Lesson-9: How to start Social media marketing – (5 working tips for beginners) | Ankur Aggarwal

Hey guys, welcome to this new lesson on social
media marketing. In this video, I’ll be covering the importance
of social media marketing as well as the various channels that are available to you. Also make sure that you watch this video until
the end, because we have some special news for you. So let’s start with the video. Hey guys welcome to lesson 10 of this digital
marketing mastery course and today’s topic is social media marketing. So what exactly is social media marketing? It is the process of gaining traffic or attention
through social media sites. So social media is definitely the fastest
growing trend in the history of the world.

Be it YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…
people are spending a lot of times on these plastforms. The best part is that this sector has grown
faster than the internet itself. Thus, the exponential rise of social media. And with so many people, millions and billions
of people are spending so much of their time on social media channels social media marketing
becomes a very important way to drive customers to your business. Now there are so many new marketing channels
coming up, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn marketing, YouTube marketing and
all of them are giving amazing airways. In today’s video we’ll be going through
today’s popular social media channels, how to market to them, what kind of audience you
should market to, and what should be your strategy for your social media marketing. So let’s first start with why do we even
need social media marketing, right? There are many reasons why you should incorporate
social media marketing in your business. The first is reaching targeted, niche-oriented
audience. You’ll be surprised what kind of targeting
you can achieve in this social media channels, also social media is an amazing channel to
increase the engagement and response.

And it is the perfect channel to create trust,
credibility and a relationship with your audience. Now in today’s work ways, there’s so many
competitions, the only way to distinguish yourself is to connect to the emotion of the
customers or the prospective customers or your audience. So social media has a vital role in creating
trust and credibility. And definitely a very important trait is the
viral sharing. If you post a viral, then you can easily drive
up- the best kind of marketing is when people start referring their services or products
to their friends. And this is where viral sharing comes into
play, people will share your content and you’ll reach a much newer audience which you couldn’t
have reached. Social media is also a very important channel
to increase website traffic, and building conversions, now we will be talking more about
conversions about what they are, how to setup our Facebook Ad section. Even if a brand is nameless, let’s say you
are a startup, if you’re opening a new website or a new business.

So social media is an amazing platform to
create brand on the internet, to introduce your services or product to the market for
the first time. And see even the response rate. There are so many benefits with social media
marketing. Now definitely the usage of social media has
increased a lot, you can see by the graph itself, like how many people are consuming
social media channels. Around 60% people are opening WhatsApp more
than once a day, you can see the similar trend on Facebook and YouTube as well. So these graphs are really giving really important
insights that the use of social media is so lucrius.

So you don’t just start a social media marketing
by choosing a platform and start paying for ads. It doesn’t work like that. You have to have a plan. You need to first understand your business
goals. If you’re a B to B company, that means business
to business company, to B to C company, business to customer company… you need to first align
your goals, to the kind of strategy you are looking for. If you’ll just start a social media campaign
without a social strategy, then in the end you’ll just end up losing money.

So this is where the first step of creating
a customer avatar is extremely important. You need to know exactly where your customer
is, what kind of customer is the perfect customer for you. Also there are some common questions that
you should ask yourself in defining your social media marketing. Like what are you hoping to achieve in your
social media marketing. Is it brand awareness, is it conversions? The second most important question is, who
is your target audience? If you’ve never defined your audience clearly,
you will never be able to make a profitable social media campaign. The better you know your audience, the better
results you’ll get from your social media marketing. So you should know exactly where your audience
is hanging out. Like are they on Instagram, are they on Facebook? If they are on Facebook, what kind of interest
do they like? Which groups do they follow? Are they males, are they females? What is the age bracket? Are 18-25, 25-30? Are the homemakers? Are they doing jobs or are they more into
the business? So you should know a lot about your customer.

And also your goal should also be aligned
with your social media marketing. What message do you want to send to your audience? So these are the multiple questions you usually
ask yourself before creating a social media marketing campaign for yourself. And also shares are the currency of the social
media world, shares are all that matters on social media. So your content must be engaging enough that
people would want to share it. That will create the ripple effect, that will
create the viral effect.

So as you can see in the graph here, this
list downs the various contents people share the most. And you can see that infographic is something
that people tend to share more compared to the other kind of content. But yes listical, like top ten list articles
have always been in various viral websites like ScoopWhoop.com or Buzzfeed.com. Video is something that’s getting popular
in 2019, and I’m sure in the coming years as well, video will be highly popular.

You should also know about the social media
trend. The first is definitely the organic reach
is going down. Now social media platforms want to make money. Like Facebook, the only way the make money
is advertisement. So they are making it increasingly difficult
for businesses to create their audiences organically. So they want businesses to pay money to reach
to their audience. Even earlier on Facebook page- let’s say
you have 10,000 people who like page, if you used to post you will be able to reach a big
amount of audience. But nowadays if you post and you are not boosting
your post, you won’t be able to reach a big number of- even if a lot of people are
actually following you.

