27th October 1994 - Hotwired displayed the first digital ad sponsored by At&t. The ad read “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You Will”. This simple text was shown on a small rectangular banner at the top of the magazine’s website for three months and it cost the telephone company $30,000 to place the ad. The outcome of this ad was as outrageous as the price. 

The clickthrough rate for the world’s first ad was 44%. This began the age of digital advertising and after the swooping success of this first ad, other companies followed suit and the rest is history. Fast forward to more than 25 years later, digital advertising has taken a new turn. There are more people on the internet now than ever before.

To be specific, at the time the first ad was made, the number of internet users was just shy of 25 million. Today, we have more than 5 billion internet users. This is a good thing because it means you can always find your target audience online. But the sheer number of internet users also means that simply putting your ad out there won’t get you the leads you are looking for. 

That is also a part of the reason why the clickthrough rate today is far less than what it used to be. The question then is, how do you take advantage of the high number of internet users to effectively promote and grow your startup? One way of doing this is through social media. 

What is social media marketing?

Social Media Marketing is the process of using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., to market products and services. Social Media Marketing has become an essential part of any company's digital strategy because it provides companies with the opportunity to reach their target audience in a cost-effective way. 

Social media marketing is a powerful tool for any business. It can be used to promote your products, services, and even your brand. The power of social media lies in the number of active users. This refers to the number of people who use social media daily, weekly, or monthly. Facebook has the highest number of active users with almost 3 million users per month. Youtube, Whatsapp, and Instagram follow closely behind according to this report. 

TikTok and Twitter also have a decent amount of users every month. What does all this mean for your startup? It means more brand awareness, more leads, and more sales. But all these can only be achieved with a good social media marketing strategy. 

How to create a good social media marketing strategy for your business

The clickthrough rate for most digital ads is dismal, despite the fact that more people use the internet today than at any other time in history.  Nevertheless, the internet via social media is much better for growing businesses today. The algorithms we have today are smarter and much better than they used to be. You only need to understand how it works in order to tap into its incredible potential. So are you ready to grow your company by leveraging social media? 

Step 1 - Set your goals

What do you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy? Knowing this will help you accurately measure how your marketing strategy is performing. Some common goals include; driving traffic to a blog or website, increasing sales, acquiring new customers, and improving customer engagement. However, these are broad goals, there’s a need to be more specific when setting your goal. How many sales are you looking to make? How many new customers are you hoping to attract? How much traffic do you expect to generate? When you have a number or value in sight, it is easier to reach your goal. 

Step 2 - Know your target audience

When a company creates a product or service it is often expected that they are people who will be interested in this product or service. This is why most startups are niche specific. Not only is it a good idea financially, but it is also a good marketing strategy. It makes it easy to know what you do and even easier for your target customers to locate you. 

Let’s say you are in the beauty industry and your startup has come up with this incredible beauty product line. Out of the four major social media platforms, you’re more likely going to benefit from marketing on Instagram. The platform has an audience between the ages of 18 - 34 who are very much interested in fashion, travel, beauty, and food. 

Twitter is more geared towards an audience with a much more general appeal while Facebook is the metaphorical jack of all trades. 

Step 3 - Choose the best platform for your startup

The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy is to decide which platforms you want to use for your startup. You should choose the platforms that best suit your company’s needs and target audience. That is why knowing your target audience is very important. With a little bit of research, you can determine which of the major social media platforms have the kind of audience that you want. 

If you can’t find the answers you need through research, then the good old trial-and-error method will come in handy. Simply create an account with all social media platforms and analyze the performance to obtain information like the number of clicks, engagement rate, number of shares, website traffic flow, and general impression. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite for your analysis.

The analysis will reveal which social media channel is bringing the most result whether that is traffic, leads, or engagement. When you hone in on the best-performing platform for your business, you can then focus your marketing effort on that specific platform. 

Step 4 - Create engaging content 

The next step is to create content for the social media platform(s) of your choice. The goal here is to ensure that your content are engaging for your audience and relevant to what they are interested in. Note, this will differ from one social media platform to another. What might be considered engaging content on Twitter might not be on Instagram and vice versa. 

This is why steps 1 and 2 above are very important. In addition to creating engaging content, you must ensure that the right audience gets to see your content. To do this you can use hashtags or keywords on the platform so that people who search those terms will find your content more easily. Hashtags work the same way regardless of the social media platform you’re using. 

What it does is bundle different content (videos or conversations) together and make them easily accessible. For instance, the hashtag #smallbusiness on Instagram displays content related to small businesses around the world. 

What are the best tools for managing your social media marketing?

When it comes to social media marketing, there are dozens of tools to choose from. If you are new to this, you may find it difficult to get your way around without some guidance, luckily that’s exactly what I’d be providing in this section. Before I begin, it’s important to mention that the marketing tool you need and that would work for you will depend on what your goal is. I’ll discuss more on that later. For now, here are some of the best social media tools to get started.

Conclusion

Since its inception digital marketing has continued to grow, more so with the popularity of social media. What makes social media the crown jewel of digital marketing is the sheer number of active users. So many eyes mean businesses get their money’s worth in the form of exposure, leads, traffic, and of course revenue.