- Listen, it's virtually impossible to run a small business
without marketing on social media.
But odds are that the social media marketing
that you have to do
is only a fraction of your task for the day,
tiny little baby fraction.
That's why in this video,
I'm gonna help you learn the basics
of social media marketing
that can increase sales in the short and long-term.
What's up, it's Jamal,
and welcome back to the channel.
Now to do any job, you gotta have the right tools,
that's why I want you to take a moment
and find the link of the description
to download our free social media templates kit.
It's gonna be your wrench for this video,
all right, a key tool.
In it, you'll find 10 different templates,
some of which we're going to go over in this video,
so it's worth grabbing now so you can follow along.
When it comes to social media marketing,
the first thing you want to identify
is the goal you hope to achieve.
Social media can increase awareness of your product,
it can also be used to make sales,
it can drive leads to your website,
or it can simply help build your brand
in the minds of millions of customers.
All of these are good things that can lead to more business,
but unless you have a whole team of marketers
working on your social media,
you wanna start with just one or two goals.
Don't be super ambitious at this stage,
you know what I'm saying?
A good way to consider which goals to go for
is to think about short and long-term results.
Short-term results are things like direct sales,
or lead generation that can become sales rather quickly.
If your business needs quick injection of cash,
or you have a special promotion that needs juice right now,
revenue direct social media campaigns
can be highly effective.
But unfortunately there's often a limit
to how many leads in sales you can accumulate
with a small audience,
and even paid campaigns can have their limits
before the cost per action becomes too high.
That's why it can be better in the long run
to focus your social media resources
on building brand efforts.
These activities are defined
by goals like awareness, engagement, and public sentiment,
that aren't tied to an immediate revenue metric,
but will in time open your business up
to far more sales than would've been possible
using short-term social media marketing alone.
Once you've determined the goals
you wanna achieve on social media,
the next step is to decide which platform to use.
To do this, the first thing you wanna consider
is what social media assets you already have.
You could already have followers
that you haven't been servicing,
but are prime for your message
once you start tending to your accounts more closely.
Remember the social media templates
I add you download at the beginning of this video?
Now's your chance to use it.
Open up the social media audit template
and fill out the tabs for any platform
you're already actively on.
Leveraging the audience you've already established
can be more time and cost effective
than trying to build an audience from scratch.
But if you are building from scratch,
the best way to decide
which social media platform to focus on
is by considering where your audience is most primed
to receive your message.
The average individual
has more than eight social media accounts
that they use for different things.
So you can't just target a person,
you have to target their user persona,
which is a combination of demographics,
like age, gender, and location,
as well as a user's profession and activities.
A user's demographic stay the same across platforms,
but their interest can change
depending on what platform they're on.
In other words,
a 32 year old woman from San Diego
might be an HR specialist on LinkedIn,
who follows pet groups on Facebook for her dog,
and watches tennis instruction videos on YouTube
to help improve her game.
Whether you sell human resources solutions,
organic pet food, or tennis racket grip tape,
will determine the platform you use
to target the same 32 year old woman in San Diego.
If you haven't fully analyzed
the audience you're aiming for,
it's worth taking a few minutes to fill out
one of HubSpot's free buyer persona templates.
The free link is down in the description.
Now that you know who your audience is
and where to find them,
you're ready to start creating content
that will work to achieve your determined goals.
But what exactly does that look like?
Maybe you wanna post cool photos of your products
to increase awareness,
or run a survey to enhance engagement.
Live videos are great for projecting brand authority,
while performance ads like PaperClick
can drive leads in sales right away.
You could even partner with a social media influencer
and have them promote your product on their channel.
For brands with a solid budget, looking for rapid growth,
this is a great way to jumpstart a campaign.
If you're still not sure which way to go,
spend some time doing a competitive analysis
of what's working well for others in your space.
You probably already have a good idea
of what your competition is up to,
but it helps to keep a formal inventory.
Start by making a list
of your three to five closest competitors,
then build a spreadsheet to record
their number of fans and followers,
posting frequency and consistency, content engagement,
like are users leaving comments or sharing their posts?
Content virality, how many shares, repins and retweets
to their posts get?
Now you've got your goals, your audience, your platform,
and your analysis of what content works.
I'm sure you're thinking to yourself,
"Jeez, Jamal, can we finally post something?
It's been ages."
Listen, I wouldn't hit that tweet button just yet,
but it is time to start planning your content.
And we make that easy to organize
with the social media editorial calendar
also included in the template's kit.
Now's the time to bust it out
and start filling in the blanks
with all of your brilliant and creative ideas.
I say creative,
because even though you've done a deep dive
on the competition,
you don't just wanna copy what other people are doing.
Every brand is different,
and it's up to you
to make that special X factor for your brand shine through,
'cause you're a beautiful, unique, little snowflake,
and I love you, so much.
All right, anyway,
I wish I had time to tell you all the ways
to creatively optimize your content on social media,
but there's just too many possibilities
for me to cover on this video.
Fortunately, we have a whole playlist full of videos
that will help you maximize results
on whatever platform you've chosen.
You can guess where the link is.
But since you're still here,
I have a few final tips that are almost universal.
Keep copy short and sweet,
and use keywords to help people find your content.
It's also been proven that using emojis
actually really does work.
Make sure that any images you use
are sized correctly for the platform,
and use original images,
not stock, if you can avoid it.
Videos should have the primary message
in the first few seconds to capture the user
before they scroll past,
and always give your audience
some sort of CTA they can follow,
unless your goal is strictly engagement,
in which case, it's better
to just ask questions or make statements
that people will want to respond to organically.
And like everything else in business,
be sure to keep careful track
of how your social media is performing,
so you can keep doing what's working,
while changing up things that aren't.
Every social media platform provides analytics,
and if you're posting lots of content
or posting on multiple platforms,
you might wanna consider a tool like Hootsuite
or Social Sprout, or HubSpot's free marketing hub
to help you organize and analyze the metrics generated
by all of your social media efforts.
And when it's time to report your performance,
just grab the social media reporting template
from the same template kit
I've been talking about in this whole video.
It truly has everything you need
to execute an effective social media marketing strategy.
When I tell you that we're literally just giving away
the nectar of the gods, straight ambrosia,
it's like people are like, "No, Jamal, there's no way."
Way, way my friend, we're doing that.
You're welcome.
Still love you.
And while you're down there,
go ahead and subscribe to the channel
so you never miss a future video
about social media marketing.
We're constantly making new ones with the latest information
on the changing social media landscape,
so we'll see you next time.
Until then, I'm gonna be looking for your content
in my feed.
If I don't see it,
just let me know where I should be following you.
You know what I'm saying?
See you next time.
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