What is Social Media Marketing

This is a digital marketing tool that involves the marketing of goods and services on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Before using social media as a marketing tool, we must first have a clear understanding of the overall business strategy.

Social media is not a marketing strategy, but a marketing tool.

Business Strategy

A strategy is a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a specific goal or set of goals.

Four strategic business options.

1. Selling existing products to existing markets.
2. Selling new products to existing market.
3. Sell existing products to a new market.
4. Selling new products to a new market.

Business Objectives

To enable you track and measure results, we will need to set SMART objectives that will translate the business strategy into a plan and actions.

SMART is an acronym for Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time.

Specific :- these asks what, who, where and how. e.g What we want to achieve, how we will achieve it, where we can achieve it etc.

Measurable:- Has to do with % increase in sales, fixed figure or a financial value we want to achieve.

Achievable:- Here we set goal that are achieved, not to easy but realistic goals.

Relevant:- This has to do with knowing our target audience.

Time: here we set time frame to achieve the set goals.

Different between SMART and non SMART objectives

Not SMART
Get more people to use our taxi services.

SMART
Get 100 more people to use our car services in 3 month by running an influencer campaign on Twitter.

We need to have a good understanding of where the business is heading, know which social media platform that will be more effective and what we want to achieve with every social media post.

Setting SMART Objective helps us choose that right social media marketing platform to achieve our Business goals

Measurement is very important in social media marketing because it help us keep business and marketing activities on track. It also helps us know when we need to make adjustment for better results.

The measurement in social media marketing involves the ability to attract, retain and convert potential customers.

If we measure what matters to our business, we will know what works and what doesn’t work.

In Social media marketing it is not only about the contents we post, what really matters is the impact these contents have on our audience. The impact on our business sales and also the cost of the marketing activity.

What matters in social media marketing is not the size of your followers but the impression and engagement your post gets.

The reach & engagements of a post is more important in social media marketing than the number of followers or fans one has.

What is Social Media ROI?

This is the profit earn from each Social Media investment

We can calculate our Social Media ROI if we set SMART objectives in line with our business strategy, use the right platform for our target audience, and if we measure what matters

Here is the formula to calculate social media ROI

Revenue from social media – (minus) Cost of social media marketing divided by Cost of social media marketing

Example: if you spent N20,000 on social media marketing and your earned N100,000

Your ROI is 100,000 – 20,000 / 20,000 = 4% or 4:1

Which means for every N1 spent you made N4.

Non Financial Benefits of Social Media Marketing

It is very important to note that Social media marketing can also have non financial benefits such as

1. Brand Awareness

2. Customer insight this gives you an insight about what you target audiences are doing and thinking. This information can be used to further promote your business.

3. Market Intelligence: this give you an idea what is happening inside your industry and among competitors.

4. Lead Generation

5. Real Time engagement with audience:- give you the opportunities to relate with your customers