More than half of the world’s population uses social networks. It is natural that each brand has its own page. We tell you how to promote a business on social networks.
What is SMM promotion
Who is social media promotion suitable for?
Types and tools of SMM promotion
Advantages and disadvantages of SMM
Features of promotion in social networks
SMM tools
What is SMM promotion
Table of Contents
SMM, Social Media Marketing — is promotion in the media. Social networks and instant messengers are now almost the main channel of Internet marketing. If you like a popular channel or account and it seems that it is run intuitively, from the heart, most likely, in fact, there is a well-thought-out content plan and good specialists. What is SMM for:
● attracting attention to the brand,
● increasing recognition;
● involving the audience in the life of the brand, interacting with it;
● building the company’s image;
● increasing sales and attracting new clients – as a result.
An important idea of marketing is to make sure that the loyal audience brings new customers. The more often this happens, the higher the brand recognition. SMM promotion also works for this purpose, but on a smaller scale. The success of local brands directly depends on promotion in social networks. Subscribe to the profile of a company that runs a beautiful page – and here you are already a potential buyer. When you need a product, you will go to the manufacturers you remember.
Beautiful design, usefulness of publications and style of communication with clients are important. Many companies manage social networks from an expert point of view, telling useful information to buyers. Someone chooses to publish information and respond in private messages, someone develops a separate role, within which the behavior of the brand and how it addresses the audience is built. All this helps the company develop and attract traffic of new clients.
Read Also:Must-Read Blogging Books for Bloggers
Who is social media promotion suitable for?
Social media promotion is especially useful for B2C businesses, those who provide services and goods to individuals, consumers – from sewing underwear, catering and photography services to clothing and jewelry brands. B2B find clients in social networks much less often. SMM promotion is a universal tool, primarily useful for less well-known companies, for example:
● small businesses,
● online stores,
● startups,
● personal brands,
● non-profit organizations.
You can learn how to effectively promote brands in social networks on the course “SMM Specialist” . The training lasts 4 months, during which time students learn the intricacies of working in different social networks, learn to analyze the market and competitors, launch campaigns and develop media plans.
Types and tools of SMM promotion
● Content
This is the main promotion method, why people subscribe to a page or Telegram channel in the first place. These can be useful text posts, beautiful photos and videos presenting the brand’s products, stories, and so on. Content should be published regularly – this will keep the audience’s attention and show the page in search more often. What and how to publish is decided when drawing up a content plan.
● Targeted advertising
These are advertisements that are shown to the target audience: for example, auto parts are bought by middle-aged men, and children’s toys – by mothers and housewives; other categories may not be so interested in the product. To launch targeted advertising, you need to analyze the brand’s target audience to understand who the potential customers are. Then an advertising campaign is formed, an advertisement is created and the target is set up.
● Interaction with subscribers
These are comments, responses to reviews, contests, emotional posts, and expressions of care. Imagine an account of a small coffee shop that, in bad weather, announces on social networks that it is inviting everyone to hot drinks at a discount. Or a local clothing brand that launches a campaign to transfer part of its profits to charity. Or a store that has taken in a cat. All of these are not only good deeds, but also a way to attract more positive emotions from subscribers and become someone people tell each other about.
The audience feels subtly when a brand speaks the same language and communicates on topics close to them. Also, a discussion of a topic involving the company or a direct question from the brand to subscribers will gather more reactions. It is equally important to solve customer problems: a quick and adequate response to negative messages shows that customers are important to the company.
● Interaction with influencers and collaborations
Influencers, such as famous bloggers, are opinion leaders in their field. For local brands, local opinion leaders are an excellent choice, as advertising costs less and their recognition in their city can be high. Joint posts, promotions and videos, promo codes with discounts from bloggers or direct advertising are suitable for this type of promotion. Companies also use collaborations with artists, musicians or brands from another field for social networks. Both options will attract a new audience.
● Mentions in third-party communities
Most often, this refers to paid advertising in thematic chats, channels or groups. This is not as effective as targeting, but it also helps find new clients. This method is very popular in Telegram when launching new channels: for a fee or mutual advertising, administrators of large channels repost publications.
● Mascot
This is a character that becomes the brand’s calling card and is associated with it. For example, even those who don’t like sweets know the characters in the M&M’s advertisements, Red and Yellow.
Advantages and disadvantages of SMM
Pros
✅ Trust
In many ways, SMM promotion looks like friendly communication between a brand and its subscribers. Regular customers of a company trust the information it publishes and forward these messages to their loved ones – and the posts already look like recommendations from a reliable source. Loyal readers of publications may not even be clients of the brand, but most likely they will definitely become them.
