Page Text: So, What’s The Difference Between
Social Media Marketing & Digital Marketing In General?
We get this question a lot! The short answer is that social media marketing is one of the services that falls under the umbrella of digital marketing services.
Digital marketing is a term that encompasses all of the many different digital marketing methods you can execute including social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click) ads, email marketing, content marketing and more.
So as you can see, social media marketing is just one working component under a bigger digital marketing strategy. That’s why we are a full service agency that offers social media marketing in addition to the other services listed above. This is because you want your social media efforts to be in support of and supported by all of your other digital marketing efforts.
Schedule A Meeting Now
We get this question a lot! The short answer is that social media marketing is one of the services that falls under the umbrella of digital marketing services.
Digital marketing is a term that encompasses all of the many different digital marketing methods you can execute including social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click) ads, email marketing, content marketing and more.
So as you can see, social media marketing is just one working component under a bigger digital marketing strategy. That’s why we are a full service agency that offers social media marketing in addition to the other services listed above. This is because you want your social media efforts to be in support of and supported by all of your other digital marketing efforts.
Schedule A Meeting Now
Is Being Active On Social Media Platforms Important To Your Business?
If you have been using social media for a while now, you’ve probably seen and interacted with a business page’s post or ad- especially if it was a brand you like! Your target audience is no different. They like engaging with brands they favor and trust. But how do you create that brand-consumer trust?
That is where social media marketing, or also commonly known as SMM promotion, comes in. This specific digital marketing method aims to increase brand awareness and establish brand trust by building a solid social media presence for your brand. But really, how important is a social media for a business like yours? Let’s check out these statistics.
66% of Facebook users
say that they Like or Follow a brand on this social platform.
53% of users say they purchased
a product they first discovered on Twitter
74% of Facebook users
state that they check their Facebook accounts every day.
89% of online marketers
state that Instagram has been a very effective social media platform for influencer marketing.
83% of Pinners
have reportedly made a purchase based on the content they saw from brands on Pinterest.
77% of Twitter users
say that they feel more positive about a certain brand when their Tweet has been replied to.
90% of Instagram users
say that they follow a business on this social network, which also translates to IG users being keen on interacting with brands they like.
90 million of LinkedIn users
are senior-level influencers, while 63 million of them are in decision-making positions.
The statistics say it all! An effective social media marketing strategy indeed plays a vital role in growing your brand and revenue. And when we say an effective social media marketing strategy, it should be more than just publishing posts and creating social ads. It needs to be fresh, targeted, engaging and personalized to your brand. Our social media services can help you. Read on to learn more.
The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing Services
Improve Your Credibility As A Brand
Simply having social media is a start to increasing your credibility as a brand. If your business does not have a social media account, or if it does but it’s not regularly updated and optimized, it has the same impact as having a brick-and-mortar location that’s empty, collecting dust. It doesn’t give a good impression, it does nothing to establish trust with your potential customers and it can make users question if your business is even operational. This is because “checking out your social media” is a part of the research process for buyers today. That’s how important social media is for businesses these days. So then, if you partner with a social media marketing agency like LYFE Marketing to take your social media accounts to the next level, you can accomplish more than the bare minimum of just having a social media account. If we’re saying that simply having a social media account is a foot in the right direction towards increasing your credibility, imagine what implementing a strategic, powerful social media marketing plan could do for establishing your credibility and online presence.
Attract A Targeted Audience
Keyword there is targeted! Earlier we said billions of people use social media and that most have 8 or more accounts on average. You need to be able to sift through the sea of people online to find your specific target audience because you don’t want to build a follower base of just any type of person! You want potential customers! So how do you accomplish this? You start by picking the right social media platforms for you. Each social media platform is different and therefore attracts different groups of people. For example, Facebook’s users are pretty evenly split between male and female while Pinterest is used more by females. So first you’ll want to nail down what your ideal customer looks like and from there, you can look at the qualities of the different social media platforms to determine which might benefit you the best. Which holds the majority of your target audience? Once you determine the social media platforms you want to utilize, you can then use further targeting options provided by each individual platform. You can filter through a platform’s user base and target by demographics, interests, behaviors and more. This will help ensure that your social media content is being served to the right audience.
