How much screen time do you use daily?
If you’re like us and just viewed your screen time usage when asked that question, you don’t need to feel guilty. Most of the world uses mobiles regularly for social media. In fact, 52% of the world’s population use social media platforms daily, with an average browsing time of 2 hours 27 minutes. Arguably, with Facebook’s switch to the Meta and the belief in a digital universe, that statistic will probably increase, and so will the amount of time people spend viewing content on social networks.
Today many people view content online through images, polls, videos, blog posts, commenting on friends’ posts, viewing products and services. Due to this excessive time spent on digital devices, it’s an avenue that should be explored when advertising a fitness business.
In business alone, 71% of small-medium sized businesses advertise themselves on social networks, with almost half posting daily. This means if you want to target many people and for your brand to be remembered well, you have to conduct your marketing strategically, so it stands apart from the other businesses excessively advertising on the internet.
Therefore to market well on social media, you have to innovate and be one step ahead of the game with a solid social strategy.
In this article, we will look at what social media marketing is, what the key benefits of social media marketing are, and the different types of social media strategies you can implement for your business.
Skip ahead to:
- What is social media marketing?
- Benefits of social media marketing strategies
- Types of social media marketing strategies
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing that involves social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, to showcase and promote products and services. It’s an incredibly powerful marketing method as, unlike print or tv advertising, you can hone the power of the internet to advertise to your target audience.
Plus, unlike offline marketing, you get to track your ads seeing what went well and what could do better. The content that social media marketing uses is often varied, being conducted over photos, videos, polls, blogs, updates, and more to drive customer engagement rate.
But you don’t want to just go out and publish content without giving it a serious thought to its order and structure. You’ll want to implement a strategy that helps you plan in advance across several days and weeks. A strategy saves you a lot of time as it’s a detailed blueprint for your online marketing.
Benefits of social media marketing strategies
Having a social media marketing strategy can really help improve your business due to the following:
Saves time
On average small businesses spend around 6 hours a week dedicated to social media errands. Whether you’re a small, medium, or large corporation, you might find yourself spending this amount, if not more, attending to your social media. Arguably, these 6 hours could sometimes be better spent elsewhere if utilized properly, like building better in person customer relationships, reviewing your products and services, and more.
By simply planning what type of content you’re going to post and scheduling it in advance using scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Planable, you’ll be saving a lot of time. It allows your staff to allocate their time elsewhere instead of taking time to think each day about what content to post, editing the content, and posting to every social media channel. Plus, it streamlines all your content for a variety of social media channels in one place.
Real-time insights
Social media accounts you decide to post on will provide you with social media analytics and insights into your posts. Such insights allow you to see exactly who’s engaging with your content and can be broken down based on age, location, gender, device type, interests, and more. Plus, it can show you what’s the best time to post content. As a result, it allows your business to refine its marketing techniques and effectively target your demographic.
Greater brand awareness
By having a solid social media strategy with the right implementation of hashtags, you can target people outside your typical target audience and location. This can be especially beneficial for your business if you encourage your viewers to use your hashtags, as people unfamiliar with your business may view them. As a result, you could get more inbound traffic. Thus, a rise in inbound traffic could potentially switch into conversions.
Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Social media strategies allow your brand to be consistent across all channels and allow users to become familiar with your brand’s persona. This will allow potential customers to understand what you’re about and be less confused and more satisfied with what you’re offering. Plus, if your content or comments solves problems, it’s likely visitors will become more loyal to your social media channels.
Competitor analysis
Just like what we said earlier, social media marketing can provide you with real-time insights, metrics and analytics, allowing you to know how you’re doing. Once you have your analytics, you can compare them to your competitors; you can usually get these through websites like SEMRUSH and Buzz Sumo.
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Discover more Moreover, you can also create similar content to what your competitors are doing, then test it out using an AB/AB format. This type of format allows you to experiment and see what marketing techniques are working for your business.
Brand authority
If you have top-quality content and it’s useful to other customers and businesses, it could mean more likes, shares and social media followers. This can allow certain social media algorithms to display your companies content at the top of pages making you more well known and establishing a greater presence online.
Types of social media marketing strategies
If you want to up your game on social media, you should aim to try a mix of social marketing strategies. If you constantly use the same one, it could make your content quite boring, and your audience will be less likely to engage with your business online.
1. Chatbots
Over 1.4 billion people are using chatbots online through messaging apps like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and more. This handy digital tool can save your business a huge amount of time on social media by having a clever bot communicate to your customers through messengers.
Top chatbots can have a conversation and solve problems without you, or your team needs to speak to a visitor. In addition to answering questions, you can enable chatbots to take product orders directly through messenger and comments.
2. Influencer marketing
If you’re not familiar with influencer marketing, it’s a type of social media marketing where you recruit famous figures or influencers to endorse and promote your products. It’s especially effective if you target influencers within your niche.
The reason it’s effective for businesses is a lot of influencers already have a large number of followers where they’ve gained trust from them. Therefore getting them to advertise your products or services allows for more social proof for your brand and potentially gets you, new customers.
3. Live streaming
Sometimes it’s good to show your audience behind your company and put a face to a name. It also allows your audience to understand more about your expertise and company than just a standard text or picture based post can offer. Going live on social media channels can help establish a sense of trust as you can add value, engage with them, and answer any questions your audience might have. It can also allow your users to feel more connected (especially the ones viewing from afar), as live Facebook and Instagram stories and videos can provide a sense of intimacy, allowing viewers to feel like they’re in the same room as you.
Plus, live posts allow you to stay on top of your visitor’s minds. After all, it’s easy for all of us to easily get caught up amongst the other posts on social media from our friends, family, and other companies. Live streams are often kept at the top of feeds allowing your people to see your business more easily. Moreover, once you’ve done with a live stream, you can later recycle the content and repost it as a recorded video on social media channels. This allows you to fill in the gaps when you’re stuck for generic content ideas.
4. Post a variation of content types
When using social media, you’ll want to make sure your company does not come across boring. One way people might choose to turn off and disengage is through repetitive content. For example, if you’re always posting a specific type of post, it can cause people to quickly scroll down their feeds.
To capture people’s attention, you should try to mix up your content using infographics, opinion posts, polls, interviews, and more. Doing this will stimulate people’s profiles and give them a reason to engage with your services even more. Plus, it will allow you to attract different types of audiences, as many people have different content preferences.
5. Convert blog posts into social media updates
Sometimes people want to learn more than a typical 280 character Twitter post. If you have a lot of content already on your company’s website in the form of blog posts, you can narrow it down to a social media post. Adding snippets from your posts can spark interest and allow users to view your article on your site and gain more website traffic.
Moreover, you can also expand your social media marketing by creating long-form blog posts on popular channels like LinkedIn. Doing this can make your opinion heard, increase interactions and produce a better visual appearance online.
6.Contests
If you find yourself running out of photos or video content to post, you can always implement promotions into your social media marketing strategies. Promotions can be done in several ways through sweepstakes, giveaways, hashtag contests, coupons, referrals, and more. The best contest posts involve little effort from your visitors to engage and share your posts.
In summary
Overall, having an effective social media marketing strategy for your business can save you a lot of time, allowing you to focus on more areas of your business. Plus it can really allow you to tailor your content to your demographic, providing them with more value and conversions than the wide audience print advertising and tv marketing has.
To have social media success you should have a social media calendar to help you line up the type of marketing tools and content you wish to publish. Do this now, as it will be efficient in the future. Gadgets are only going to evolve and the usage on social media platforms is only going to rise.
Therefore why not invest in this now and build a robust, varied, and creative social media strategy?
