Hot Tips to Build Your Brand Through Social Media Networks

Small business owners can no longer afford to ignore social media networks in their marketing activities. This is not just because of the huge popularity of many social networks but also because of the relative ease of marketing on the networks. Many small business owners have a preference for hugely popular micro-blogging sites such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. For this reason, social media is fast becoming the dominant advertising platform online. It is greatly cost-effective when compared to traditional formats of advertising such as TV, newspapers, magazines and radio among others. As preferred ads media, social networks enable small businesses to easily reach their target audiences more effectively through a variety of channels. This is why small business owners can depend on them to build their brands fairly quickly online.

Here are some hot tips/techniques to get the best marketing results from social media networks.

Social Media Management, SMM: SMM requires an integrated approach that takes into account various aspects of strategic internet marketing. This includes planning, measurement, and strategy implementation. If you accurately measure your marketing results quantitatively, you have a great opportunity to understand exactly where you are in your efforts to reach your target audience. This measurement data must include everything from the number of people who have visited your blog, to the number who are now your friends/followers on your social media handles. You can also measure and obtain metrics data on the time spent on each social media platform by your target audience. Next is to measure the actual engagement on the platforms. From the engagement data, you get to know the number of people who actually click on your ads, respond to your promotional messages, and share your content. This information is very valuable for marketing purposes as most marketers very well know. Smart small business owners rely on this data to formulate marketing plans, develop marketing strategies and launch marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategy: For effective marketing purposes, SEO is not expected to be a one-time process. It is usually a continuous and an ongoing effort with the sole aim of achieving higher rankings on major search engines. Higher ranking on SERPs of search engines translates to higher organic traffic, leads, customers and sales. A good SEO strategy involves using the right keywords in your content, creating backlinks to your website, and generating high amount of traffic to the site. When your SEO is good enough, it helps your business to maintain a positive brand image while greatly increasing its brand awareness on the internet.

Strategic Internet Marketing: This focuses on SEO, paid Search Engine Optimization, PPC, pay-per-click, networking, viral, and other creative strategies. You can strategically integrate them all to get good results. A good SEO helps your business with organic exposure and you can easily incorporate it into your social network marketing plan/strategy. That way, you can easily use social networks to build your brand by directly engaging your target audience.

Combine SMM and Traditional Advertising Methods: Many small businesses successfully combine traditional media marketing with SMM in their efforts to quickly build their brands and grow their businesses. Both are complimentary to each other. It is not smart to rest one for the other if your marketing budget can accommodate both. If the budget cannot, it is advisable to put more of your scarce resources on SMM that is hugely cost-effective. This is a good survival strategy in the hugely suffocating ads marketing space.

Get Reliable Metrics/Analytics Data: To do this effectively it is recommended you use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. There are free easy-to-use Google Analytics tools available online and paid ones as well if you are desirous to have a more comprehensive report. Business owners rely on analytics data to have insights into how users are interacting with the content on their websites, search and user behaviors, and demographics. This helps them to have a clear understanding of their audience and the activities they engage in and general audience behavior. Armed with such vital information, they can plan better and create more effective social media marketing campaigns for their businesses.

User tip: For best results from Google Analytics, just import the data, use the filters and options available, and generate a custom dashboard with detailed reports. That way, you can easily return to it and get updated info from it as often as you want.