HOW TO START SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IN 2023. INITIAL STEPS AND SMM STRATEGY

Whether you own a business and want to maximise its performance, or looking to start your own marketing agency, social media marketing (SMM) is the place to start. Marketing has been around for a very long time and for good reason. A successful business requires a constant customer base and that is where marketing comes into play. Marketing allows you to introduce your brand to a range of possible customers and through various marketing techniques, you aim to convince them that they need your services or products.

Traditional platforms such as TV or newspapers originally provided the opportunity for businesses to reach a wide audience. But in an age where we all consume an immense amount of data online, should you consider other platforms? Since you are reading this, I assume you already know the answer to that question is, YES. Although traditional marketing allowed you to reach a wide audience, most of those individuals would not have been right for your services or even interested in who you are or what you do. Also, let’s not forget the fact that these marketing platforms can be extremely expensive if you want them to yield any tangible results.

Online platforms on the other hand allow you to reach a mind-boggling range of individuals, choose the demographic you want to advertise to as well as letting you advertise your business next to the biggest names in your industry. But with so many platforms it is very difficult to decide where or how to start. Or is it?

Where to start

As of the fourth quarter of 2022, Facebook has over 2.96 billion active monthly users. Yes, you read that right! To put that in perspective, China’s population is just over 1.4 billion; the largest population in the world! Facebook also collect a huge amount of information about their users such as interests, profession, hobbies and a lot more. So, it should be no surprise that we would advise anyone new to marketing to start here. As of the first quarter of 90% of marketers worldwide use Facebook in their marketing strategies. So clearly, the platform has a lot to offer both for novice advertisers as well as professionals.

Contradictory to what most gurus would tell you, to start your own social media marketing agency or just to advertise your business you do not need to spend thousands of your hard-earned cash on courses, advice or any sort of equipment. All you need is a desktop or a laptop. Although, if you want to be a successful marketer you also need a lot of time and even more dedication to your craft.

To start, go ahead and make a Facebook Business account where you can start running your ads for yourself or your clients. Once you have the basics down, you can move on to slightly more complicated strategies such as using services like clickfunnels or GrooveSell to develop landing pages and funnels in combination with your ad campaigns. Although you do not need to use funnels or landing pages initially, we highly recommend you set up an account with GrooveSell as soon as you can. The platform is currently in beta stage which means you can get access to their base account with a large number of features completely free, FOR LIFE!

Strategy

Now that you have your business account set up you are ready to start your ad campaigns but before you launch your adverts you need to come up with a marketing strategy and there are four major aspects to consider;

• Business goals
• target demographic
• budget
• success measurement.

This is where things start to get a bit more technical and if you are a business owner, we do advise you seek advice from marketing professionals to achieve great performing ad campaigns. Ask us how we can help!

Business Goals

Firstly, and most importantly, you need to understand and define business goals. Is the business looking to create more website traffic, brand awareness or are they trying to convert to revenue? Once you know the business goals, you can tailor your campaigns to suit these goals. For example, if your business goal is lead generation, make sure you tailor your campaign and ads to collect leads and not pushing sales.

This Facebook advert from a BMW dealership is a great example of a lead generating advert. You can clearly see they are not attempting to sell to the person viewing the ad but rather aiming to have a wide audience sign up for a valuation to sell their car using their email addresses and phone numbers. The company then has a large number of warm leads. They can then contact these leads and push them towards the next sales stage to generate revenue and hit their ROI (Return On Investment) targets. 

Target Demographic

Of course, it is important it is to make sure your ads are targeted at the right people. As we told you earlier, online platforms allow you to target a very specific customer base. This is why understanding and defining a robust customer demographic is key to a successful SMM campaign. Initially you should define this demographic based on characteristics like age, gender, occupation or interests. For specific campaigns, you could even go as far as directly targeting your competitors’ customers. For example, if you are running ads for cosmetic products, Facebook would allow you to target your ads specifically at people who liked, follow or have purchased from Kylie Cosmetics. This method of aggressive targeting usually helps if you are looking to convert from the adverts to hit revenue targets.

Pro Tip: Be sure to make use of the Facebook Pixel, especially if you sell products on your website. The Facebook Pixel is a very Powerful piece of code that can be embedded onto the header of your website. This then collects information about the individuals who visit your website, view your products, make a purchase or even window shop. This then allows you to target the same individuals or users with similar characteristics in the future.

Budgeting

Budgeting strategies always varies and is hugely dependent on the size and needs of yours or your client’s business. Since you are reading this article, we assume you are a novice or you own a small local business. These businesses usually do not have an extensive marketing budget so we strongly urge you not to spend a big sum of your budget on your first advert. The reason for this is simple. You are new to the business and you do not yet know which specific details in our ads would yield results. So big investments on your initial campaigns could result in wasting your budget and having nothing to show for it!

Instead, we advise that you set low budgets for a few initial campaigns with specific but different demographics, visuals (photos and videos used in the ad) and written content. Review these initial ads after some time to see which one has been more successful. We advise you wait at least 5 days before checking the performance of your initial ads. At this point compare the these and choose one or two most successful campaigns. You can then dedicate a larger budget to these and be confident that the investment will pay off and achieve the best results possible.

Success measurement

As we mentioned in the last section, being able to assess the success of your ad campaigns is very important. That is why we strongly advise you to set appropriate performance indicators for your campaigns. For you to be able to do this correctly, you need to revisit your business goals and set your indicators based on these. For example, if your goal was to create brand engagement, you can use indicators such as likes, comments or shares. But these clearly would not be useful if the business goal was converting to revenue. In this case you want to set indicators such as direct sales indicators like coupon orders or links to purchase counts. Make sure you set and revisit your indicators regularly as the business needs and the world of social media marketing changes and evolves very quickly!

On your way   

We really hope this helped and you should now be well on your way to becoming a successful advertiser! Stay tuned because in our coming posts we will give you a bunch more tips, tricks and tools you can use to be even more successful!