Marketing on Steroids

Social media marketing is like traditional marketing, except on steroids. With social media marketing, all of your prospective customers are concentrated in a few social media platforms. A social media strategy will help you effectively engage these potential customers and turn them into real paying customers - and even future advocates for your business. 

But in order to do this effectively, you will need to do more than post a few things on Facebook or Instagram. You are going to need an effective social media strategy that combines different tried-and-true social media tactics. These tactics include strategies such as local SEO for your website, Facebook Ads with videos or slide shows, or LinkedIn how-to articles with specific targeted keywords. It might even include a Pinterest marketing program using effective pictures of your product or an Instagram advertising campaign with funny or silly posts that use "influencers" to pump up your product. Simply posting occasionally on Facebook or LinkedIn won't hurt your business, but it probably won't bring new customers either.

POWERFUL TOOLS AND STRATEGIES

In order to turn these unknown and unidentified people into enthusiastic customers and later, advocates for your company, you must have an effective, well planned social media strategy. Fortunately, the tools that are available to help us identify and reach your ideal customers are extremely powerful and provided by these platforms themselves. In fact, when you understand these tools and tactics fully, you will see that they are simply mind-blowing. And, over the last couple of decades of social media evolution, there have been certain marketing approaches that have risen above the others for different types of industries and marketing goals.  

DIFFERENT PLATFORMS, DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

The strategies for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn all radically differ from each other. For instance, with Facebook, the marketing approach needs to be leaning toward the entertainment side of things with videos, slide shows, and engaging personal stories. People who are on Facebook are there during their free time, and they are looking to be entertained. Creative social campaigns such as an emotional and entertaining approach with videos, funny or touching stories, or pictures is the key to success on Facebook. However, on LinkedIn, this approach would be disastrous. 

This is because people are on LinkedIn for a different reason than when they are on Facebook. They are there to do business. LinkedIn is a place to meet other business people or learn things about how to operate your business. Using pictures and videos of kittens and puppies on LinkedIn could actually hurt your brand and drive away customers. This is true even though you may be talking to the exact same person as you did on Facebook. And it's the same thing the other way around. On LinkedIn, instructional "How to" posts can be very effective, and the length of the article needs to be longer, not shorter. Statistics show that LinkedIn articles of 1,500 - 2,000 words are the most shared by a 2-1 margin. But posting an article of that length on Facebook would be a total failure. With a long article like that on Facebook, you wouldn't even get a second glance.

Because these different platforms cater to people that have different goals, the marketing strategies and approaches need to be appropriate for each platform. Fortunately, we can use the characteristics of the various platforms in coordination with each other. There are very effective strategies for using multiple platforms simultaneously in a digital marketing program. For example, we can identify your ideal customer on Facebook, and then "remarket" to them on LinkedIn. Or the other way around. Using approaches like this, we can leverage the strengths of each different platform for different parts of our campaign.

TAILORED-MADE PROGRAMS

We know that there are no two businesses that are exactly the same. Even businesses that offer the same products have different goals at different times. And so, it follows that no two social media marketing campaigns can be exactly the same. Fortunately, the variety and strength of the options that are available to us when using Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are incredible in their reach and mind-boggling in the detailed knowledge of their user base. 

Here at The Click Depot, we begin the process by consulting with your company to discover things such as - what marketing you've done in the past, who is your ideal customer, what is your current advertising ROI, as well as learn all about your products and services. We will also look at your current website and social media presence to understand your existing client base.

With this information, we will sit down with you to discuss what your strategy should be moving forward.  As previously stated, we have several strong social media platforms from which we can launch a great variety of campaigns. Some of these platforms could be of great benefit to your company, while others would simply be a waste of time and money. Armed with this information, we can create a digital marketing program that will increase your customer base with an excellent return on investment (ROI).

FREE AND PAID CONTENT

Another thing we would need to consider is that all successful social marketing campaigns utilize both free content and paid ads. On all these social media platforms, you can post content for free. As a matter of fact, most users of these platforms don't even consider paid postings, and those people are probably your future customers. These social media paid programs combined with free content, are what we use to deliver a very effective marketing punch.

Google was born in 1998 and started selling their AdWords in the year 2000. Over the last 20 years, the marketing strategy using Google's ads has developed at an extremely rapid pace. And it is also a similar story with Facebook. This company started in 2004 and is now the largest social network in the world. The existing marketing strategies using Facebook's ads have developed into very powerful and effective tools for today's companies.  It's hard to believe that all of this change happened over the last 15 years.

With over 2.3 million searches per second, Google's advertising dollars are at $40 Billion per quarter - the biggest in all of history. Why is it so successful? Because the world's biggest online advertising vendor has so much information about their user base - which includes just about anyone with a computer. And the Facebook platform isn't too far behind.  

For most people, Google and Facebook appear to offer all their products for free. Free search engine, free maps, free Gmail, free online storage from Google. And from Facebook, they provide us with free access to talk with our friends and join groups of people just like us (for instance, look up "miniature horse clubs" or "mommy groups"). All of this for free. But it is this free engagement that allows them to collect so much useful marketing information.

WEALTH OF INFORMATION

As advertisers, we can see the marketing power of having this wealth of information available for our campaigns. We use this information to precisely target our customers with the offers that they will enthusiastically engage with. Then we have the ability to pull them off the social media platform into our website through carefully designed marketing campaigns that include things such as landing pages, web forms, webinars, and downloadable content. 

MORE SOPHISTICATED PROGRAMS AND TECHNOLOGIES

If you were going to start running social media advertising programs ten years ago, it was a simple matter of placing ads and seeing results. Because the industry was new, most people in business didn't recognize the power that was available to them through these platforms. Also, the customers were new to social media as well. Fast forward to today, and we can see how very powerful these platforms have become. They also have become very sophisticated, and the customers have become more sophisticated as well. And not only have the platforms developed over time, but there are new platforms that have joined the game. These platforms include names such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram.  Each of these platforms are powerful in their own right. But using all these platforms in harmony can be extremely powerful.

At The Click Depot, we have years of experience designing and implementing social media marketing campaigns. We understand the strength of each platform, how to use them together, and which ones to avoid for particular industries.  Call us today and set up an appointment with one of our social media specialists to talk about our affordable social media marketing packages.  We will design a program that is tailored to your industry and your particular situation.