Social Media Marketing or SMM is a type of online marketing which uses up the social networking sites as a marketing platform. This type of marketing was introduced to generate promotional materials that the users commonly share with their entire network to assist their organization to enhance their exposure to brand promotion and to exceed their reach to the customers. It is basically the use of websites to promote a specific product or service.
The general marketing model
In order to include social networking sites as a key tool for the marketing strategies, different organizations and companies have developed a general model for marketing depending on the websites they’re using. The following are the steps included in this mentioned model.
- Selecting the potential social websites that can be used.
- Deciding upon a financial plan in regards to recruiting social media brand managers or consultants
- To design or modify the organizational development models which will thereby control the social networking sites in favor of the particular company’s market of demand. This also requires the addition of a social media platform to the already existing marketing sector of the company. A news branch can also be added for the same.
- The target supply and demand markets need to be chosen wisely.
- Also, the promotional products, brands, and services need to be selected along with the target markets.
- A few performance measures need to be implemented for processes of evaluating and analyzing.
In the year 2014, over 80% of business professionals had recognized social media to be a predominant sector of their business. An overall 100% increase in sales has been noticed through SMM.
Strategies for engagement
There are basically two types of strategies used for engaging the customers and leads: Passive Approach and Active Approach. Alongside being a strong marketing tool, social media sites can also be a justified way to hear out perspectives from different customers. Blogs and forums are the platforms provided to the public for sharing reviews and referrals of different products and services. The feedbacks can thus be analyzed for further continuation of marketing processes. SMM is thus a cheap yet the most effective form of promotion. It is a perfect instance for choosing smart work over hard work. Unlike traditional market research methods such as surveys which are time-consuming and costly, and which take weeks or even months to analyze, marketers can use social media to obtain real time information about the behaviors of customers. This is the only feasible form of marketing in this fast-paces world. Talking about Active Approach, SMM can also be used for specific audiences in form of customer engagement tools. TV and newspapers also generate advertisers who have a specific targeted audience. However, social media websites can target alcove markets even more precisely. It would be hard for a TV station or paper-based newspaper to provide ads that are this targeted.
Conclusion
SMM helps any company to get direct reviews or feedbacks from its customers alongside looking more personable. It allows the public to ask questions or even complain about the way they feel about the product. Customer Relationship Management is thus one of the important components of SMM. This became more popular with sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The company and blogger both are responsible for assuring that the incentives provided are transparently disclosed and the posts shall never consist of misleading information.
Author Bio :
Sejal Parmar, is an enthusiastic blogger who has a passion and interest in SEO. She covers topics on SMM, SEO, social media, digital marketing, blogging and much more at Web Ratna!