How to Do Social Media Marketing - 7 Easy to Follow Steps

Social media marketing is the best way, for now, to increase your sales online and have a solid brand awareness campaign even when you are a new business or a small business. Many big brands and businesses are getting the benefits of social media networks by using them as the #1 channel of advertising. 

While many businesses are still striving to know how they can use social media marketing to increase their brand awareness and sales. Thus they always search for how to do social media marketing and they just got haunted by many fake social media marketing experts and they took their money giving those small businesses nothing back but a bankruptcy signal.

So if you want to know what is social media marketing and how it can benefit your business online or how to do effective social media marketing with a plan and strategy then here's a guide. This 7 steps social media marketing formula is created based on all types of businesses in mind so you can adapt it now.

Step 1. Create A Plan

A plan is everything and when it comes to the social media marketing technique the very first thing you have to do is create a custom plan for your social media marketing campaign and document it with what you want your social media marketing expert to do for you. Even if you are working with a social media marketing agency I recommend you to create a plan or ask them to create it for you by telling them your vision and aim with it.

For example, You are a hosting company and host websites, forums and video streaming portals. How you will give them a quick line of text to make your social media marketing agency know what you really want them to do? In my recommendation, you should shout them this line "Hi, we are giving services about web-hosting and we want more bloggers to use our services for streaming their live sessions (webinars) and hosting their blogs" this will tell them that your main goal is to get more customers who are bloggers or related to the internetworking industry. And I recommend you to use these top social media networks for marketing purposes:

• Facebook
• Instagram (Instagram Marketing Strategy - complete guide)
• Twitter
• Snapchat

And above is a simple plan cheat-line and you can add bullet points, questions and your concerns in a contact email to the social media marketing agency. They will create the plan for you or you can even ask an expert to create a custom social strategy for your business.

Step 2. Return On Investment

No, I am not saying that after just planning your campaign you should start measuring your return on investment. That's not going to happen as you still you have to spend and then the real game begins.

For now I want you to have your own way of checking whether your campaign is running good or not. Like when you are getting 10 sales for spending 100 dollars and they are benefiting you with 50 dollars and you are happy, you still need to check your progress and not just rely on reports of your social media marketing agency.

As they will be more clever to make you happy on less sales. Again I am not telling that they are not going to give you more sales or they are not working hard for your campaign. But there is something you should keep track of to know if you can get more sales in same budget. So have these metrics checked on daily basis by your self and do it manually:

• Brand Mentions on other social profiles/pages and sites
• Bounce rate of your website and duration of visits
• Social media sharing score (before campaign and after it)
• Conversion rate and best time of conversions

Almost every social media platform allows you to have reports on these common and basic tracking possibilities. You can also ask your social media marketing companies to provide you the same data but with more insights. This will ensure you that your social media agency on which you have trust and giving your money is legit or not.

Step 3. Current Stats

The most crucial thing to consider checking is to know where your social media marketing is standing and then deciding what else you can do and what needs changes. Its about knowing your current position on social media networks. You can take a look at these metrics:

• On how many social media networks you have a profile or page?
• Have you updated cover photo, profile image, bio and contact details?
• Which social media platform is bringing you the most customers and website traffic?
• On which social media you are getting more contact requests?

And the best way to make your social media profiles look professional you can spy on your competitors and see what they are sharing, how they are managing their social media accounts and what type of updates they are posting. By visiting your competitor' social media accounts you will be able to manage yours accordingly and also you will get an idea to give a branding touch to all of your social media profiles for a line breaking social media marketing strategy.

Step 4. Know Your Audience

A buyer persona is the key factor when you are eager to know your exact audience and sell your products easily. If you are using social media marketing as your only marketing strategy then it's the perfect step to take time for and dig deeper.

For example, If you are a company selling sneakers with custom designs and you know that your audience on social media networks is teenagers, what you will do for knowing them closely? you may want to know their exact age group, area of your stores and their residents, their interests, and recent buying habits. You can do that all with social media networks like Facebook.

As being the #1 social media network in the world, Facebook is giving you almost every tool to target your desired audience and make sure you are getting the highest return on investment. But the key factor is to know your audience type and you can do it by noting these points at your shop or website with the help of Google Analytics tools:

• Age group
• Area
• Education level
• Interests
• Visit duration (the longer, your audience is)
• Conversion rate

And there are so much more insights you can get with using the Google Analytic tools and the best thing is Google is offering their Analytics services for free to every user. So make use of this service and get more insights about your audience and website traffic for understanding them to create a better social media marketing campaign.

Step 5. Social Media Management Tools

In today's social media marketing world, every big brand and some of the small businesses make use of social media management tools to fire their virtual assistants and give the job to automatic social media management tools and services. There are many of them, to check what type of social media management tool you need, read our article about the best social media management tools and you will get to know which tool can give you the exact help you need. You can do many different and some times hard jobs with these tools and some of that jobs are listed below:

• Posting content (new product or articles) to social media accounts
• Re-sharing content and product offers
• Ability to reply to customer questions on every social media network in one place

Plus these benefits, you can get more insights about your social media promotions. So if you are busy or can't afford an assistant then do signup for a social media management tool and survive in the river of competition and easily optimize your social media accounts for getting more sales.

Step 6. Content

I know that you are thinking "why is content at step #6 and why not at #1?" but the main reason for many failures online is businesses start creating and publishing content without a proper plan and knowing other key metrics which are now aware of (if you followed above steps) and that's why I am here to give you an idea about what type of content you should create or curate and publish. In starting you can focus on these 3 types of content:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Infographics (visual studies or report charts)

These three types of content can be created for every type of business and utilized for success and conversions on social media networks. As when you are social media networks, you have to update your audience with content and engage them and to engage your social media audience you have to create quality content that should suit your business model and brand. You can also make use of other content types like:

• Press Releases
• Interviews
• eBooks
• Freebies

If you are a big company or thinking out of the box. Plus you should think twice before creating content from the above 4 types of content as you may need to create these types of content professionally and invest your money, time, and mind. All you can do with content is "every time you publish if on your blog and or social accounts, make sure you are adding related product links in that posts" and this will increase the sales which is our first priority.

Step 7. Audits

After adopting all the strategies and following the above steps, the last thing is to make audits on a daily, weekly to monthly basis. Why? because you are spending your money, time and your fun just to increase your brand awareness and sell more products. The only thing which can help you keep on track is to create audits of your work and investments. To do that there are 3 factors you should keep notes for and they are:

• Track
• Analyze
• Optimize

The very first thing is Tracking and this can be done with social media networks and social media management tools.

The second thing is Analyzing and this can be done manually. You just have to read what your tools are sending you in form of data. So you will be informed about your success rate and return on investment ratio.

Now the third and last step is to Optimize your social media marketing campaign and change your plans according to your insights and trends in the industry.

If you do it right and following these 7 steps of social media marketing success, you will be able to increase sales, increase brand awareness, invest less and get more benefits.

 So, if you still have any questions relating to "How to Do Social Media Marketing" then leave a comment and I will answer you ASAP.