CINDY GOTTINGER: Social
media is any digital tool that enables users to create
and share content publicly. With billions of
people on social media throughout the world, your
current and potential customer will likely be some of them. People use social
media platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, and Instagram to stay in touch with
friends and family, share photos and videos,
research products to buy, stay up to date
on current events, find entertaining content
to read, and more. Social media gives
you the opportunity to reach the maximum
number of these people in a variety of different ways. Coming up, we'll discuss what
social media marketing is and how it benefits your
marketing campaigns. You'll learn about five
key pillars of social media marketing– strategy, planning
and publishing, listening and engagement,
analytics and reporting, and paid social media. We'll discuss how the different
types of digital media fit into your social
media campaign. And you'll learn how to use
social media to guide customers through the marketing funnel,
the path a potential customer takes from awareness
of your brand to purchasing a
product and beyond.
Ready to get started? Let's go. [MUSIC PLAYING] In this video, I'll explain
what social media marketing is and why it's important for
the success of your marketing campaigns. Social media
marketing is a process of creating content for
different social media platforms in order to drive
engagement and promote a business or product. Social media
marketing enables you to connect with your customers
and help them better understand your brand. Why is social media such an
effective marketing tool? There are so many reasons. First of all, social
media is an excellent way to increase brand awareness. Brand awareness refers
to how familiar people are with a particular
business or product. Think about a time you
saw a social media post that caught your attention
from a brand you didn't know. If you can remember that brand
now, that's brand awareness.
Social media platforms
engage with over half of the world's population. And according to a Pew Research
study, over 70% of social media users check their accounts
at least once a day. People use these
platforms to interact with their friends and
family as well as companies, so you can connect with
users whenever they log in. This makes social
media a natural place to target new customers. Social media also helps you
build stronger relationships with your existing customers. It gives you the opportunity
to build their trust, help them solve
problems, and show them that you care about
their needs and opinions. Additionally, marketing
on social media can help you grow your
business by driving more traffic to your website.
By sharing your website content
on your social media platforms, you can direct
users to your site every time you
publish a new post. You can also increase
website traffic by including your
website address in all of your
social media profiles so that people who want
to learn more about you can easily do so. Social media is also one of
the most powerful marketing channels for generating leads. As you learned previously, a
lead is a potential customer. On social media,
a lead is someone who took a specific
action that made them a potential customer, such
as filling out a form, subscribing to a free
trial, or clicking on a link to a discount code.
Many social platforms
provide advertising formats specifically designed
to collect leads. Social media allows you to
gain valuable insights that can help you inform
your marketing strategy. Learning about your
target audience's likes, dislikes, and interests
through social media can help you tailor
your marketing strategy to that audience. Analytics tools offered on
many social media platforms enable you to gather
a large amount of data about your
target audience as well. Additionally, social media
provides an opportunity for you to learn about your competitors. Researching what your
competitors are doing can help you emulate what is working for
them and improve on what isn't. Another great benefit of
social media marketing is that it is cost effective. Most social networking
platforms allow you to sign up and create
a profile for free. Also, you can reach users based
not only on their interests and hobbies, but on the personal
and demographic information they choose to share with
the social media platforms. This narrows down your audience
to precisely the customer you want to target so you can
avoid spending your budget on a wider audience.
Social media marketing
has been greatly beneficial to my
campaigns at Google. For example, I recently
launched a new product feature in the market and it
was important for me to connect with users that
would find this product helpful. Social media helped me share
digestible information that increased the awareness
of the product among users and guided them
to a destination, in my case, Google Ads Help
Center, for further reading. Businesses of all sizes can
benefit from a social media presence, though
strategies can differ depending on the company. At a big company, you
might work with a team of designers, copywriters,
or even an agency to create content.
While at a small
company, you might be doing more of
the work yourself or with a small in-house team. The benefits I've described
here at just a few of the many reasons why this
marketing channel is so useful. Because of this,
social media marketing has become a crucial element
of many companies' business development strategies. Next, we'll discuss
the basic principles of social media marketing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Previously, we discussed
why social media is such an important piece
of your company's marketing puzzle. Now let's talk about five
core pillars of social media marketing. Strategy, planning
and publishing, listening and engagement,
analytics and reporting, and paid social media. These pillars can help you
guide an effective social media marketing campaign. The first core pillar of social
media marketing is strategy. To build a successful social
media marketing campaign, you need to develop
an effective strategy. Your strategy will define the
primary goals of your campaign.
You may want to use
your marketing efforts to boost brand awareness, drive
more website traffic and sales, provide customer support,
build a community, and beyond. The purpose of your
social media campaign will also depend on your
broader marketing goals and the goals of your business. Your strategy will also include
which social media platforms you'll use. In order to decide
which platforms are best for your
brand, you will need to research the platforms
most visited by your target audience and your strategy will
outline which types of content you'll post.
