UNIT II – Social Media Marketing

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the
power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and
branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and
posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving
strategy with measurable goals and includes:

• Maintaining and optimizing your profiles.

• Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your
brand and attract a relevant audience.
• Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your
reputation.
• Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to
build a community around your brand.

Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where
you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly
targeted users.

Benefits of social media marketing

With such widespread usage and versatility, social media is one of the most
effective free channels for marketing your business today. Here are some of
the specific benefits of social media marketing:

Humanize your business: Social media enables you to turn your business
into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and
interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience
can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
Drive traffic: Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts,
and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to your
website where you can convert visitors into customers.

Generate leads and customers: You can also generate leads and
conversions directly on these platforms, through features like
Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call to action buttons on
profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.

Increase brand awareness: The visual nature of social media platforms

allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and and
improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better
results with all your other campaigns.

Build relationships: These platforms open up both direct and indirect lines
of communication with your followers through which you can network,
gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with individuals.

Cost effective: Social media marketing is probably the most cost-efficient

and diverse way of promoting a business.

It doesn’t cost anything to create a profile on most social networking sites.

In case you want to run a paid campaign to boost your content, the cost is
relatively low as compared to other advertising platforms.

When done well, your chances of producing greater returns on your

investment are higher. If paid advertising is a part of your social media
marketing strategy, be sure to start small and work your way up as you
become more comfortable.
What is content strategy?
A content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or
written) to achieve your business goals. A successful content strategy will
attract your target audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them
engaged even after a purchase.

Say your business goals include increasing brand awareness. To achieve this,
you might implement a content strategy that focuses on SEO to increase
your website's visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive
traffic to your products or services.

New business owners might assume a content strategy is a nice-to-have, but

not necessary early on. However, producing high-quality content can be
invaluable in building trust with new audiences and succeeding in the long
haul.

In essence, a good content strategy is the foundation of your Attract and

Delight stages in a buyer's journey that follows the inbound marketing
framework. Along with attracting prospects to your brand, you can leverage
a content strategy for sales enablement and customer satisfaction.

Plus, with 70% of marketers actively investing in content marketing, it's

critical that you develop a good content strategy to compete in your
industry.
When you develop a content strategy, there are a few questions
to answer.
1. Who will be reading your content?

Who's the target audience for your content? For how many audiences are
you creating content?

Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your
content strategy can cater to more than one type of user.

Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver content
that's tailored to each persona.

2. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience
has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience
through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product:

those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those
who are already using your product to overcome these challenges.

Your content reinforces the solution(s) you're offering and helps you build
credibility with your target audience.

3. What makes you unique?

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your
potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least,
different.
Maybe your main asset is that your company has been established for many
years. Or perhaps you have a unique brand voice that makes you stand out
from your competitors.

To prove why you're worth buying from, you need to prove why you're
worth listening to. Once you figure that out, permeate that message in your
content.

4. What content formats will you focus on?

To figure out what formats to focus on, you need to meet your audience
where they are.

While you may to tempted to launch a podcast since it's grown so much in
the last few years, or launch a YouTube channel, find out first where your
audience lives.

Otherwise, you may waste time creating content that either won't reach
your audience or capture their attention.

Once you identify the best formats, start creating a budget to assess what
resources you can allocate to execute this strategy.

5. What channels will you publish on?

Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have various
channels you can publish to, from your website to social media.

This, again, will reflect where your audience lives. If your audience prefers
long-form video content, you may opt to publish your content on YouTube.
If you have a younger audience that likes quick content, you may opt for
TikTok and Instagram.
6. How will you manage content creation and publication?

Figuring out how you'll create and publish all your content can be a daunting
task.

Before you execute, it's important to establish:

• Who's creating what.

• Where it's being published.
• When it's going live.

In a small team, this may be easy enough as you may be the sole decision-
maker. As your company grows, you may need to collaborate with several
content teams to figure out an effective process.

How to Create a Content Strategy Framework ?

1. Define your goal.
2. Conduct persona research.
3. Run a content audit.
4. Choose a content management system.
5. Determine which type of content you want to create.
6. Brainstorm content ideas.
7. Publish and manage your content.

1. Define your goal.

What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want
to produce content and create a content marketing plan?
2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content's

target audience — also known as your buyer persona.

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to
marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more
relevant and valuable content that they'll want to read and convert on.

If you're an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you

want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market?
Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience
parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing
your audience.

3. Run a content audit.

Early on, most brands start with blog posts. If you want to venture out into
different formats, you can run a content audit to assess your top-performing
and lowest-performing content. Then, use that information to inform which
direction you take next.

If you've been in business for a while, you should review your content
marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year.

Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new
goals.

4. Choose a content management system.

A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content

publication, and content analytics. CMS like – Word Press, HubSpot and
many more.

5. Determine which type of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create, from
written content like ebooks and blog posts to audio content like podcasts.

6. Brainstorm content ideas.

To start your brainstorming session, you need to decide who will be

participating. Working with multiple different departments within your
company, like PR, SEO, and social, can help to produce more ideas.
However, remember that the larger the group, the more off-topic things can
get, and the more disagreements that may arise.

In addition to choosing your brainstorming team, you should also have some
decisions made in advance. For example, since you’re brainstorming about
content topics, you should know how often you want to create new content.
The frequency with which you plan to post new content may determine the
type of content that you will create.

7. Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you'll create – it
should also cover you'll organize your content.

With the help of an editorial calendar, you'll be on the right track for
publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website.
Then, create a social media content calendar to promote and manage your
content on other sites.

Types of Content
Different content reaches leads and potential customers at various stages of
the sales funnel. It’s important to learn the stages where each type is most
successful so you can slot it into your strategy in the best possible place.
Some options include:

Email newsletters: Allow you to connect directly with subscribers, like

potential leads and current or former customers, through their email
accounts

Social media posts: Let you share updates and information about your
business with a community of online followers

Video scripts: Let you share specific informational, sales, or promotional

content in a video format

Web page copy: Serves many purposes, such as explaining more about your
company, the products and services you offer, or acting as a hub for your
other content

Landing page copy: For sharing information about an event, product,

service, or special initiative worthy of a landing page rather than an entire
website

White papers: Allow you to share industry-specific information, like the

features of a product or service, or explain ways your company can solve
client problems with targeted solutions

Blog posts: Let you provide information of value to your audience with
short-form content

eBooks: Long-form content that serves as an informational guide or

resource on a specific topic in your industry

Informational articles: Let you provide knowledge of value to your target

audience with long-form content
Product descriptions: Let you share information about your products and
services online, through websites, eCommerce stores, or third-party services

Press releases: Let you share promotional content or company updates with
news outlets

What Is Content Writing?

Content writing is a type of professional marketing writing created for an
online audience. Marketers and business owners publish content, or copy,
online for many reasons. They may look to increase the traffic to their
website or to inform their customers about a new product or service.
Business professionals often hire content writers to produce high-quality
messages for sales copy, blogs, articles, and social media posts. The writer
must understand the audience to write successful copy that appeals to
them.

Importance of Content Writing in digital marketing:

Any person visits your site than they have reason, without reason there may
be a visitor but very minute chance of becoming a customer. So a good
content gives the visitor a reason to visit your site leads them to engage on
your site and become your customer.

1. First of all good content describes the visitor about the kind of your
business or industry. If content writer has well knowledge about his target
audience and he is able to answer the basic questions of visitors and your
content has enough capability to convince the visitor about the product or
services provided, then there are lots of chances for his conversion from
visitor to a customer.

2. A good content writing is useful for search engine optimisation that is,
making rank of the site higher. Creating content and posting to your website
is the best way to reach your potential customers. In the initial phase the
content writer has to search the keywords that will help him to reach him
his audience. Once they well set keywords they have traffic to their sites,
the writer could create content around those content and optimize it for
search engines like Google.

3. Content Writers could also mention links in their contents for their
website and bring traffic to their sites. Links are one of the most essential
key factor for SEO ranking. If in any content links to your website is
mentioned and user clicks on it he will be redirected to your website and
consequently, increasing the traffic to your site.

4. A good content is useful for conversion of visitors to a customers. Good

content engages the visitor and every time visitor decides to take action and
becomes the customer it is called as conversion.

5. In order to launching the digital marketing campaign the content will be

needed. The well specified content is the one of the most important SEO
parameter because it consist of the pages that includes the search results
and ranks your site.

6. A content is always shareable on social media. Irrespective of the kind of

business every business or organisations have the social media accounts.
Those social networks are used to promote the business. Whether it is on
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ etc. All these social networks
promotes the content from you site.

If running any business is the mind then creating the content is the heart. If
businessmen are the king then content writers are kingmakers. They just
don’t write five hundred words instead they understands the importance of
the headlines, keywords that are going to increase the search rankings, and
knows the best practice and effective usage of SEO.

Introduction to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube,

Instagram and Pinterest; their channel advertising and campaign

Facebook
Facebook is a popular global social networking website. It has a database of
2.50 billion active users as on December 2019. Facebook offers other
products and services beyond its social networking platform, including
Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal. It also has
acquired Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Giphy and Mapillary, and has a 9.9%
stake in Jio Platforms

How to Use Facebook for Marketing

It’s important to start by building your fanbase on Facebook. Publicize your
page and post a link to it anywhere you can, including adding a social icon
onto your website.

