How Marketing On Social Media Works

Social media has revolutionized the way businesses reach out to their customers. With millions of users across various social media platforms, marketing on social media has become an essential aspect of modern marketing strategies. It provides businesses with a unique opportunity to connect with customers in a more human and personalized way. It can be used to reach new customers, build relationships with existing ones, and promote your brand. But how does it work? How do you get started? What are the best practices for using social media as a marketing tool? In this blog post, we’ll answer these questions and more!

First of all, Marketing is too complex for us to address here. However, we can break it down into smaller pieces and understand how each one works. In this case, we will focus on Brand awareness and Social Media Marketing.

Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for your business, product, or service that sets it apart from competitors and makes it memorable to customers. In essence, if you can answer these two questions:

1. What I’m really good at it?
2. What makes me stand out from the crowd based on my effort?

To have a Business identity, you need a product or service – which requires work. Working is about taking the same action, again and again, and eventually making it better for your customer. The brand is not just about the logo, the colors, or the fonts. It’s about the tone of voice that resonates with your target audience. It’s about the values you want to represent. It’s about the experience you want to create for your customers. It’s about the story you want to tell.

Bottom line: you need to choose a product or service that you genuinely care about and feel passionate about working on over and over again.

Therefore, to create a Brand, you need to select your audience, aka “persona”, and define your target audience. You need to understand your customers’ preferences, interests, and behaviors. By doing so, you can create content that resonates with your target audience, and engage with them in a more meaningful way. If you don’t have a clue, run Facebook ads and it will show you based on their analysis. Simple as that. With these, we can start Marketing. (Ow, I thought that was easy. It’s not. But it’s not hard either; it’s just a lot of steps.)

1. Create engaging content

Creating (engaging) content is a critical aspect of social media marketing. Businesses need to create content that is interesting, informative, and relevant to their target audience. Imagine that you have a nightclub, as I once coordinated, and you want to promote it. In the beginning, we just publish the cover photo for the event.

As you can see, it can be informative, but it’s not engaging. So, we need to create content that is engaging and relevant to our target audience. We start creating after-movies for the parties, photo albums of every event, and Reels of promotions. We started to create an “engineering” blog on Linkedin, showing what we have done to make the party happen. All of this “backstage” content helped to create more awareness that we are a serious business, and we are not just a “party house”. In effect, more older people started to come, generating more income. As a rule of thumb, in nightclubs, the older the people, the more money they spend because they work. So, that was the target audience that we were effectively targeting.

1. Build a following

Our shift towards a content-focused approach paid off when we saw a significant increase in our follower count. We were able to figure out what kind of posts worked best by using hashtags, mentions, and shares. This was a pivotal moment for us, as we began to implement more automated tools.

Managing our social media presence across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp was a real challenge. With nearly 40,000 followers across all platforms and just two of us on the team (focused on chat specifically), we needed help. That’s when we decided to invest in omnichannel platform automation with a chatbot for frequently asked questions and a system for quickly responding to comments and messages. It made a huge difference!

1. Use social media advertising

A big shift occurs when we started to use social media advertising as we have to produce a lot more photos, and videos to focus on specific demographics. Here in Brazil, we have a lot of small towns, one close to another. And we find it especially difficult to narrow them down. Therefore, Social media advertising provides an opportunity to reach a larger audience and track results.

But beyond just the numbers, social media allowed us to connect with the audience more often, building trust and establishing a sense of loyalty. With this, we positioned ourselves as experts because we were always on the screen of the user. It helped a lot in our conversion rate.

1. Promoters

Promoters are people that sell tickets and advertise a party. This can seem like a niche to parties and events, but the only method of marketing that works exponentially is the classic “word of mouth”. It is people sharing with their friends what they bought, where they will go and how they will consume. In the case of Bar Cultural, we had a lot of promoters, and we gave them a lot of freedom to do what they want. Some posted videos about the party DJs, about the drinks, and some just reposted the cover art in their stories. In essence, they speak good stuff about our business – the best marketing that will have.

We had promoters that sold 100 tickets for us in one week. And best of all: we didn’t pay them anything; just give them some tickets to give to their friends. We had a lot of people coming to the party because of the promoters. You can create “promoters” in our brand by giving your customers credit if they call their friends. By hosting a company event and calling the most loyal customers to it. Anyway, let’s not forgot that customers are people and act accordingly. Who doesn’t want to get something free; to help a company that gave them free tickets?

1. Analyze and refine

This is plain and simple: have metrics to analyze the performance of your social media campaigns and refine their strategy based on the results. If something is not working, try to understand why. Try to solve one’s needs. If you don’t know how to do it, ask your customers. They will tell you where you should improve. And if you don’t know how to ask, just ask them to fill out a survey. Simple as it.

I hope that you understood everything that I tried to teach and learn from my experience. If you have any questions, please contact me. I will be happy to help you!