SMM is different than the white from the black? Proper marketing in social networks

M stands for Marketing

The most important letter in the abbreviation SMM is the last one, it means marketing. To make a brand recognizable and in demand, you need it.

Marketing is a set of processes aimed at creating and promoting goods and services of a company for potential and existing customers; management of relationships with customers on favorable terms with the organization. The marketing also takes care of customer satisfaction through market analysis.

As you can see, black SMM is at odds with the concept of "marketing". Today's Internet users really don't need spam and intrusive sales, and manipulation has never been of value to customers.

Important: The products or services offered must be of value to people, which means they need to be promoted at the right time and in the right place. Therefore, any social media marketing starts with setting goals and drawing up a work plan.

Creating and planning goals

Having set the right goal, you get the planned result of SMM promotion. The goal could be:

• dissemination of information about discounts, promotions, news;

• creation of a customer-oriented community;;

• building and maintaining reputation;

• engaging target users in the conversion funnel.

By achieving your goals, you manage demand and have a positive impact on sales.

Formation of a customer-oriented community

It is most convenient to organize such a community on the basis of thematic forums and social platforms. The main thing is to start, and a properly built marketing strategy will ensure its natural scaling.

Remember, people need to consciously follow you. Why increase the number of subscribers to 15 thousand if 95% of them are fake accounts or non-target audience?

Your main task is to create a community that will be searched for, found and tempting to join. There are three main tools to develop your presence on social networks:

• Useful and relevant content. This is one of the main reasons why Internet users are added to your group.

• Virality - this is a natural, rapid spread of content among users.

• Targeted advertising. Provides the ability to show advertisements exclusively to potential customers.

An active group with high traffic is half the success of an SMM strategy. Next, you will need to work not on the number of subscribers, but on their quality.

Informing the target audience

To effectively convey information, it is not enough just to make notes in the comments of other groups that your company is selling “a such and such” product. To be heard, understood and interested in, you need to correctly present your message to Internet users.

First of all, you need to study the needs and expectations of the target audience, and then choose the most suitable social platforms for promotion. Your company's pages can be created in all social networks, but the emphasis should be on those that turned out to be the most promising according to the results of the analysis.

In them, the specialist develops the brand community, and also looks for thematic platforms for communication with the audience (forums, blogs, groups). The SMM specialist draws up a publication calendar (content plan), where they note the announcements of posts, describes their content. Here are some ideas for making your content diverse, interesting, and interactive:

• Real photos of the product, office, employees of the organization;

• Polls to identify the interests of the audience, demand for products;

• Contests, sweepstakes, when you need to quickly raise interest in the activities of the organization;

• Infographics showing success (especially relevant for the IT sphere), survey results, up-to-date global statistics on your business niche;

• Product videos, time-lapses;

• Live broadcasts for live communication with the target audience, increasing authority.

All of these types of content can be created and successfully promoted on different social media platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, VK, etc. Crowd marketing is also often used.

We should also mention situational content: it is almost impossible to plan it, so you need to be on the alert all the time and, if the opportunity arises, put viral potential in your publications - popular memes, hashtags, videos, etc.

Engaging users in the conversion funnel

One of the tasks of social media marketing is to provide transitions (traffic) to the main resource of the company. How to do it? Here are some tips:

• SMO. Socialization of the site allows visitors to share your publication on their page in FB, VK, etc.

• Grasping headlines. If you have a really cool headline, it's already 90% sure that you will be noticed.

• Design. A competent visual design complements your publication and favorably distinguishes it in the news feed among such heavyweights as babies, cats, puppies and other adorable animals:

• Hashtags. Use thematic # hashtags and tag the posts of the most active subscribers of the group to draw their attention to the main resource.

• Links to website pages. In your public page, you can provide links to the relevant sections of the site, for example, when filling out the block "Contact information", "Price range"etc.

Reputation management

This is a set of measures to identify factors that can affect the reputation of a brand, as well as a systematic impact on these factors in its interests.

Reputation management includes:

• monitoring of mentions of the company on the Internet;

• studying the reaction of Internet users to these mentions;

• identifying the attitude of users to the business;

• interaction with clients (potential and existing).

Using reputation management, you can effectively handle negative online reviews, improve customer service, and use social media platforms as a stable channel of communication with your target audience.

The easiest way to find out about negative reviews about your brand on the Internet is to enter the query “Company name + reviews” in a search engine or in a social network search. There are also special tracking services for this.

Here are some ways to get users' opinion of your brand:

• creating discussions on forums;

• questioning;

• blitz polls;

• interviewing.

The reactions of the Internet audience to positive and negative mentions of a company shape its image. But communication with customers has an even greater impact on reputation than image advertising. By the way, both an SMM specialist and a manager or other authorized employees can communicate with the target audience.

Finally

SMM services and their cost is equal to the effort spent and the result obtained. Yes, black SMM is cheaper because it is based on markups, where the price of one subscriber or like can go up to 0.01$.

But compare by yourself: are obtrusive advertising, spam and determining the true needs of the target audience, demand, equal? Can entertaining posts, fake comments compare to competent commercial content, sincere communication when working with feedback? Of course not.

When it comes to a good brand reputation, which is earned by hard work and for many years, it is not worth saving. White SMM is your key to the company's success and stable profit.