✅ Speed of information dissemination
Messages on social networks are sent instantly, and this feature has two sides. On the one hand, a regular reader will forward a notification about a promotion or a beautifully designed post to others – and they will quickly spread across the network. On the other hand, the same thing works with negative messages, from reviews of services that have appeared on social networks and in the media, to major scandals.
✅ Reaching your target audience
It is faster and easier to find new clients on social networks. And thanks to targeted advertising, information about the brand will immediately reach consumers interested in the product. Users themselves provide data for targeting, leaving it in their accounts.
✅ Communication
Social networks are designed for communication, and marketers have turned this feature to their advantage. These are quick responses to comments, jokes that become popular memes, user surveys and contests.
Cons
❌ Investments
Results do not appear immediately, usually it takes from three months to six months. In addition, it is difficult to calculate how much SMM promotion will cost – costs depend on many factors. ❌ Constant work. New content should constantly appear in the brand’s social networks, and creating videos or organizing contests require a lot of time, as does regular posting.
❌ High cost of error
From a typo in the text to the wrong choice of topics or a reaction that causes numerous discussions. Due to the speed of information dissemination, everyone learns about serious errors – and the target audience too.
Read Also:Ceñillin – Your Guide to the Magic Herb
Features of promotion in social networks
SMM promotion includes five stages:
1. Defining the promotion goal
For example, increasing brand awareness, sales growth, analyzing the target audience for further marketing work, creating your own brand community. It is also important to set measurable business indicators that need to be achieved. For example, increasing the number of subscribers by 500 people per month.
2. Market and brand concept analysis
We study the company’s positioning, logo, corporate colors, corporate phrases, how work with clients is conducted on the website. It is important to analyze the market and data on competitors’ work in social networks: what techniques they use, how the audience reacts. Market analysis will give an understanding of what indicators to focus on when working on your own promotion and what competitors’ practices work. It will be useful to find mentions of the brand in social networks, media and on forums with reviews and understand how the brand was evaluated before.
3. Audience research
To understand how to manage social networks, you need to know with whom and in what language you will need to speak. Everything depends on the target audience of the product. The same data is needed for subsequent advertising settings and for thinking through campaigns – materials that touch on important moments for people, their pain points, work best. 4. Content creation. Based on the analysis of the target audience, we choose which social networks the brand will work in and what tools will be used to build promotion. The target audience may not be present on all platforms – there is no need to spend effort and money on entering them.
At this stage, the idea and core values of the brand, tone of voice , are described in detail . If a person is close to the company’s values, he will give it preference when buying. A visual concept and principles for the design of materials in different social networks are developed. A content rubricator is created, a list of topics is agreed upon. There is a rule called the “golden formula of content” – the ratio of the most popular types of content in social networks: 40% of materials are entertaining, 30% tell about the brand, 25% are educational and useful, 5% are advertising.
Entertainment content — games, jokes, memes — keeps the audience engaged, while educational content adds expertise. Brand materials include company news, feedback, stories about the company’s “inner workings”, and content from employees. Advertising publications include announcements of promotions and competitions, stories about products and delivery.
5. Selecting promotion methods
Several brand promotion hypotheses are created, which will be tested to understand which methods will work well. The targeted advertising setup is thought out, which social networks and in what format will be used, how the brand will work in social networks with negativity, how it is planned to interact with influencers, collaborations, etc. A media plan with budget distribution is drawn up.
A properly formed strategy will allow you to avoid mistakes and save your budget. Chaotic management of the company’s social networks indicates an undeveloped strategy or its absence.
SMM tools
We have collected in the table tools that will help SMM specialists at different stages of promotion.
Analytics
Metrics are needed to understand whether the chosen SMM promotion method works. At the beginning of the path, it is necessary to identify the main indicators for tracking: this is the reach of publications, user engagement, mentions, clicks on links, saving and forwarding posts.
Collecting these statistics manually is very difficult and time-consuming, so there are many useful tools on the market. In Telegram, this is primarily TGStat . Analysis of competitors on VKontakte is carried out using the Media-VK tool . Statistics in several social networks are analyzed by the Popsters tool . Yandex also has its own free system – Yandex Metrica .
Post planning
The most famous is SMM-planner , a simple service for automatic posting on social networks. Also, various social networks have a function of delayed publications.
OnlyPult – in addition to publication, suggests the best time for posting.
Parsing
Parsers are tools that collect user databases to set up targeted advertising. PepperNinja , Target Hunter and others
Competitions
Contests often use random number generators to determine the winner, such as Randomus .
Content
Text check: Glavred (check for complex wording), Tipograf (layout errors), Orfogrammka (grammatical errors).
Images: Canva , Figma . Video: CapCut , Supa , Wave .