So social is moving more towards “pay to
play”. The more money you’ll be paying, the bigger
the reach of your campaign. Social media algorithms will always prioritize
the advertisements. So the more businesses are willing to pay
the better reach you will get. So now many people ask me about which is the
best network for their social media marketing, many of you must already know that there is
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn and there are so many others like
Reddit, even Quora is getting popular these days.

But the answer to this question of which is
the best network, there is no correct answer. It all depends upon your strategy. There is no such thing as a best network. At the same time you should know what your
goals are, from this social marketing campaign. Let’s start with the most popular channel
that is Facebook. Launched in 2004, and approximately 2 billion
people are actively using Facebook… I can give you so many different stats but
Facebook is the big daddy of social media marketing. In my experience, especially for marketers-
digital marketers- Facebook is like the best platform to market on. It has the most targeted ads. And if you’ll be looking at a Facebook ads
video, you will understand the kind of targeting options that Facebook give. You’ll be surprised by the ways you can
actually market your products.

You’ll start to see the kind of power a
digital marketer has in influencing a person into making a purchase. That’s the kind of power, Facebook advertisement
has. You can be asked specifically defining your
customers down to the socks that he’s wearing. Yes, that is the power of Facebook ads. I’ll be covering Facebook ads more in detail
in our Facebook ads video. Images will get much higher click rate compared
to written content so, whenever you are targeting Facebook as a social media channel, you use
more visual contents like images, videos, etc. And also you can use a user-generated content,
like give the readers a chance to share something about themselves by offering them a conversation
starter. And also you have to have some personal touch
when you’re going on Facebook ads as a social media marketing channel, it is- respond to
people’s post, comment them, help them out. You can also create a more personal touch
by sharing things about yourself but also you have to keep- maintain an extent to which
that you can share. And in the end it’s all about trial and
error, try different things and see which ones are working for your audience.

So should you be on Facebook for your marketing
channel? If you’re thinking of creating more leads,
in my experience I’ve seen that Facebook can be used by all the businesses out there. Because there’s some kind of advertisement,
some kind of branding or conversion funnel were you can start. Just the amount of targeting that Facebook
provides it becomes a paradise for a marketer. You can increase the website traffic, you
can increase the brand loyalty, you can unread targeting ads, you can do so many things in
Facebook.

pexels photo 6483615

So if you haven’t started using Facebook,
make sure you start. Now let’s talk about Twitter. Twitter also has 3 billion plus user accounts. And 330 million active users and all the other
stats like 80% of Twitter users have mentioned a brand in a tweet. So specially for brands Twitter is an amazing
platform. Just like I told you that whenever we talk
about Twitter it’s more related to brand awareness, so if you’re a starter if you
are just starting out, then you can consider Twitter as a marketing channel. And also specifically in the online reputation
management, Twitter is an extremely effective channel. To connect to the customer query, to take
their feedback, respond to their feedback and also handle their queries, so I think
Twitter can be an extremely amazing channel for online reputation management. You can also try various other strategies
like running a conversion campaign or driving traffic to your website. But compared to Facebook, that won’t give
a much better arrow around Twitter.

So if you’re just starting out in social
media marketing, then I would recommend you to start with Facebook and then move on to
Twitter. Now Instagram is supposedly the new Facebook,
these days people are moving away from Facebook and going more on the Instagram. Because of the more visual content and also
the video content is really dominating on Instagram. He growth of Instagram has been exponential,
after Facebook acquired Instagram it has really exploded. And it has already killed Snapchat. Snapchat used to be its competitor, but now
almost all of their features are available on Instagram. Then again almost 40 billion photos are shared
to date and 4.2 billion people are liking the posts. 500 million plus Instagram accounts are active
every day. So the data is amazing. And the best part about Instagram is the visual
content. And people respond much better to visual content
compared to a textual content. Just like Facebook you can use it for everything. Be it targeting ads, be it generating sales,
be it brand awareness and especially the influence of marketing.

The influence of marketing has exploded in
2018 and I am sure that by 2020 as well, influencer marketing will keep on dominating the social
media channels. Especially Instagram, so whenever you are
learning Facebook Ads, you can select the placement on Instagram as well. So the same ad will be shown on both Facebook
and Instagram. I’ll be showing you this in our Facebook
Ads lesson. So you should definitely consider Instagram
in my opinion. It’s an amazing channel to get conversions,
for brand awareness, for any kind of advertisement. So now let’s talk about YouTube. One trend that has been dominating the marketing
world is the video.

Even on Facebook, videos have been given higher
preference compared to images or text and also just like the impact of videos is much
higher than an image. And also after this huge video reliance with
people having access to high speed internet, YouTube has started to dominate the Indian
market. So why should you be using YouTube? First of all it captures attention, because
video has always been more powerful compared to any other channel of marketing. And it is high traffic volume, YouTube is
the second most popular search engine after Google, it has massive traffic. There are multiple ways to advertise, you
can go for the advertisement you can also do an influencer marketing, but collaborating
with the influencers who have the kind of audience that you are looking for. And the best part about YouTube is that the
video creates much more influence compared to images or text, personally for me, I’ll
be focusing a lot on YouTube this year.

