With marketing efforts constantly changing and gravitating towards social media marketing, it is imperative for business owners to utilize all the available tools and resources for effective social media advertising strategies. Furthermore, it’s also essential to remain sensitive during this time of uncertainty surrounding the current COVID-19 pandemic. From defining and building an audience to understanding and leveraging social media platforms to learning the ins and outs of content marketing, there is a lot to cover and thoroughly understand to develop an innovative and robust social media advertisement campaign while remaining aware of the effect that COVID-19 has on businesses of any size..
Defining Audience
The first step in building a social media campaign is defining the audience for which you’d like to market. Some important questions you might ask are: who do I want to help? What kinds of businesses or clients could profit from my products and/or services? What are some common pain points of their industry(ies)?
Typically, you’ll need to decide if you want a business-to-customer or business-to-business approach. From there, it’s a matter of narrowing down your audience. For example, if you’re doing B2C, what types of people are you targeting? Will you target business owners, influencers in the industry, or executive-level employees?
Understanding Social Media Platforms
In this era of technology, social media, and younger generations, there is a social media platform for any audience. It is important to understand each platform and the types of communities they reach. For example, a Baby Boomer may only use Facebook and Twitter, whereas a Gen-Z-er might use YouTube. Depending on your defined audience, the type of social media platform will be crucial to your marketing strategy.
Here are a few summaries of each:
- YouTube: YouTube has a diverse and worldwide reach from an audience standpoint. It also provides a more interactive platform to show face and personality for potential clients to see.
- Facebook: Facebook offers diverse self-serve and tracking tools to create an easy-to-use system and reports. You can incorporate videos, images, and audio to customize your ads.
- Twitter: Twitter offers real-time analytics and you can measure engagement for each individual tweet.
- LinkedIn: Because LinkedIn is a more professional-based platform, you have a wide range of content marketing-type ads, such as sponsored content, message and text ads, and dynamic ads.
- Instagram: Instagram gives you diverse opportunities for marketing, including ads for stories, videos, photos, carousel, collection, and explore giving you a dynamic range of ad spaces.
Content Marketing
There are endless ways to market your content. Blogs, infographics, whitepapers, case studies, videos, and even podcasts are all great content, especially to push through social media for audience engagement.
- Blogs are great ways to showcase your expertise on a subject and/or in an industry. It offers you the opportunity to cover diverse topics and bring traffic to your website and/or push through your social media, both of which can offer organic leads.
- Infographics can be incorporated into blogs or be marketed on their own. They typically contain condensed information on complex topics and give statistics to drive a point across. This is a great platform to demonstrate your creative flair.
- Whitepapers are integral to collecting data on your content marketability. For example, because whitepapers are information documents typically containing tips for common industry issues that are high in demand, they can be used as gated content.
- Case studies are essentially testimonials. They follow the journey between you and a client, including their pain points, how your products and/or services helped them solve such problem(s), and showcase you as a leader in your industry. However, they can be used for failures as well to determine what went wrong, how to improve, and develop more effective strategies.
- Videos allow your audience to connect through your personality and the information you convey. Videos don’t always have to be the business owner. There are numerous ways to incorporate videos, such as lists, industry updates, explaining a concept, etc.
- Podcasts are a relatively new concept but are incredible content marketing tools when used correctly. They can be used for gated content as well.
The avenues for social media advertising are limitless. With the right training, research, and tools can position you as a leader in your industry. Contact Insured Solutions for PEO solutions that can assist you with marketing best practices and other HR solutions tailored to your business demands.