What are the Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
In today's society, social media has become an integral part of everyone's life.
Regardless of your occupation—business owner, student, housewife, wage worker, or anything else—you cannot dispute the significant role that social media plays in your everyday life.
The majority of us find it impossible to even pass an hour on our preferred social networking platform without scrolling through the feed.
May it be GenZ, millennials, and even boomers, everybody knows how to use any social media platform. Because of this, many marketers find the potential to use social media as part of their marketing strategy.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing uses social media channels to educate a committed audience about your business or brand. With this opportunity, you may now quickly increase sales, develop a brand identity, and increase website traffic.
Excellent content production, such as posting readable and eye-catching information on all social media platforms, interacting with audiences and followers in a meaningful way, tracking the success of advertising campaigns, etc., is a key component of a successful social media strategy.
In short, SMM or social media marketing is all about brand or business promotion, and advertising on different popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the like. The aim is to drive more traffic, boost sales, and build authenticity.
5 Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
To fully understand how important social media is these days, it is vital to know the pillars or backbone of effective social media marketing.
Strategy
Creating a social media strategy is the first thing that we highly recommend for you to start doing if you intend to publish anything on social media.
While it is easy to post or publish online, don’t rush it. Contents that are made haphazardly and without a theme or purpose will most likely fail because they may not resonate with your brand or business. It will simply be FORGETTABLE.
That is the importance of having a social media strategy. To develop a customer-centric strategy, you need to consider the following questions:
What are your brand’s main goals?
Which of the social media platforms will you utilize the best?
What content will attract your audience?
Do you want to educate, entertain, or do both?
Always remember to define your goal first so you can identify what strategies to use when using any social media platform.
Planning and Publishing
Social media for personal use is different when it comes to brands or businesses. Every firm needs to focus on demonstrating a steady social media presence to ensure that prospective clients see their brand.
When using social media as part of your marketing strategy, it is vital to be consistent when publishing your content. Therefore, the reason why you need to have a plan so you can schedule your content and what content should be published.
To guarantee a better-coordinated process, create a social media calendar. Provide access to your team members so they can make the necessary changes when needed.
Keeping a campaign's timing and frequency appropriate is essential to its effectiveness. But you don't need to worry about writing content every day. You can still publish your content automatically on social media even if you are not online.
There are lots of scheduling solutions available where your posts can be planned out weeks in advance. Additionally, once they are published you can still keep them for future use.
Engagement and Listening
Brands are discussed in public forums. On social media, they openly criticize, discuss, applaud, and sometimes make fun of one another. For instance, they think a brand’s logo is provocative or the service is inadequate.
People also discuss their experiences with every event or product launch. As a brand, you have to respond to such remarks made in public because this is how you'll be able to maintain your reputation and raise client satisfaction.
Assure them that you will listen to them and address their issues and concerns. This is vital especially if you want to create lasting relationships with your customers.
Monitor direct messages, mentions, and tags. Manually check your alerts to see whether there has been a tag or mention because it's simple to overlook them.
All social media mentions and messages can be gathered by using a listening and interaction tool such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Mention, Hubspot, and the like. It will efficiently keep an eye on postings with no tags at all.
Analytics and Reporting
To find out if you are headed in the correct direction, evaluate the results of your social media campaigns. Remember that your objective is to consistently boost traffic, sales, or engagement, depending on what your target is.
Most of all, it is MUST to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing activities as you go with publishing or doing social media interaction. Compare your growth to the most recent quarterly data. Is it doing well or not?
If your brand is an online retailer, are you receiving more positive or negative mentions or tags? All of the fundamental data about this is captured by social media analytics and technologies, which you can readily access on the applications.
Check out social media analytics tools, nevertheless, to have a deeper comprehension of all data collected. These days there is a vast array of analytics tools available, including Google Analytics, Sprout Social, and HubSpot, among others.
These tools allow users to compare their performance across multiple social media networks. Hence, allowing you to make the necessary changes if needed, and know which strategies work well for your brand.
Advertising
As your money increases, social media advertising is a profitable field to consider. Your chances of reaching a larger audience rise when you show your advertisements to a broader target group.
Your social media following grows quickly when you use social media ads. Since social media algorithms are so specific, they can select the right audience for your business.
The audience can be divided into groups according to a wide range of criteria, including age, gender, demography, interests, and behaviors.
Some types of advertising include:
Video ads
Static image ads
Messenger ads
Stories ads
The Power of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a clever, affordable, and long-lasting method of promoting services. Create a strategy that is built upon the solid foundation of the following five pillars: audience interaction, social media ads, planning and careful publication, good strategy, and campaign performance analysis.
Using these 5 core pillars, you will be able to reach your marketing objectives and succeed in your commercial ventures.
Do you want to know how we can help you develop your social media marketing strategy? SmartVAs is your perfect solution. We provide the best digital marketing virtual assistant depending on your business needs.
Visit our website and book an appointment today!
Frequently Asked Questions:
Is social media marketing easy?
While most social media platforms can easily be accessed and utilized, using them as part of your marketing strategy is a surefire way to increase brand awareness and reach out to more possible customers.
However, social media marketing is not easy, but it is worth it. It takes time, effort, and expertise to launch a successful social media marketing strategy.
Hence, the reason why careful planning and acquiring the assistance of an expert marketing virtual assistant is another option that you can consider.
What is the most popular form of social media marketing?
Facebook has about 3.03 billion active users, making it the most widely used social network globally. As a result, marketers operating on both the B2B and B2C spectrum continue to view Facebook as the market leader and the most significant social media platform.
However, Facebook is up against more competition as the social media scene rapidly changes and new players vie for users' and marketers' attention. Given the popularity of Instagram and YouTube, a lot of advertisers are also preparing to scale back their Facebook presence soon.
Why should you use social media marketing?
Social media marketing has grown to be one of the most successful and well-liked forms of digital marketing in recent years. With just a click of your mouse, advertisers can connect with billions of potential customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Industry professionals, especially, enjoy the improved exposure for their brands and products, as well as the increased traffic on their websites, which is why it is one of the reasons why you should use social media as part of your marketing strategy.