I’ll be running advertisements and we’ll
be trying various strategies to see which one is working for me. So I would recommend for you guys as well
to use YouTube as well, in your advertising campaign. Now let’s talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very popular especially in the
professional world space. And total amount of LinkedIn users are 500
million so it’s not a small number. People think it’s not that popular, but
yes, LinkedIn is an extremely popular website. One very popular question is, is LinkedIn
worth trying? Honestly in my experience and working with
clients as well, I’ve seen that LinkedIn gives much better results if you’re going
with B2B, when your target customers are more businesses and not B2C.

LinkedIn also gives you a lot of precise targeting
options so you can target your prospect customers in various ways. You can also use LinkedIn groups to establish
your business as an expert on certain topics. If you’re just starting out with social
media marketing, then I won’t recommend you to go directly into LinekdIn. I’ll still recommend you to first try, at
least the Facebook and Instagram, and once you’re familiar with all those platforms
then you can move on to LinkedIn and try this one.

But if you’re a B2B company you can directly
go into the LinkedIn Ads. And I think they’ll be the best kind of
advertisement for your business. There was also a survey done on the effectiveness
rating for the B2B social media platforms. And LinkedIn came up with the top. So especially with the B2B businesses, LinkedIn
is the perfect opportunity and the perfect social network to drive their customers. Now let’s talk about Snapchat. It gained a lot of popularity, but recently
it has been going on a declining trend because Instagram is dominating the market. And almost all the features of Snapchat is
also available on Instagram. Not all of them, but still Instagram has taken
a big chunk of the Snapchat audience. Going with the numbers, approximately 300
million monthly active users. More than 10 billion daily Snapchat video
views. And active Snapchat users open the app 18
plus times every day. So the numbers are really good and speak for
themselves. So should you be doing Snapchat. Well if you’re target audience is young,
if you are going for a very young audience maybe 15 – 18 or 15 – 22.

If you’re targeting millenials, then Snapchat
is the perfect network for you. If you are owning an ecommerce store or targeting
female specifically, because Snapchat is more dominated by females, young females. I know about an ecommerce store that made
a killing on Snapchat. They were targeting some kind of makeup product
and they were heavily advertising on Snapchat. I think they are making millions of dollars
per month just through Snapchat ads alone. So if you’re targeting millenials, if you’re
targeting young people, Snapchat should be in your priority list. When we talk about B2B, I won’t recommend
you to go for B2B on Snapchat.

One another area where you can use Snapchat
is the brand awareness. Because again it’s a visual content, the
“stories” are videos in nature. So it will create a much more powerful impact. If I would have to give you an order of how
to start your social media marketing, then I would recommend you to go for Facebook along
with Instagram. And then slowly move on to YouTube as well,
and then you can try the other networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat. And see what kinds of results you’re getting. And then start pushing more budget to the
ads that are giving you the best returns. So here are the social media metrics that
you must measure. So first of all anticipate growth by counting
your followers, so the first thing I would recommend you to is to count the likes in
your content creation.

So let’s say you have created 10 different
kind of content phases. So make sure you check which content is getting
the best kind of engagement. Which content is liked by your audience so
that you can create more of such content in the future. Also keep on the user comments because these
will give you a very good idea about what people are looking for. How are they interacting with your content. Or maybe some, new content ideas as well. Content share is another very important metric
because you need to know how many people are actually sharing your content to their friends. So these are the few metrics that you can
keep a track on whenever you’re doing you’re social media marketing.

So now I’ve listed various of the tools
that you can use to create an effective social media marketing campaign. First is Buffer, Buffer is used for social
media scheduling. So instead of posting on individual networks,
you can directly integrate all the social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
all of them on Buffer. I just post once, and the post will be posted
down to all various networks. BuzzSumo is one that we’ll be using for
finding good content ideas. It is another important and amazing tool. Canva can be used for creating beautiful graphics
data for free. So make sure you check all these tools out
and see which one suits you the best. The first three I personally use so that is
why I’ve added “recommended” on to them. So guys this was a short video on social media
marketing. Personally for me, whenever I talk about social
media, I primarily focus on Facebook Ads along with Instagram. And we will be covering that in detail in
the future lesson.

So make sure you watch that video because
that’ll be highly comprehensive. And I’ll be going through a lot on how to
make effective a Facebook Ad. Hey guys, I hope you like this overview of
social media marketing. In the next lesson we’ll be covering Instagram
marketing. How you can start and skill an Instagram account
in very few days. Guys, I have some good news for you. I am giving an instant access to all the rest
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to see the rest of the videos. All you have to do is click on a special link
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