What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing is on the rise like never before. Businesses, both small and large, have found the need to reach their audience anywhere, at any time. Social Media Marketing uses social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Linked In to reach an audience to build brand awareness, increase engagement, create a brand, increase sales, drive website traffic and more.

Behind the Scenes of Social Media Marketing

There is so much time, planning, research, creativity and structure that goes into Social Media Marketing. The main areas include:

• Industry Research
• ICA Research
• Content Strategy
• Content Creation
• Caption Creation
• Hashtag Research
• Scheduling/ Posting
• Organic Engagement/Community Building

Industry Research

It is crucial to fully understand the industry in which you are marketing. This is the first step before you can begin to think about how to market. Industries are specific. Each kind of industry has different products/services, different clientele, different approaches, different tones, etc.

If you are marketing for an Auto Service Business, it’s important to know that you won’t be marketing anything related to beauty products to that industry. Makes sense, right?

ICA Research

ICA Research is Ideal Client/Customer Avatar research. When blooming your business, it is super important to understand who your audience is. If you know who your audience is, you will be able to directly market to them.

You want to know this ideal audience as much as possible. What do they value? What platform do they use? Do they like informative content? Having the answers to these questions makes for successful results.

You don’t have to stick to this specific clientele if you don’t want to, but it definitely helps to increase engagement.

Content Strategy

Before you can begin with content creation, you need to develop a content strategy, which includes the business objectives. This is your strategy you use to reach your goals of engagement, sales, awareness, etc. In this stage, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the audience.

A good way to produce quality content is to follow a strategy that includes the following elements:

• Information – Is the message you are producing informational,entertainment, practical?
• Context – Who is the target audience and what can they benefit from the message?
• Medium– Are you using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? How should you communicate the message?
• Form – Are you using a graphic, meme, audio message, video or another form?

When all of these elements are combined, you should end up with a cohesive message for your intended audience.

Content Creation

After considering the following areas, content creators sit down and take the content strategy and add a creative twist, one that will resonate well with the intended audience.

The messages get turned into eye-catching content that can be produced into various forms.

Caption Creation

The messages are both in the creative content and the caption itself. When developing captions, the captions should match the content it’s being posted with. It should inform the audience, while keeping the desired tone in mind.

Tone makes a huge difference in how something is read. Depending on business objectives, tones can vary from informational to relatable and everything in between.

Hashtag Research

Hashtags. Are they in? Are they out? Hashtags are most definitely in! In fact, Instagram has even said that hashtags need to go in the caption to be searchable. Hashtags are a great way to make your content more discoverable.

By putting simple hashtags that relate to your content, the goal is to have a larger audience viewing the hashtags that are associated with your posts, in turn more people will visit your accounts and view your content!

Be sure to research hashtags before posting to understand which ones will be the most successful related to your posts.

Scheduling/Posting

With social media, it is important to post at times during the day where more people are on their phones. A few good options are early in the morning before work, around noon when people are on their lunch break or sometime in the evening when people have a lot of free time to scroll leisurely.

At Bloom Digital Creatives we either schedule posts through Facebook’s Publishing Tools or we post in real time. Scheduling ahead of time allows for you to (almost) guarantee that your post goes out at the exact time that you prefer for it too. However, we still like to post in real time so that we are on socials to engage with those first few comments that come in.

Organic Engagement/ Community Building

Organic engagement is when you get interactions freely without the post being sponsored or promoted. This is great because it actually means your content is being seen just how it is with the proper content and hashtags that are catching an audience’s eye.

This is a great way to build community because when your engagement is increasing, your content will likely appear higher up on a feed. When you interact with your audience, you will have an account that can be relatable and trusted, bringing that audience back for more!

For someone who is busy running a business or doesn’t have the time or energy for all of this (which is totally understandable) is why Bloom Digital Creatives is a great option for you!