Our previous blog looked at the top 10 social media trends to watch in 2022. We looked social commerce and the evolution of eCommerce. This blog looks at solutions for social media marketing. It also focuses on cost effective packaged solutions for small businesses. We look at what you need for a basic set up. The article will touch on:
- Domain Registration & Hosting
- Website Design & Management
- Web Blogs & Articles
- Social Media Content
- Social Media Community Management
Firstly, you need to take stock of what you have. Do you have social media pages? Do you have a logo & a tagline? What about your brand elements? What are brand elements anyway? Where’s your domain? Website, emails, blogs, posts, SEO, hashtags, trends, viral… overwhelming? It doesn’t need to be. Your ‘social media marketing’ project just needs a kick start. And for that, you will need to get in touch with us.
It All Starts With A Good Plan
Engagement: We need to talk to you. We need to know what you need, and you need to know what we can do. Our job is to create for you an instantly recognisable brand, logo & tagline. We start by initially looking at your brand & then researching your market. This research will also guide our use of elements of shape, colour & image psychology. Gradually, we will build you brand elements for online & print use. Now that we have some direction, we know where we’re headed to.
Strategy: We will develop for you a marketing strategy. We also identify the online mediums best suited for your message. We will then develop a medium-specific content creation strategy. Thereafter, we create a comprehensive, measurable marketing plan. Finally, we finalise a marketing mix.
Plan: The next step is to create a marketing program calendar. We schedule posts on social media, B2B networking, blog posts and other online platforms. The content created can also augment your marketing activities on offline platforms (newpapers, radio, TV)
Content: We will then create industry-specific & relevant copy content. The content will vary for each media. We do this to maximise your exposure as well as increase your SEO ranking. We focus on your expertise, experience, and knowledge of your industry. Our aim is to position us among the best in your business segment.
Measuring Your Social Media Marketing
The marketing calendar is the measure of your marketing plan. You get an annual calendar with an overview of seasonal and annual campaigns. We also give you a quarterly program that shows the build up to, the marking of and culmination specific campaigns. The monthly schedule then gives you every post for each platform, with the scheduled date & time for posting.
Analytics is the performance gauge of your marketing plan. Each week, we examine at the engagement of the posts. We look at the number of views, likes, comments, as well as the demographic of who’s engaged. All of this, and more, also give us other information, to continually tweak the plan. We want to ensure that your plan does what it’s meant to do.
There’s much more that happens behind the scenes. Design is a fine art. (Copywriters love that overused line.) We create an image library that incorporates multiple brand elements, as well as underlying shape, colour & image psychology. Adding your branding to the images is also part of the process. What you see in a single image on your post is as a result of hours of work.
Stringing together words for online copy is an acquired skill. Most times, it’s not about how many words, but the impact with as few as possible. Whether it’s word-wrangling, carrot-dangling, or plain old-fashioned “click here“, a lot of research & planning goes into creating copy. Further, the copy is “enhanced” with hashtags, tags, focus keyphrases, meta texts, bread crumbs* and a host of other tools to maximise your SEO.
There’s value-added and added value…
Most small to medium digital companies combine design & content elements to create great looking work. What sets us apart is that we also have SEO specialists working on all our projects. Every post, blog, article and tweet is SEO’d (That’s a word created by the development team) to maximise reach & exposure. The real value in social media marketing is as much what you see, as what you don’t see. We, however, show you everything, because that’s how we roll. When we send you your monthly marketing calendar, we show you the SEO analysis before we post, as well as the analytics after we post.
There’s more to social media marketing that meets the eye. Many digital companies and freelance practitioners sell themselves as specialists and experts. It’s a lot more complex than “take a pic and post it”. Ask them what you’re paying for, and what you’re getting. Now ask yourself how you’re measuring what you’re paying for. Then click here and get in touch with us.
*In web design, ‘bread crumbs’ is a real thing. Don’t believe us? Click here...
