Social media is a powerful advertising opportunity used throughout every business sector to communicate with customers, collate reviews and share exciting announcements! If you already have a company social media profile (or business pages on all the major socials), it might be time to hire a freelance social media marketer on Guru to monetize your presence.
Although organic social media posts are a brilliant way to broaden your reach, a little marketing thrown into the mix can make a substantial difference to your bottom line.
Marketing Applications of Social Media
Unsure how to use social media for marketing or what you might need to do differently to transition from communicative posts to advertising that pays returns? There are several possibilities, depending on what you’d like to achieve:
- Paid advertising: Every social media platform allows businesses to create paid ads, normally with a charge per click, engagement, or purchase. You can set your target audience and budget and leave the campaign running until it hits your max spend or reaches the end date.
- Influencer marketing: Cross-posting products, services, events, or charitable causes with support from an influencer with a large following is an option if you’d like to expand your audience.
- Social proof: Inviting customers or clients to leave reviews, ratings, and testimonials is an excellent form of social proof, adding credibility to your brand. You can also share other PR content, such as press releases or product features, on your socials to achieve a similar outcome.
One of the key features of social media, regardless of the types of marketing activities you deploy, is the ability to personalize content and focus your campaigns on specific user groups. For example, if you primarily sell to male buyers in certain states between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four, you can specify this in your campaigns and instruct the platform to display your ad in those users’ feeds.
How to Grow Your Business With Social Media Marketing
There is zero doubt that social media is an effective marketing tool. Still, selecting the right approach, understanding optimized ad spending, and curating your feed content to reach the right customers can be a fine art.
This strategizing stage is where a social media marketer steps in, offering advice and expertise based on the life cycle of your business, the objectives you’d like to hit, and your existing social media accounts, ads, and followers. Hiring a social media specialist through Guru is a great way to enhance your social media activity without the risk of investing thousands in advertising that doesn’t produce any tangible results.
Here are some of the initial questions a social media marketer will likely run through before they make any recommendations:
- What do you want to achieve? The right social media channel and marketing activities will depend on your goals, such as increasing website traffic, boosting your sales income, or providing better customer support.
- Which social media channels do you use? It might be necessary to create a new account on a key platform you don’t currently engage in, or you might wish to focus on your existing followings on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example.
- What sort of content do you prefer to share? This question will also vary between business sectors but could include videos, explainers, technical guides, funny posts, blogs, industry news, or entertainment pieces.
Once you have established these initial building blocks, your social media marketer can start to craft a marketing plan and advise how, when, and where to create posts or sponsored content.
The Importance of a Social Media Strategy
Finally, let’s discuss why a strategy, plan, or content schedule is so crucial to social media marketing success–can you not simply post something compelling, interesting, or exciting now and then? It’s not quite that simple.
Social media marketers carefully analyze engagement, click-throughs, and customer responses to determine the best approach, which can involve a great deal of detail, such as establishing the times of day when most followers are online or scheduling a particular campaign during a trend. Pre-planning your social media content means you have plenty of time to create high-quality, shareable content that your audience will love, with the assurance that your timing, imagery, and hashtags are perfectly aligned.
