Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a way to attract attention to the company’s products using social platforms. The essence of this method is to use a set of various activities to use social networks to promote companies.
The main component is the creation of content that is independently distributed by users, without the visible participation of the organizers. This method is good because the information transmitted via social networks inspires more confidence among potential buyers.
If you decide to use SMM to promote your business, then, first of all, you need to know the basics of SMM, what tasks can be solved with it, and what tools advanced SMM specialists use.
SMM features
- SMM allows you to manage the consumer’s opinion about a product, service or brand.
- SMM helps to increase consumer knowledge about the product.
- Helps to form a positive image of the company.
- Builds a trusting relationship with the target audience.
- Helps promote the brand.
- Corrects unwanted impressions and user reviews that the company managed to earn.
Benefits of SMM
Internet marketing is built on trusting relationships with its potential customers, who, when accessing their pages on social networks, have only one goal – to relax and chat with friends. Therefore, information about your product must be presented in such a way that it does not look like an advertisement, but like a catchy, interesting, captivating post that unobtrusively includes authentically truthful and convincing information about some product or service. There are a large number of different manuals and paid SMM courses for beginners that help inexperienced Internet marketers to build their tactics correctly and achieve success in their business. SMM promotion has a huge number of advantages that allow:
- Win the trust of customers.
- Reach large audiences.
- Create a target audience interested in your activities and communicate directly with customers.
- Carry out online marketing activities at affordable prices.
Video about SMM for beginners
How to learn SMM promotion?
So, you have decided to promote your business through SMM. How to learn it and where to start? First of all, you need to understand that you can promote a brand in social networks through forums, social networks or blogs.
Forums
- To promote through the forums, you need to select only the most popular ones in your niche.
- Then create some interesting topics for discussion on them.
- Think about who will be your official representative, put him in support.
- Ask consumers to leave reviews after buying your product.
- Find thematic forums and create as many topics as possible on them that may be of interest to your target audience.
- Arrange promotions for participants, make discounts.
- You need to get people to trust your company and start showing up. After that, start a contest among the participants.
Social networks
First you need to determine which social networks are the most suitable for work. Then create public pages on them. To promote the site, use SMM tips for dummies:
- Think about who will be your official representative.
- Next, open groups and pages that will be of interest to your target audience.
- Link open groups to the official public page.
- Invite the maximum number of participants to the groups.
- Arrange promotions for participants, make discounts.
- You need to get people to trust your company and start showing up (reputation management on social media is easy, but requires constant monitoring). After that, launch a competition among the participants with your sponsorship.
- If you find a thematic social network, then create your own communities in it and promote them.
- You can create a separate public page for representatives and dealers.
- You can also create a separate community for each product group.
- Keep the main communities active with polls, contests, promotions.
- Work with partners: motivate to create new content about a product or company, replenish the feedback base, maintain relationships, encourage.
- Open up to your audience by showing a team of employees working on a social network, telling interesting information about each of them.
Blogs
- Select a few bloggers on your topic and ask them to write product reviews.
- To promote the product, pay attention to news resources.
- Create an official blog.
- Do SMO optimization of your blog.
- You can also write guest posts and add them to social bookmarks.
- Give away from the blog for free.
- Participate in promotions, contests, blogosphere marathons.
- It is also worth considering the creation and distribution of thematic demotivators, posters, viral advertising.
- Create and promote a corporate hero, tell interesting information about him.
The above lists are the basics of SMM promotion. To implement all the items on this list, you will need a team of specialists, something will have to be made to order. Many of these tasks have long-term goals, so they will be implemented gradually. However, most of the work from the list a beginner SMM must do on their own.
Useful books on SMM
Internet advertising professionals who know almost everything about it share their experience and publish books on SMM, with the help of which aspiring businessmen can understand how Internet marketing can be used for promotion.
Today there are many such books, for example:
- “Marketing in social networks" by Damir Khalilov.
- The Effect Formula by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
- "Guerrilla marketing in social networks" by Sergey Shcherbakov.
- "Selling Texts" by Sergei Bernandsky.
- Word of mouth marketing by Andy Sernowitz.
- "Data Driven Marketing" by Mark Jeffrey.