You'll need to find out
what types of content your audiences value. Some people might be interested
in educational or inspiring content, while others might
prefer to be entertained. You'll also need to
decide on the formats for the content you'll post,
such as images, videos, or articles. You should be prepared to
do some research and a lot of trial and error to see what
resonates with your target audience and yields results. After you have developed
your social media strategy, you can move on to the next
core pillar of social media marketing, planning
and publishing. It's important to have
a consistent presence on social media.
This allows your brand
to be seen and discovered by potential customers. Scheduling your posts
in advance helps ensure you have a
consistent presence and that you are publishing the
content most likely to attract potential customers. When planning your
posts, you'll also need to consider their
timing and frequency. When is your audience
most likely to engage with your content? How often should you post in
order to be in their minds but not overwhelm their feeds? Social media
scheduling tools can help you publish your
content automatically at your preferred times. In a later course,
we'll discuss how to create a social media
calendar to help you plan and publish your content.
Once you've published content
on some social media platforms, it's time to explore the next
social media marketing pillar, listening and engagement. As you publish more on social
media and your following grows, mention of your
brand will increase. Potential and existing customers
will comment on your posts, tag you in their own posts,
or message you directly. You can learn a lot about how
people feel about your brand through social listening. Social listening refers
to tracking and analyzing conversations and trends
related to your brand. Social listening can
help you understand what people think
about your brand, which can inform your marketing and
product development decisions. It can also help you
determine your approach to audience engagement.
Engagement refers to how
your audience interacts with your brand on social media. It's when people respond
to your social media posts by taking actions such as
liking or sharing them. Studying engagement helps you
learn what content resonates best with your audience. Engagement also includes how
you interact with your audience on social media. For example, if a
customer comments that they love your
product, you can respond with your appreciation. If a customer needs
help with an issue, you can tell them how you'll
take action to address it. Interacting with
people in this way increases their positive
experience with your brand.
After you've had a
consistent social media presence for a while,
you can move forward with the next core pillar,
analytics and reporting. Social media
analytics is a process of collecting data from
your social media platforms and analyzing that data to
make business decisions. Social media analytics
tells you how your campaign is performing. They can help you find out
things like how many positive mentions you got in
a particular month, or how many people you're
reaching on different platforms from one month to the next. Your analysis of
the data you collect can help drive your social
media marketing strategy moving forward. After you've collected
and analyzed the data, you can share social media
reports with stakeholders to inform them about the
results of your campaign.
A social media
report is a document that presents relevant
data and analysis about your social
media activities. You can set up different
reports to help you monitor different metrics
such as followers, comments, or clicks. This can help you improve the
performance of your campaigns over time. Many social media platforms
provide their own analytics and reporting tools. We'll explore analytics
tools in a later course. That brings us to the last
core pillar of social media marketing, paid social media. Previously, you learned about
the differences between organic and paid media. While many of your marketing
activities on social media will involve
organic content, you may need to develop a paid
social media strategy as well. You'll be able to better
control and target your marketing with
paid social media than with organic approaches.
And social media
ads generally allow you to reach a wider
audience than organic posts. Paid social media can also
help you grow your brand and broaden your
presence on social media. The data you gather
about the success of your organic
approaches on social media will help you inform your
paid social strategy. Now you've learned a bit about
five pillars of social media marketing– strategy, planning
and publishing, listening and engagement,
analytics and reporting, and paid social media. In the coming lesson, we'll
discuss each of these pillars more thoroughly and
how you can bring them all together to create a
successful social media campaign. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now that you've been
introduced to the five pillars of social
media marketing, we'll review the different
types of digital media and how each of these can
fit into your social media campaigns. Previously, you
learned about the three types of digital media,
earned, owned, and paid. Implementing all three
of these media types into your social media campaign
can help build brand awareness, vary the way your audience
engages with your brand, and increase sales.
Let's review what you've
learned so far about each of these types of media and
explore how to incorporate earned, owned, and paid
media into your social media strategies. Let's start with earned media. Earned media is the
personal or public promotion of a brand or product. Earned media is marketing
generated by your customers. Whenever a customer tells a
friend, posts on a social media platform or blog, or writes
a review about your product, they are producing earned
media for your brand. Social media is one of the most
powerful marketing channels for generating earned media. Sources of earned social
media include customer reviews and testimonials, mentions
and comments on social media platforms, shares, retweets,
and likes of your posts, content about your business
on third party sites, blog posts about
your businesses, and user-generated content
related to your business.
User-generated content, or
UGC, is any content created by people rather than brands. User-generated content can
include text, videos, images, reviews, and so on. For example, imagine you are
running a social media campaign for a company that sells socks. If customers post pictures
of themselves wearing your company's socks
on social media, this is user-generated content
and an example of earned media.
One of the many
advantages of earned media is that it's organic. Organic social media is
any social media activity that does not require
a paid promotion. Organic social media
will form the foundation of your social media strategy. Let's move on to owned media. Owned media is all the digital
content a brand fully controls. Websites are one of the most
common forms of owned media.
