing platforms and social collaboration tools such as Mailchimp and Slack.
Facebook Page Manager is an App that allows you to manage Facebook and Instagram accounts on the move, from your smartphone.
Ideas, tips and best practices for 2020
The starting point of any Social Media Marketing strategy is to establish a digital presence on the networking platforms more in line with the company's image and its offer. The next step is to work on brand awareness, therefore increasing brand awareness. At a further level of sophistication, then, the company's goal will be to be able to better engage prospects and customers through a targeted content management strategy, to then divert traffic to the website. Marketers use social media to showcase the most popular networking platforms, track down and reach customers and prospects, promote products and services, and engage the audience to improve conversion and ROI of marketing campaigns.
Each platform has its specific guidelines which summarize the precautions to be taken to maximize the effectiveness of communication. The resolution and image of the photos, for example, the use of ashtags or abbreviated links, the time of publication ... The knowledge of these best practices is a matter for Social Media Manager, an increasingly important figure within companies, which has the task of guaranteeing a rich and involved social media experience for each follower. To ensure basic consistency of the messages conveyed through social media, it is a good rule to spread a manual containing the communication policies to adapt to when mentioning the company or its brands, especially regarding the type of content disseminated and tone of voice. To optimize the creation of content, it is possible to reason for issues dear to the company, marked with a certain temporal frequency - weekly, monthly, seasonal - or ride on the trend topics of the moment. This will improve the engagement and maximize the results of Social Media Marketing campaigns. Investment in influencers will have to be carefully evaluated. These web icons are full of likes and real brand advocates move thousands (sometimes millions) of followers to purchase one or the other brand. The influencers are particularly effective in taking hold on traditionally more difficult targets towards paid advertising, making themselves somehow authoritative guarantors of the quality of the offer.
Post continuously
Social networks are an important source of truthful consumer data but also a reservoir of knowledge freely accessible at all times. Users go to social networks to get informed, have fun, share ideas and receive advice. And that's why it is very important for the company to communicate continuously with its audience. The risk, otherwise, is that it ends up appreciating and sharing the contents of the competitor and no longer ours. The most effective SMM strategies are those that see the company ready to give advice on how to choose the product, also providing advice on how to best use it. Sharing the posts of bloggers dealing with topics dear to the company allows you to attract the attention of the public and offers interesting ideas for updating. But we must also give space to entertainment by posting funny memes, quizzes and videos.
The advantages of Social Media marketing for companies
The personalization of communication strategies and the specific knowledge of one's target are the main advantages of Social Media Marketing. The ability to 'feel the pulse' in real time of those who interact with the brand by monitoring shares, likes, posts and reposting, tweets and retweets, puts marketers in a position to maximize the effectiveness of the campaigns. The work of the social team is not an exercise in style but is transformed into a concatenation of data driven actions, guided by the results obtained for each campaign or, even, every single message or post.
Social Media Marketing ensures potentially huge benefits for the brand, compared to rather limited investments compared to those envisaged for traditional promotion and advertising channels. But what are the main advantages of SMM? Here are the five most obvious:
Secure yourself in the consumer's hidden memory
Online communities drown in a sea of information. Psychologists speak, in this regard, of FOMO (fear of missing out), or the fear of individuals to be virtually excluded from potentially important social events and contexts. The brands, in all this, are constantly looking for new ways to get noticed and the adage 'away from the eyes, away from the heart' perfectly fits into what is the situation of the modern consumer, prompted by a thousand stimuli and flatteries. Social media offer companies the possibility to post content regularly, so as to always remain in the head of the consumer. If this also does not immediately translate into an action, such as a purchase or download, the memory will resurface at the appropriate time.
Make the offer more in line with the needs of the consumer
The analysis of the interactions and conversations that take place on social networks allows the company to better understand the needs of each consumer, understand what are the strengths or, on the contrary, the gaps in the offer. This will allow planning improvements of the product, service and communications in line with the needs of the demand.
Retrieve new ideas and content
The abundance of information can play in the marketer's favor. With the help of social networks, the company has access to a myriad of ideas and news, which materialize in the form of news, updates, content posted by competitors, suggestions and criticisms published by customers ... Brands today base on news jacking strategies (the art of knowing how to exploit the hype of the news of the day to attract interest on its offer, the brand or the company's activities) and popular reviews the editorial content used to enhance the effectiveness of Social Media strategies Marketing. Another way to create an editorial offer in line with the needs of the social audience is crowd sourcing, represented by the so-called user-generated contents, which provide for the direct involvement of customers and followers in the drafting (and sharing) of reviews, product tests and suggestions for use.
Manage reputation and crises
Customers talk about the company and its products regardless of whether the brand has a social presence or not. This means that they will still post suggestions, requests and complaints. The ability for the brand to proactively use social media can prove to be an effective strategy both in terms of engagement and to improve customer service. Social media are also indispensable for managing the most critical business situations in real time (crisis management).
Amplify the effectiveness of advertising
Social media advertising, unlike traditional ADV campaigns, is still quite effective. Social networking platforms allow the company to work in an extremely targeted way. The deep knowledge of the tastes, habits and experiences of the consumer obtainable through the analysis of his social profiles allows to deliver a 'surgical' and personalized advertising. The remarketing features conducted on social networks allow you to reawaken the interest of long-inactive customers. The transposition of similar audiences (lookalike), on the other hand, puts the company in a position to find new prospect segments on social networks that share characteristics and tastes similar to those of customers already at home.
Generate revenue
Social media are now a key touch point for guiding leads along the funnel. Social commerce, or the direct sale of goods and services through social networks, is a marketing method that begins to be understood in our country too. Consumers can browse and compare the offers of a product on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest (which have already activated this service) and then finalize the purchase within the same network.
Is it possible to calculate the ROI of Social Media Marketing?
Social marketing is by definition data driven marketing. The ability to perform A / B tests to evaluate the effectiveness of each message, content or post allows you to work more and more precisely to make the content in line with the target audience's wishes. But often this is not enough to understand if the actions taken have guaranteed the expected return on investment. The measurement of ROI and sales campaigns performance social continues to be rather complicated, because the activity carried out on these networks does not necessarily translate into an increase in turnover, at least in the short term. The initial objectives of the company that approaches Social Media Marketing can, therefore, aim to increase the reputation and online presence of the brand, brand awareness, loyalty, lead generation or Customer Experience. And in this case the ROI is not easily calculated, even if most of these objectives are easily measurable through the number of shares, likes, tweets, retweets, mentions ... Google Analytics they are still an essential tool for the work of Social Media Manager and the marketing team and offer a basis for calculating the ROI of marketing activities on social media. The platform accurately tracks individuals' behaviors once they land on the corporate website. And if this happens immediately behind a post or a tweet, it can easily be deduced that the two activities are the consequence of the other. In addition, there is a very important feature of the Google platform called Social Conversions, which helps to understand which networks have performed better within a social campaign.
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