Social media marketing can be a daunting prospect if you’re just about to dip a toe in the water. Social media is already a vital tool in the belt of the savvy business owner. It is unusual to find a successful company without a cohesive social media marketing campaign today, especially as we move our lives more and more online.
But you have enough on your plate! Learning how to apply your voice and values to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on is a big task. That’s why it’s best left to the professionals – Find local social media marketing services.
We’ve got the intel on the smartest experts, taking another job out of your hands. Your time is valuable, after all!
Social Media Marketing versus Traditional Marketing
The biggest difference between new forms of marketing and traditional is the amount of customer interaction. Both forms do need attention, with a focus on keeping your brand’s identity at the forefront. Both have the overall requirement of promoting your business, increasing brand awareness and recognisability. The benefit that comes from social media marketing is that your customers – both current and potential – can engage. You can see in real-time how the strategy is going.
Where traditional marketing might involve a billboard or a magazine article, pieces that need to be designed and approved and scheduled well in advance, social media marketing is more fluid.
It could be a competition on Instagram, which encourages your customers to share how much they love your product with their friends. It could be a pithy comeback to a competitor’s tweet on Twitter: people love when brands seem to break that wall of professionalism, even if they know it’s been approved much higher up the food chain.
You may or may not need a public face on every single platform, in much the same way as a national campaign may be the wrong move for your local eco-friendly landscaping business. There are some industries that truly just don’t do very well on Instagram, or where the cynicism of Twitter doesn’t match up to the brand identity. A social marketer will know the answers to the question of which platforms are right for you.
Why You Need a Professional
Even people who are very confident on Facebook, who use it every day, may not have the skills and expertise to manage an effective social media marketing campaign. It is also a full-time job, and if you are running your own company or managing a workforce, you already have one of those!
Social media marketing is a highly specialised skill, something that is best left to those that have dedicated their lives to understanding algorithms, the construction of the perfect 280 character statement, how to whip up a stop-motion reel, or what on earth Tik Tok is.
Marketing on social media is different across each platform. You need to understand how users might want different experiences, and how that could be applied to your brand’s messaging. Instagram lends itself to beautiful photography; this sort of thing does poorly on Twitter. Facebook’s users may be from slightly older generations, who prefer a conversation starter and a link. LinkedIn is vital, and yet using it can be very tricky. A social media manager will know just how to approach each platform to get the absolute best use of it. That’s why they are the experts.
The Benefits of Agility
There is one huge benefit to social media marketing that is impossible to find in traditional forms of media, and that’s the agility. While it may take weeks or months to see returns from a new branch of marketing out via traditional routes, such as on television or printed in a local newsletter, social media is more immediate.
There is no means for analysing the effect of a campaign in real time via traditional media. This is where social media comes into its own.
A savvy social marketer can put out a new idea on multiple platforms and watch engagement as it happens. They can tweak and twist, look for opportunities to increase the reach, add bows to strings as and when they are needed. They are like detectives, creatives, and statisticians all rolled into one.
A social media marketer knows how to pull up the statistics on each post to see what worked, what could have been done better, and to apply those findings immediately. That’s something you just can’t get with a billboard.
Hire a Professional
Social media marketing is best left to the social media marketers. They live their lives deep in the belly of the beast, constantly discovering the best ways to utilise social media. Every company needs some kind of internet-based public face, and a social media marketer will make sure you put your best face forward.
