Social Media For Businesses – Social Media Marketing Plan

Social Media for Businesses is the topic every business or startup are eagerly searching on internet and try to find a right solution for their business.

Let be clear here, no one is going to give you a perfect idea or strategy for your business until they analyze your complete business and your purpose of using social media marketing.

Although there are lots of blogs available about social media marketing and strategies, they only summary’s the things for and rest of work you have to do by yourself or by hiring some expert or some digital marketing agency.

The one question that every business have in their mind is “Is Social Media work for their business or not?”

In brief the answer is, YES. But there are lots of other factors that you need to consider while doing social media marketing for your business.

Effective use of social media channels is the most important thing because it saves lots of money, effort as well as time.

In this post we are going to discuss about the most important factors while doing Internet Marketing and try to clear all of your doubts.

Let’s begin…

Table of content

Social Media for Business to Business or Business to Consumer

We all know there are two kinds of business B2B or B2C, aim or strategies may be different but social media work for both of them.

Be it B2B or B2C remember one thing at the end of the day you have to deal with a real people, a human being. Why I said that because most of the company make mistakes of using social media as a business only but the fact is that you still need to deal with the a real person behind that company, right.

Look social media is very powerful tool, you have to use it wisely to make great connections that will pay you on a long term.

Social media marketing gives you a choice to personalize your Brand. You can connect with the people and give them solution that they are looking for and in return they will give you a business, not only in terms of money but also in terms of brand value, loyalty, mouth publicity and many more.

This is one of the strongest strategies that professionals are grasping right now. Not just keeping your business behind a Logo but personalizes your brand by representing your business as yourself. That way you can make an unbreakable trust among a people for your brand.

Hope you understand there is not much difference between B2B and B2C social media marketing.

Now let’s dig deep and understand various social media platforms, myths of social media marketing and how to use it effectively.

Social Media Marketing Channels

We have gone through the simplest yet effective strategy in previous section, let’s now discuss few of most effective social media platforms.

There is whole lot of Social Media channels available on the Internet. And most of the businesses try to be present on each and every social media network. It is completely fine if you have a team of expert who are individually handling these platforms.

But if you are just starting and you don’t have a team to handle your social media channels, then you must only focus on single channel and become master in that. In that way you will understand how social media works for business.

After mastering one network you can now shift to other social media platforms easily. It might sound crazy that focusing on only single channel will generate a lead or give best result, how even it is justified.

Actually most of the businesses be it small or a giant one, make a same mistake of choosing multiple networks to showcase their business and end up with no or few results.

Let me take an example, one of my client was in an ecommerce business and they were just moving from offline to online store. We had suggested a same thing to them to just focus on a single platform then move further slowly and steadily. But instead they hire someone else for social media marketing to cover almost 5 to 7 social media network and end up wasting lots of money and time.

Although they hire a professional for their work still it’s really difficult to reach and grow all the 7 channels.

They tell us the complete story after almost 5-6 months and they still wants to cover all the 7 media.

We again suggested them to just focus on one and gave them a strategy of how we are going to cover all the other media after specific period of time and how it would be beneficial for them and saves their money too.

Finally they agreed and now they are present on all the social media networks. Yes, it took time but they are achieving results what they were expecting.

May be this is difficult for businesses to understand this simple thing but trust me this is the success formula that most of the professional are adapt.

Every platform have their own purpose and audience that they are dealing with. It’s we who need to choose a right platform to target our business related audience rather than focusing on dead audience which don’t have interest in our business.

Let’s take a look at what are the purposes of top social media platforms.

Facebook:

Social Networking site – Make world more open and connected.

How to use Social Media for Your Business –

Experts are taking Social Media Marketing to next level and there are tremendious approaches to make a conversion for your business. Although there are lots of methods and strategies to follow but we first need to understand the base.

If we see broader picture of how to use social media, then we will realize there are only three steps involve that is;

We will now dig deep into these topics and understand each of them and see how to implement these effectively.

Understand Customer

We first need to understand need, want and demand for our business. You first need to research on what are your customers looking for and is there any possibility of giving them an instant solution. If YES, implement it as soon as possible.

Customers in most of the cases search for solutions on internet and if we are giving them exactly what they want, your business will automatically grow.

Basically there are three phases for any customer,

Awareness – Buyers are unaware about their problem. We can say it is a research phase where people have a problem but they are not actively aware of that problem. In this phase we have to make them realized that they have such a problems considering their pain points.

Here we deeply need to understand what may be the pain points or problems for the specific business and what are the possible solutions. In that way we can run a awareness campaign by targeting a specific problem and instant solution.

For example, if you are running a Public Speaking Courses, here your target audience are broad but the solution in most of the cases is same. So you can run ad campaign only focusing on single solution for multiple audiences.

Consideration – Buyers are actively searching for solutions and need more information.

This phase may be a deal breaker for you. In this phase buyers need more and more information and if you are the one who gave them a complete knowledge with a specific solution, BOOM! You make a best conversion out there.

