Social Media Marketing: Starter Guide

22 Sep Social Media Marketing: Starter Guide

In 2018, 4.8 million people in Singapore are active social media users.  That is around 83% from the whole population of the country. From that number, big chance is that your target customers are included in it, so why not try to promote your business there?

Social media marketing is more than just a trend. It has become a vital part in the era where digital presence is a requirement. Everybody who has smartphone basically has at least one social media application installed in it. With a growing number of social media channels over the years, social media marketing creates bigger chance for people to notice your business and even your value and activities.

Interested, but do not know where to begin?

We have created a basic social marketing starter guide to help you make your first step.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

By the name, you would have thought that it is a marketing process that is performed on social media platforms. At the beginning, social media marketing is interpreted as just creating a presence and raising the number of followers.

However, customers these days care more about the value behind a brand in addition to the quality of the products. Even if the product has good quality, but if the brand violates what are socially believed, for example brings harm to the environment or supports animal cruelty, the customers might choose to leave, while advocating their stand on their social media; thus, attracting other people to not believe in the brand as well.

Which is why, a lot of brands compete to promote their good value to gain more trusts from their consumers and target consumers. Using social media which are heavily used, is without question one of the best ways to deliver the message.

Moreover, with the growing development of e-commerce, social media marketing is often heavily aligned with digital sales. Some platforms like Facebook and Instagram have supported in-app purchase. Some brands also choose to link their social media to marketplace or their own e-commerce, so there is a direct funnel for the conversion.

BEGINNING SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Determine the Purpose and Goal

Again, do not do social media marketing just because it is a trend because every business is different from one another. Just like any other business plans, you need to have a goal and know what you want to achieve to know the direction you are going.

Identify your own business and see what exactly you need. This step is essential because you will need the information to build a social marketing strategy, even if you create the most basic strategy. It is like analyzing the maps of your battlefield before you create a war strategy.

Do you want to:

1. introduce your business to the market?
2. educate about your products?
3. promote some events?
4. increase brand awareness?
5. increase traffic to your website through link?
6. get some leads?
7. sell your product?

Whatever your purpose is will determine the way you execute the marketing process. Moreover, social media marketing also involves getting organic and paid results. Determining the purpose and goal will help you create the right decision and which platform is more suitable to use.

Know Your Audience

Knowing exactly what kind of customers you want to target is not only important for the success of social media marketing, but also to your business as a whole. Picture in mind your target customers and analyze their profile based on:

• Demography
• Location
• Behavior
• Emotion

By knowing all information about your audience, you can create highly-relevant contents that you will later put on your social media. The more relevant the content is, the higher the possibility for your audience to follow your accounts and engage.

Furthermore, the customer persona will also make it easier when you want to use paid advertisement because you need to be very specific in order for your ads to achieve the correct audience. In other words, this will impact your Return of Investment (ROI).

Analyze Your Competitor

There is no business without competitor, and so is social media marketing. Although your intention is probably not to beat your competitors (yet), still it is important to know what your competitors are doing to learn how they manage the relationship with the audience, because their target market is your target market.

When you have a complete idea what kind of social media strategy they are practicing, you can see which methods work which ones do not. You can implement the good methods into your practice, while filling in the gap where your competitors are lacking. In fact, you may even perform a better strategy that may beat your competitors’; for example by choosing better keywords or invest more accurately on ads.

Create Your Content

What you should pay attention to when creating contents is how they align with your value, your identity, your target audience, and the channel you use.

Let’s say you have an online business in fashion industry which targets young ladies between 18-24 years old with upper middle level social status. The content you post should mirror these ladies’ behavior, style, and favorites. The post should exude modern style that is youthful and elegant. Imagine many of these ladies are first-jobbers or senior years in university who will need classy semi-formal looks but not too mature. If you are going to post on Instagram, make sure the pictures match the traits required, and if you are going to share an article through Facebook, you can give, for example, fashion tips that will be useful for their activities while positioning yourself according to your business’ value and identity.

Sounds complex? It can be, especially if you don’t understand their profile well. Surely, you can just put any general content with less targeted direction, but it may not be relevant to your market, and instead driving them farther away because they don’t see you relatable.

Manage and Evaluate Your Performance

Whether you decide to implement unpaid or paid social media marketing, evaluation should regularly be done to measure the success rate. See which of your posts gain good engagement, and for paid ads which one gets more clicks than the others. This is to make sure that you only run the best practices by eliminating those that do not work.

If you use paid advertisement, you can get fast result and even see the real time report. You can also control your budget on how much you want to spend and for how long. On the other hand, if you master the unpaid process, you will be able to perform more sustainably on the platform with lower cost. However the downside is that it may take a long time especially if you are from a small business with no well-built reputation.

The management also includes creating a content plan that should be renewed regularly and maintain the engagement on the accounts because customers love quick response and hate the opposite.

Ready to start your new journey? If you want to increase awareness, increase traffic to your site, and gain leads you may want to begin from posting ads on Facebook because it is by far the most used social media in the world, even in Singapore. With a lot of users, it makes you easier to set the target and explore the possibilities of your audience profile.

We at AlpharusMedia are familiar in this area. We will help you achieve your goal by implementing only the best practice of social media marketing based on our years of experience. Leave us a comment below or contact us here.