Direct Access To Your Customers
Engagement and conversations are happening every second of every day on social media. One of the biggest reasons social media has proven so powerful for businesses is because it gives them the ability to engage with their customers directly. For example, if someone buys a dress from your shop, they are likely to take a photo with it on, post it to Instagram and tag your brand (this is just an example but if happens way more often than you might think!). Your brand can then like the photo, comment on it, share it on your Instagram etc. This kind of positive interaction encourages brand loyalty and shows people that your customers love your brand. Let’s look at another example. Let’s say a mishap occurred with shipping and a customer let’s you know about it on social media. You have the power to quietly provide a solution to that customer and take care of their needs all within private messages on social media before they go and publish a negative review of your business. Having direct access to your customers allows you to keep a pulse on the likes and pain points of your target audience while they feel that they have a direct line and connection to your brand, increasing their trust in your brand.
Social Media Can Help Your SEO Rankings
Remember earlier when we said that social media marketing services work best when they support your other marketing services and vice versa? Well, here’s the perfect example of that. SEO is the process of getting your website to rank higher on search engines like Google. For example, if you sell muffins in Blue Ridge, Georgia, you would want your website to appear as the #1 search result when somebody types in “muffin shop Blue Ridge, GA” on Google right? SEO is the process that helps you do that, and you can learn more about our SEO services here. So, what does social media marketing have to do with SEO? Well, there are hundreds of ranking factors that Google looks at when determining which websites to rank first, and social media is one of those factors. The more backlinks you receive to your site from social media from people sharing your content and talking about your business, the more importance Google places on your website. What’s a backlink? A backlink is a link from another website that links back to your website, and backlinks are very important to Google. So while you’re carrying out your social media strategy to reap all of the social media specific benefits we’re discussing here, you can be simultaneously assisting your SEO efforts as well.
Increased ROI
The best benefit of all! While yes, social media management is geared more towards fueling the top of your marketing funnel, you want to see that those followers are eventually converting into customers. This starts with targeting the right people from the beginning and building your online presence effectively with a thought-out social media marketing plan. You don’t want your social media marketing efforts to be for nothing, so that’s where at social media marketing company like LYFE Marketing comes in! We know how to simultaneously focus on the followers and engagement while keeping the end goal of ROI in mind.
The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing Services
Improve Your Credibility As A Brand
Simply having social media is a start to increasing your credibility as a brand. If your business does not have a social media account, or if it does but it’s not regularly updated and optimized, it has the same impact as having a brick-and-mortar location that’s empty, collecting dust. It doesn’t give a good impression, it does nothing to establish trust with your potential customers and it can make users question if your business is even operational. This is because “checking out your social media” is a part of the research process for buyers today. That’s how important social media is for businesses these days. So then, if you partner with a social media marketing agency like LYFE Marketing to take your social media accounts to the next level, you can accomplish more than the bare minimum of just having a social media account. If we’re saying that simply having a social media account is a foot in the right direction towards increasing your credibility, imagine what implementing a strategic, powerful social media marketing plan could do for establishing your credibility and online presence.
Attract A Targeted Audience
Keyword there is targeted! Earlier we said billions of people use social media and that most have 8 or more accounts on average. You need to be able to sift through the sea of people online to find your specific target audience because you don’t want to build a follower base of just any type of person! You want potential customers! So how do you accomplish this? You start by picking the right social media platforms for you. Each social media platform is different and therefore attracts different groups of people. For example, Facebook’s users are pretty evenly split between male and female while Pinterest is used more by females. So first you’ll want to nail down what your ideal customer looks like and from there, you can look at the qualities of the different social media platforms to determine which might benefit you the best. Which holds the majority of your target audience? Once you determine the social media platforms you want to utilize, you can then use further targeting options provided by each individual platform. You can filter through a platform’s user base and target by demographics, interests, behaviors and more. This will help ensure that your social media content is being served to the right audience.
Direct Access To Your Customers
Engagement and conversations are happening every second of every day on social media. One of the biggest reasons social media has proven so powerful for businesses is because it gives them the ability to engage with their customers directly. For example, if someone buys a dress from your shop, they are likely to take a photo with it on, post it to Instagram and tag your brand (this is just an example but if happens way more often than you might think!). Your brand can then like the photo, comment on it, share it on your Instagram etc. This kind of positive interaction encourages brand loyalty and shows people that your customers love your brand. Let’s look at another example. Let’s say a mishap occurred with shipping and a customer let’s you know about it on social media. You have the power to quietly provide a solution to that customer and take care of their needs all within private messages on social media before they go and publish a negative review of your business. Having direct access to your customers allows you to keep a pulse on the likes and pain points of your target audience while they feel that they have a direct line and connection to your brand, increasing their trust in your brand.
