Search VS Social Marketing. What is the Real Value for your Business?

Social media marketing, also known as SMM, has become an extremely powerful marketing tool for business. SMM budgets in business are expected to double in the next 5 years. This has been driven by the embrace of social media in our culture from various age groups and the extensive range of social media channels.

Google AdWords is becoming an increasingly saturated market and this is forcing the cost-per-click (CPC) off the table for many small to medium businesses. SMM has provided an affordable alternative that can be 10 times cheaper than Google AdWords (when compared to Facebook advertising). For you this means your advertising budget is driving your engagement levels up 10 fold than what could have been achieved on Google AdWords. Consider this serious bang for your marketing buck.

Now take a pause. Before you create your new Facebook advertisement in the hope that extra leads flow through your website, lean back with your coffee in hand and consider the most important point. What’s your marketing strategy? Without this, you are not able to recognise, measure and qualify leads, not to mention create an impact in the market which will lead to your overall success.

Take into consideration your business drivers and objectives and your desired outcomes from SMM. This may include:

• Increasing your website traffic (increasing brand strength and/or market visibility)
• Creating leads through your website (with specific offers or campaigns)
• Increasing brand, product or service awareness(understanding your differentiators)
• Building an audience to market to in the future through a staged approach (slow release teaser campaigns for example).

One approach is to create “personas” for your brand as this is is an important step when looking to be successful with SMM. Facebook for example, has the ability to target an audience by location, age, sex, languages spoken, jobs, interests etc. Think of all those details you’ve shared with your friends and families, yes that’s right, we can target all of them. This helps you create a target audience that you can specifically market your products or services to. To aid with this process, if you have an existing Facebook page, you can use this to analyse your current audience traits by exploring your page insights.

From there, you can create a captivating advertisement that communicates directly to your target audience and encourages them to engage and interact with your website of Facebook page.

Now for your next step – optimisation.

Without continually monitoring, optimising and measuring the success of your new creation, you are missing out on the funnelling effect your marketing efforts should achieve. Optimisation can be as simple as tweaking a word/s or trying multiple or different images to increase engagement with your desired audience.

Now if your SMM campaign goal is to drive traffic to your website, tracking it with Google Analytics is a great way to gauge its success. One of the most valuable elements you can add to your SMM campaign is to setup tracking tags and campaign goals in Google Analytics. This will allow you to see which specific ads are driving traffic and if extra conversions are coming through these channels.

SMM is a valuable asset for any business, whether you are talking about business-to-business or business-to-consumer, using platforms such as Facebook and its targeted advertising system, you can be marketing to your desired audience in an instant with the click of your mouse. Here’s your homework – start small, and make minor alterations and as you become more confident, use trial and error to determine what works, and what doesn’t work, for your business.

So what are you waiting for? Learn more about how The Digital Embassy can help you with your SMM Campaigns