Today there are approximately 3.5 billion active social media users in the world, making social media a real part of people’s everyday lives. Social media has evolved into a powerful tool for brands to connect with buyers and engage in, sometimes instantaneous, two-way conversations. Social media plays a crucial role in customer acquisition by helping connect your brand with millions of potential new customers and develop their awareness, recognition, and sentiment for it.

Getting your Customer’s Attention

The thing that all brands desperately want is customer’s attention. Since the advent of the internet culture, the competition for attention has been ferocious. Getting customer’s attention will help you establish conversation which will develop relationships. These relationships will bring happy and loyal customers. 

Establishing your Goals

They have to be:

• Specific: Make them clear: Increasing brand awareness for your social media accounts.
• Measurable:  Monitor, measure and analyze them.
• The brand awareness will be increased by at least 8% per month. The post reach should have a minimum of 1100 impressions.
• Achievable: Make sure you can realistically achieve them.
• Time-sensitive: You’ll need an exact timeframe for your goals.

In 6 months, our goals should be attained.

Content is the heart and soul of digital marketing, it’s the foundation on which all marketing campaigns are based, be it search, social media, email, paid traffic or influencers. Without content there is nothing to discover, like, to share, to be fans about. Each piece of content acts as a stepping stone on the path from awareness to lead to customer and from customer to frequent buyer.

People are drawn to content that teaches them something, inspires them, or makes them laugh or cry, they share content that has provided them some kind or form of value, you then have to create quality content if you want to raise awareness.

Content should:

• Educate
• Entertain
• Inspire

Don’t get overwhelmed with all the different platforms that exist, as tens of them are out there, instead, master two or three and see where it takes you.

You might wonder what an editorial calendar has to do with getting people to see your content. The more organized you are the better your strategy and your content will come together. A calendar ensures that you and your content are on track and ensures that fresh content is flowing.

If you are a solo business operator or have a small team, you might think that a calendar is an overkill. But it’s not. Why would you want to keep the schedule in your head or take the chance to miss a deadline?

A calendar will help you:

• See the big picture of how your content is distributed throughout the months.
• Develop content for specific promotions and campaigns.
• Not knowing what to write about with a deadline looming.
• Vary your content format.
• Review your strategy at any given time with the information you need

Once you have content you have now to know how and when to use it in the most efficient way. In Social Media marketing there are four media concepts.

• Owned Media: Your website, blogs, emails, media that you control.
• Shared Media: Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc… where you post your content. Shared refers to the likes and shares you get from others on those platforms.
• Paid Media: All advertising that you pay for, paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram.
• Earned Media: Media you are getting when others recognize and promote your content for you and is showcased in some way or reshared. Influencer review, customer show became brands advocates, traditional PR and media relations.

So, which one is the most efficient? The answer is all of them or rather, a mix of all of them. Unfortunately, you have no sure way to guarantee that your content will be seen, shared and that it will generate future customers. It is necessary to leverage paid, earned, owned and shared media tactics to boost your chances.

Owned and paid media should get 60% to 75% of your budget as they are the ones you have the most control on. The ease of use, reliability, efficiency, automation and the ability to collect data every step of the way helping to make better decisions incite companies to rely more and more on technology for marketing as it maximizes their ROI.

Owned media, as previously mentioned refers to all the content online that you create and control. It includes websites, landing pages, podcasts, videos, emails etc. Because you control it entirely you can be as innovative and creative as you want as long as you think it is appropriate for your audience. Added benefit is that it’s letting you frame the context for the media. For example, you can elaborate very sophisticated email marketing campaigns that has the right personalized message or create an out of the box media piece that will get significant attention.

Paid media includes traditional advertising as well as others forms such as retargeting, paid ads etc..

A few years ago, banner advertising was the big thing, now their efficiency has decreased tremendously so another way was developed to get online customers’ attention. Enters retargeting. Here comes retargeting into the play. It refers to the ad tactic that allows a brand to anonymously place a pixel (a small piece of software code) on a website so when the customer click on the item to look at it, it will get displayed again when that customer browse another site. It gives the retailer another chance to have his product visible to that person who just left his website. This tactic has proven to be quite effective the reason being that your website visitor sees something that he expressed interest in. It also works well for abandoned cart.

The role of paid ads, mainly on Facebook and Instagram which are the 2 most popular and most efficient media, is truly very important to reach more people, achieve more interaction, and drive traffic to your website.

The good news for small and medium-size businesses is that paid ads are not expensive. You can invest as little as $5 in an ad or boosted post or as much as hundreds of dollars. The more you spend the more people you reach. If you are not sure about the results, starting with a small amount is a great way of gauging results.

Even if you have a small budget you can still see results. Facebook and Instagram offer different ad choices, so it’s important to put money into the right campaigns for your needs. It’s equally important to have a plan, without it, you don’t know where you’re going. You can use highly targeted ads. You can select specific geography as well as demographic information when you create your ad. You should target your market based on the knowledge you have about your customers as you can use a multitude of different criteria to reach new potential buyers.

Determine first what you would like to achieve. The most common goals are:

• More engagement
• More likes, comments, shares
• More traffic to your website
• Driving sales

What makes influencer marketing so popular? The concept has pretty much always existed but has now exploded in popularity because of social media, and the results are impressing.