Once you’ve created a strong following it’s important to use status updates
or photos to share your products, offers, services. You should also post
things that get your audience to engage with your posts. Things that they
will click, “like,” comment on, and share. The more people are engaging, the
more frequently you’ll appear in others timelines.
It’s important to keep in mind that many use Facebook as a personal
network to connect with their friends or loved ones. Your brand needs to fit
into this atmosphere naturally in order to keep people interested in what
you’re posting. So don’t make it solely about selling.

Tool to Utilize: Advertising

Facebook Advertising is really picking up speed in the business world.

It uses social graph and activities to pinpoint those who fall into your buyer
demographics, making Facebook Ads incredibly effective. Facebook ads are
more likely to bring in strong leads that are actually looking for your
services.

They help make sure your advertising budget isn’t wasted on those who
aren’t really interested in what you’re offering and helping to put product or
service put into the hands of the exact person who wants or needs it. To go
much deeper into mastering Facebook, download this free guide.

Twitter
Twitter is fast-paced, concise, and easy way to connect with your audience.
With over 310 million registered users (and growing), Twitter is a sea of
information of 140 character or less content waiting to be read, clicked,
followed, and re-tweeted.

How to Use Twitter for Marketing

Twitter generates over 175 million tweets daily and allows you to share
quick pieces of information and photos in an effort to drive people back to
your site or landing pages. You only get a small amount of characters, so
make them count!

When marketing on Twitter, you need to have content that is enticing

enough for people to stop and click through. People are normally scrolling
through quickly so it takes more than just simple text to stop them in their
tracks. Make sure when you’re constructing your tweets, you’re making
people want to click through.

Try using quotes, statistics, or questions related to the link you’re tweeting
as a way to people wanting to read more. Incorporate photos, polls, gifs, or
even short videos. (All of these are now natively supported by the platform!)

While Twitter is a great way to share quick thoughts and generate traffic to
your website and offers, it’s important to make sure you’re also building
relationships with followers.

People follow you because they like what you have to say, but often also to
engage in conversation. Like you would on Facebook, ask and respond to
questions, respond to mentions and direct messages. Twitter is as useful for
driving traffic as it is for customer service.

Tool to Utilize: Hashtags

Hashtags (#) are you key tool on Twitter. These tags allow you to reach a
wider audience than just your followers by getting involved in existing
conversations.
People searching for specific information will often check hashtags to see
what’s out there. Do some research what your buyer persona is hashtagging
to make sure your posts are going to be found by the right people.

Our free guide “Tune Up Your Social Media Marketing” will teach you
everything you need to know to master Twitter for business. You can get it
here.

LinkedIn
How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing
LinkedIn is different from the rest of the social media outlets because it’s
specifically designed for business and professionals. Users mainly go to
LinkedIn to showcase their job experience and professional thoughts,
making it one of the more important platforms to use for those in B2B.

Between features like LinkedIn Pulse, Company Pages, InMail, Groups, and
“Get Introduced” and the ability to see who’s viewed your personal profile,
LinkedIn is a valuable tool for not only driving traffic, but prospecting,
establishing thought leadership, as well as recruiting.

Instagram
Instagram is a free, online photo-sharing application and social network
platform that was acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Instagram allows users to edit and upload photos and short videos through a
mobile app. Users can add a caption to each of their posts and use hashtags
and location-based geotags to index these posts and make them searchable
by other users within the app. Each post by a user appears on their
followers' Instagram feeds and can also be viewed by the public when
tagged using hashtags or geotags.
How to use Instagram for Marketing
Ads Manager is your starting point for running ads on Facebook, Instagram
Network. It's an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing when and where
they'll run and tracking how well your campaigns are performing.

With the Ads Manager app for iOS and Android, you can keep an eye on
your campaign while you're on the go. Wherever you are, you'll have the
power to create and edit ads, track their performance and manage ad
budgets and schedules.

YouTube
YouTube is a free video sharing website that makes it easy to watch online
videos. You can even create and upload your own videos to share with
others. Originally created in 2005, YouTube is now one of the most popular
sites on the Web, with visitors watching around 6 billion hours of video
every month.

If you've ever watched a video online, there's a good chance it was a

YouTube video. For example, almost all of the video tutorials on our website
are actually YouTube videos!

How to use YouTube for Marketing

• Create a channel on YouTube
• Research your target audience
• Conduct competitive analysis
• Create videos based on the YouTube algorithm
• Start uploading content to your channel
• Provide all the necessary information on your channel
• Promote your videos
• Consider influencer marketing
• Measure your success