Sources of owned social
media include blog sites, social media profiles like your
brand's Facebook or Instagram profile, and community forums. One of the greatest
benefits of owned media is that it allows your
company to control the conversation surrounding
your brand on social media. When your brand owns
the media property, it decides what type
of content to publish, how often to publish it, and
how users can interact with it. Owned media also allows you
to market specific products or services on social media. Consistently publishing
compelling owned media can also generate more earned media. And finally, there's paid media. Paid media is any form
of digital promotion a brand pays to put online. Remember that the fifth pillar
of social media marketing is the paid social media. Examples of paid social media
include image ads, video ads, story ads, and
influencer marketing. Paid social media
allows your brand to reach customers who are
not actively searching for it.
It can be used to target
specific groups of people who might be interested in
your product and services. Paid social media can also help
promote your content in order to drive more earned
media and direct traffic to your owned media properties. Earned, owned, and
paid social media will all be important components
of your social media marketing campaigns. When strategically
implemented together, they can improve
brand awareness, generate leads,
and increase sales. You'll learn more about how
to incorporate these media types into your
social media campaigns throughout this course. [MUSIC PLAYING] In previous courses,
you learned about how to guide potential customers
through the marketing funnel. Now we'll discuss how to
apply these strategies to your social media
marketing campaigns.
Let's start by reviewing
what you've learned so far about the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is
a graphic representation of the process
through which people go from learning about a brand
to becoming a loyal customer. You have learned that the
stages of the marketing funnel are awareness, when a
potential customer encounters a brand for the first
time; consideration, when the person starts to
think about doing business with the brand and
actively searches for more information
about it; conversions, when the person decides
to make a purchase; and loyalty, when the
customer decides to purchase from the brand again. How you approach
the marketing funnel depends on the
marketing channel.
You will use different tactics
for print, SEO, and email marketing, for example,
though these strategies will support one another. Now let's discuss how the
marketing funnel can help guide your interactions
with your customers and optimize your marketing
efforts through social media. The social media
marketing funnel begins in the awareness stage
with potential customers learning about your brand. At this stage in the
funnel, your goal is to capture your
audience's attention. You want to get people
to remember your brand and try to learn more about you. By targeting key
phrases, you can pinpoint the topic your target
audience is searching for. Then you can create
social media content, such as guides, videos, and
blogs around those topics. For example, maybe your company
offers career guidance services and you notice that
people are searching for things like interview
tips and how to interview.
You could create a guide
with interview advice or a brief video tutorial
highlighting key interview tips. At this stage, you should
keep things brief and simple just to gain your
audience's interest. You can also use paid ads to
improve your target customer's awareness of your brand. By targeting a specific
audience or interest group, you can better reach
specific people and nudge them towards the
next stage of the funnel. During the consideration
stage, your potential customers are searching for
more information to help them decide whether
or not to make a purchase. At this point, they may
be looking for reviews or comparing your offerings
to your competitors. This is your opportunity
to provide them with more detailed information
about your brand to set you apart from the competition. Posting content like case
studies, customer testimonials, product reviews, and
in-depth product tutorials can help build potential
customers' trust and confidence in your brand. In marketing, the rule of seven
says that a potential customer must see a message at least
seven times before they're ready to take action.
Social media makes it easier
to implement this messaging. Each time you appear
in someone's feed, you are making them more
familiar with your brand. After you've nurtured
your potential customers through the previous
two phases and they have taken actions such as
signing up for your email list or clicking on an ad,
you know that they're interested in what
you have to offer. During the conversion stage,
you capitalize on the interest people have already shown. During this stage, you can
use paid remarketing campaigns to reach people who have already
showed interest in your brand. Remarketing, also
known as retargeting, is a strategy in
which you use paid ads to target customers who have
visited your website, app, or social media profile. You can also gently
encourage people to make a purchase by offering
incentives like discounts or free shipping. After you've acquired
a new customer, you can move on to
the loyalty stage. Did you know that it
costs five times as much to attract a new customer
than it does to retain the ones you already have? That is why the loyalty
stage is so crucial.
You need to continue to
nurture relationships with your customers
at this stage so you can remain
in their minds. Remarketing ads to existing
customers on social media is a great way to encourage
them to make a repeat purchase. You can also stay connected
with your customers by making them
feel like they are part of your brand community. One way to do this is by
developing social media content that relates to the
purchase that they have made. For example, if a customer
purchased career guidance services from your
company, you could prompt them to share
on your community forum once they land a job. Great. Let's review what you've
learned about guiding your prospective customers
through the social media marketing funnel. The awareness stage is your
time to capture your audience's attention. The consideration stage
is your opportunity to provide your potential
customer with more detailed information to set
you apart from the competition and help build their trust
and confidence in your brand.
The conversion stage
is when you capitalize on the interest people have
already shown in your brand by remarketing and
offering incentives. And the loyalty stage
is a time to continue to nurture relationships
with your customers so you can remain
in their minds. MIRIAM: Congratulations
on finishing this video from the Google Digital
Marketing and E-commerce Certificate. Access the full experience on
Coursera including job search help, and start earning
the official certificate by clicking the icon or the
link in the description. Watch the next video in the
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