Social Media Can Help Your SEO Rankings
Remember earlier when we said that social media marketing services work best when they support your other marketing services and vice versa? Well, here’s the perfect example of that. SEO is the process of getting your website to rank higher on search engines like Google. For example, if you sell muffins in Blue Ridge, Georgia, you would want your website to appear as the #1 search result when somebody types in “muffin shop Blue Ridge, GA” on Google right? SEO is the process that helps you do that, and you can learn more about our SEO services here. So, what does social media marketing have to do with SEO? Well, there are hundreds of ranking factors that Google looks at when determining which websites to rank first, and social media is one of those factors. The more backlinks you receive to your site from social media from people sharing your content and talking about your business, the more importance Google places on your website. What’s a backlink? A backlink is a link from another website that links back to your website, and backlinks are very important to Google. So while you’re carrying out your social media strategy to reap all of the social media specific benefits we’re discussing here, you can be simultaneously assisting your SEO efforts as well.
Increased ROI
The best benefit of all! While yes, social media management is geared more towards fueling the top of your marketing funnel, you want to see that those followers are eventually converting into customers. This starts with targeting the right people from the beginning and building your online presence effectively with a thought-out social media marketing plan. You don’t want your social media marketing efforts to be for nothing, so that’s where at social media marketing company like LYFE Marketing comes in! We know how to simultaneously focus on the followers and engagement while keeping the end goal of ROI in mind.
How To Market On Social Media
So far we’ve talked a lot about what social media marketing is, the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses and what it can do for your brand. So your next question may be, “How do you do it?” How do you effectively market your business on social media? Well, let’s break it down into 5 main steps.
How To Market On Social Media
So far we’ve talked a lot about what social media marketing is, the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses and what it can do for your brand. So your next question may be, “How do you do it?” How do you effectively market your business on social media? Well, let’s break it down into 5 main steps.
Research Everything
Do the heavy lifting up front to make the rest of your social media marketing plan a little smoother and dive into some heavy research. You want to know everything you can about the following 3 things: your target audience, what your competitors are doing and user behaviors on the specific social media platforms you intend to use.
How do you find this information? Well, there are a couple of ways. For your competitors, start by simply looking at their social media pages. What are they posting? Do they get good engagement on their post and/or do they have a decent amount of followers? On Facebook, there’s a feature where you can literally click to see what Facebook ads they’re running as well. Overall, you want to conduct a social media audit of your competitors.
Take note of what they’re doing and jot it down (either as something to try or something to avoid!). Then, assuming you have a shared target market, look at how people are responding to their content. Do they comment a lot or have a good amount of reviews? And in both of those instances, is it positive or negative overall? When it comes to your customers, Facebook has another feature called Facebook Audience Insights which can give you some ideas of what your target audience seems to be interested in on Facebook given their behavior patterns on the app.
Beyond this, take a moment to really think about what motivates your target audience’s purchasing decisions. What problem are they trying to solve or what goal are they trying to accomplish by ordering your product or using your service? Understanding your customers should be at the heart of every piece of marketing content you put out.
And lastly, you want to be educated about the social media platform you’re utilizing. Be aware of how people utilize the platform, and cater your content to their behavior patterns. Here’s an example. If you have a longform video to publish, Twitter may not be the optimal platform given that tweets are limited to 280 characters and people are used to consuming short bursts of content there. Whereas when people go to YouTube, their mindset is ready to consume some longer-form content.
So with all of your knowledge compiled about your competitors, your target audience and your social media platforms, let’s move on to the next step.
Plan Out Your Content Accordingly
After conducting extensive research about your target audience, put yourself in their shoes. What would they respond to best on social media? What do they care to see and what would they scroll right past? While your business’ social media accounts are for your business, they should ultimately exist to please your consumers!
Remember that social media marketing is all about capturing the attention of targeted, qualified, relevant followers to enter them into the top of your sales funnel. So your social media content should be less sales-heavy and more customer-focused. Provide informative, helpful content that makes you a thought leader in your space while simultaneously providing value to potential customers.
The other perk that comes with planning out your social media content is it gives you time to think about your messaging in advance. Decide what you want your brand tone to be and how you want to interact with your followers.