Don’t be narrow in this case, give as much of information as you can but be sure don’t leave your niche behind.

Take previous example of public speaking course, here in this phase you need to divide your target audience and give them specific reason to join your course. Like Public speaking is for everyone right from students to professionals, so you need to specify why students need this and what are the benefits, same in the case of professionals and other audience.

In this case Run the campaign on the basis of audiences rather than on solutions.

Decision – Buyers have found the solutions but need to verify or authenticate them.

You have successfully build a trust in consideration period and now buyers have listed your business for possible solutions. Now it’s your turn to get ahead from competitors and give something extra to your buyer or build an authenticity and trust with buyer.

The best way to authenticate your product or service is to showcase your previous works and their results. Client testimonials helps a lot in this phase.

Let’s again take an example of Public Speaking Course, what you can do here is prepare a handful of testimonials of your students and their achievement’s and showcase them. Buyers will relate themselves with those achievement’s and  there are major chances that buyer will choose your course out of those competitors.

Now that you have understood your audience and a brief overview of how these marketing funnel works. We have taken a simple example of Public Speaking Course here, but you need to consider lot’s of other things along with these factors that we will discuss in next section.

Decide Goal

Running a social Media Marketing campaign without a goal is like paddling a cycle in reverse direction, you will not go anywhere. Just wasting your time, effort and even people are not sure about what you’re doing.

And if your buyer’s do not understand your business how would they make a purchase from you.

As we have already discussed that buyers have to belief in your business then only you will get results from social media or any other platform.

There may be many goals for ad campaigns like spreading awareness about your business, generate traffic for your website, making someone to purchase product, collecting an emails, selling eBook, event promotions and many more.

You first have to decide what your ad goals are and what is the end result that you want from that ad. Always think about long term goals because social media marketing is not a short term game.

In general, there are two types of Goals;

Brand Awareness – Experts in this campaign are more concern about likes, shares, retweet, heart and such kind of similar things, depends on social media platforms.

Experts are making efforts in getting post engagements rather that a conversion. And in this phase you can’t assume that people will convert and give you ROI, although there are chances.

Here you are more concern about making a community of like-minded people who can give you conversion in future.

Conversion – You can directly relate conversion with ROI. Here your complete focus is on getting a traffic that will pay you.

Conversion may be of any type like sending traffic to your website, selling service or product or anything. It completely depends on your skills how you can effectively manage to create a sales funnel.

A blend of content and social media marketing will give a best result. Digital marketers always says content is a king and it very much true. This strategy will help us in our next section of “Approach”, we will discuss this in deep.

Approach

Approach is basically means, how you are going to market your business or present your business in front of your buyers.

It largely depends on what audience you are targeting on and in which phase (Awareness, Consideration and Decision) your audience are lying currently.

We have already discussed that content marketing mixed with social media marketing is a proven way to get best results. Now you just have to strategies things, like you have to create content according to the type and phase of audience.

Like if you are targeting on awareness phase, you can’t directly sell a product or services to your buyers rather give them an useful information and make them realize about their problems.

Now if you are targeting audience in a consideration phase or a research phase, try to give a solution with complete information. Dig deep into the problem by putting yourself into customers shoes and provide a complete knowledge based solution.

Like in case of digital marketing you can provide a solution by giving a step by step guide to your customers. In that way they can either solve the problem by themselves or most probably contact you to solve their problem.

By providing a complete guide in consideration phase, it will be easy for a buyer to purchase a service from you as you have already provided them a great value.

This is the professional approach which most of the experts work on. Though it provides a overview but this is exactly how social media marketing works.

Social Media Myth’s

Social media is free, yes but just for hanging out. But if you are in a business, it may not cost you money but it surely costs lots of time and effort. If you want to see great result in early stage you need to invest money on social media marketing. Social networks are now becoming strict and they want business to pay them to get result. Although you can still use social media for free but it takes lots of effort and time to reach your target audience.

This is the biggest myth that you need to present on every platform. It is a sure shot way to waste your time and effort. Just focus on a single platform at start where your potential customers are present. For example if you are targeting a professional audience best platform is LinkedIn. Just understand your audience, Decide Goal and then Approach. It will definitely give you best results.

It may be true if you are just focusing on creating a few customers in return of your long term efforts. In many studies it is observed that about 84% of the audience which follow your business on social media are either your current or former customers. Social media is not for making new customers, it is for making great relationship with your current customers.

Those days are gone when you need to post multiple times a day and your post will reach automatically to thousands of people. Social Media are now getting better and they are now focusing more and more on the quality of content rather than quantity. Social media algorithms are now boosting posts as per their quality. That doesn’t means you need not to be consistent, you need to be consistent keeping quality in mind.

At initial stages of social media it was true but as the platforms are evolve more and more people are joining these networks. There are 52% people over the age of 55 are present on social media, on the other hand almost 95% adults are active on Facebook. These figures are enough to debunked your myth. So if you are thinking social media is not for your business, think again.