Optimize Your Accounts
Make sure everything you can control about your accounts is as optimized as possible. Think of it as putting your best foot forward on social media. This includes filling out your bio, adding a high resolution version of your logo as your profile photo, ensuring your website links work, adding your business’ contact information, proofreading for any spelling and punctuation errors and more.
Also, if you’re managing multiple social media accounts for your business, you want to make sure everything looks unified across the board. Somebody should be able to easily find you by typing in your business name on any social media platform. One good way to ensure this is to change your handle to be the same on every platform. Your handle is the @username which is separate from your “name” on social platforms. Make sure they’re all the same to make your business accessible and convenient for users.
The last tip we have for you on optimizing your social media accounts is actually a fairly new feature. Social media platforms are slowly starting to roll out their own native “SEO” processes if you will. This means when someone types in certain words into the platform’s search bar, your account can appear in the search results even if the user did not search a hashtag or location tag. When you’re optimizing your bio, particularly on Instagram, make sure you include “keywords” or words that people are likely to search for, in relation to your business. For instance, if you own a deli, make sure to include the words “deli” and “restaurant” in your bio as these are keywords people will likely search if they’re are looking for a deli in their area.
Decide If Social Advertising Is For You
Social media advertising is a whole other ballgame when compared to organic social media management. That’s why our social media advertising services are separate- because the goals and approach are different. That said, it does couple well with organic social media management. The two services go hand in hand. So here are some questions to ask yourself if you’re debating on whether to run social ads or not.
Do you have the time to invest in an organic approach or do you need immediate website traffic?
Are you looking for an extended reach within your target audience beyond what organic social media can provide?
Do you have an existing customer list, email subscriber list or any other historical data to work with?
Are you ready to set aside at least $20/day in ad spend?
The way you answer those questions will help you determine whether or not you need to invest in social media advertising, social media management or both!
Do I Need To Hire A
Social Media Promotion Company?
When managing your business’ social media accounts, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, they are all social media platforms, but they are different in their own way. Just like businesses in the same industry, each of these social media networks have their own strengths and features that can be useful to your business. That’s why it’s crucial for you to have an effective social strategy on more than one platform.
But wouldn’t that be time consuming? If you do it yourself, yes it can consume your time and resources. But the good news is that you don’t have to do it yourself. Our online marketing company can help you with our social media marketing services.
Our social media promotion service has a proven track record of helping businesses achieve their goals in social media marketing. Whether you’re aiming to grow your audience, generate more leads, get more new customers, or increase your ROI – LYFE Marketing is here to help.
Do I Need To Hire A
Social Media Promotion Company?
When managing your business’ social media accounts, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, they are all social media platforms, but they are different in their own way. Just like businesses in the same industry, each of these social media networks have their own strengths and features that can be useful to your business. That’s why it’s crucial for you to have an effective social strategy on more than one platform.
But wouldn’t that be time consuming? If you do it yourself, yes it can consume your time and resources. But the good news is that you don’t have to do it yourself. Our online marketing company can help you with our social media marketing services.
Our social media promotion service has a proven track record of helping businesses achieve their goals in social media marketing. Whether you’re aiming to grow your audience, generate more leads, get more new customers, or increase your ROI – LYFE Marketing is here to help.
Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses
Our Social Media Marketing Services
You can avail our social media promotion service for any of the social media platforms below. If you want to learn more about our SMM promotion services, then you can simply click the buttons below or schedule a free meeting with one of our digital marketing experts.
Facebook
With over 2 billion monthly active users, you are guaranteed to reach your desired audience through Facebook. Use the leading social media platform to grow your business.
Facebook Marketing Services
Instagram
A picture says a thousand words. Use one of the most engaging social media platforms that over 60% of people use to discover new products. Start building your audience today.
Instagram Marketing Services
Twitter
Increase brand recognition through Twitter. Twitter has over 330 million users and is used by all ages, from 18-64. Build trust and relationships through a trusted social platform.
Twitter Marketing Services
Pinterest
Use the best social media platform for businesses that sell consumer goods. Reach up to 400 million users, and an audience that is primarily middle-high income women.
Pinterest Marketing Services
LinkedIn
Reach up to 500 million decision-makers and professionals through the most popular social media platform for business owners. Most of LinkedIn’s audience is college educated and over 25 years old.