Being on Facebook is almost not optional for businesses these days.  This is where customers go to research businesses, look for reviews, read content, ask questions and importantly - look for products to buy and services to use.  This space is right up there with your website in terms of importance for your business’ presence online.

We are experts in this channel and know how to engage effectively with your target market.  Some of the common questions we help clients answer to form their strategy are:

• Should you use organic content or paid promotion?   
• What would be engaging to promote for your business?
• What targeting should you do for your promotion?
• How do you get someone to stop scrolling and look at your ad?
• How do you use the performance metrics from your campaigns to optimise them?

Facebook is not an easy platform to market on effectively, but when done well is very rewarding and we would love to help you make it work for your business.

Instagram is a beautiful visual channel which provides fantastic opportunities to wow your potential customers with your brand and content.

What is the key to success on Instagram?

1. High quality design (don’t worry - we have absolutely world class designers on the R6 team!)
2. Engaging content

Whether you are building a gorgeous Instagram page with stunning posts or engaging your audience with insightful, fun, quirky or funny reels - we can help you find your Instagram voice.

LinkedIn is the Facebook of the business to business world.  If you are looking to generate business, build your brand or demonstrate why your business is a great place to work - LinkedIn is a ‘must have’ channel in your social media strategy.

At R6 we can help you leverage LinkedIn to:

• Find new sales opportunities
• Build your business brand
• Communicate the great work that you do
• Position your business and an employer of choice

Through a thoughtful content strategy and amplifying it with an effective marketing plan, we can turn your LinkedIn presence from something you just have, to something you wouldn’t want to be without.

TikTok has grown fast and now become a hugely influential platform.  Users on TikTok spend more time watching videos each day than YouTube users, which is a massive testament to how engaging it can be.

TikTok is a uniquely fast paced video centric environment.  Being successful as an advertiser on there is not easy, but for some businesses can be very rewarding.  It can be used to:

• Reach a different market or younger demographic
• Build a following for your content on that platform

TikTok content needs to be quick, fun and appealing to viewers that are looking for immediate entertainment.  If this is a space you want to play in then we can help you make content that resonates and reach the right audience.

Wait - YouTube is a social media?  It sure is!  With significant amounts of user generated content and community engagement YouTube is a hidden powerhouse of social engagement that many marketers don’t think of as part of their social media marketing strategy.

There are multiple ways to market your business on YouTube and engage with potential customers such as:

• Video - skippable and non-skippable
• Bumper ads
• Overlay ads

We can work with you to form a YouTube strategy that is right for reaching your potential customers with your message.

There are numerous social media channels and some might be exactly what you need to reach your target audience.

Some of these include:

• Reddit
• Quora
• Twitch
• Snapchat

Each of these have their own advertising opportunities which we can leverage to drive results for your business.   We can work with you on your social media marketing strategy to work out whether any of these would suit your campaign.

Social media marketing has become an essential part of a complete digital marketing strategy.  This FAQ is intended as a quick guide to help you build your understanding of how social media marketing can be leveraged to grow your business and your brand online.

Social media marketing can provide an efficient way of generating interest and awareness in brands, products and services.  To really make your social marketing sing it can help to engage with an agency or other social media marketing services, or recruit highly skilled staff to build these campaigns yourselves.

This quick guide should help you understand even more about social media marketing.  If you want to dig deeper or get some help with your strategy the team at R6 would love to help you make the most of your investment in this channel.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

What Are The Types Of Social Media Marketing?

What Does Social Media Marketing Do?

Which Social Media Platform Should I Use?

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Should I use a Social Media Marketing Agency?

How Do I Start Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing involves leveraging social media (such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc) to gain awareness for brands, products, services and causes.

Social Media platforms have access to a lot of data on the people who use them.  This makes it possible to target specific audiences in a more accurate way that other advertising channels are able to.

For example on Facebook you can target audiences based on age, gender, location and interest (eg: females, aged 20-30 years old, living in Brisbane who are interested in Yoga and speak Japanese).   The targeting can be as specific or broad as you want and what you would use depends on the objective of your social media marketing campaign.

There are many nuances in how to best execute a good social media targeting strategy which we have learned over many years of experience and would love to share with you.

There are a broad range of different social media networks and they are all different.  Due to this there are many different ways that you would approach marketing on each of them.

Some of the core types of social media marketing activities are:

Video marketing - videos shared on social media - often short and catchy

Micro blogging - short written content shared via social media

Image marketing - use of images, be they photos, infographics, illustrations, memes etc.

Curated content - sharing of links with summaries and recommendations

Each of these types of social media marketing have various networks that they are well suited to. Some, such as Facebook and LinkedIn can work with each type of social media marketing very easily, whereas others, such as Instagram and TikTok can only work with certain types of content.

Network Video Marketing Micro Blogging Image Marketing Curated

Facebook Yes Yes Yes Yes

Instagram Yes No Yes No

TikTok Yes No No No

Twitter No Yes Yes Yes

LinkedIn Yes Yes Yes Yes

While some social media networks are unable to use certain types of social media marketing directly, combined approaches can be used in various cases. For example, on Instagram an image could have a microblog attached to it, with a link, thus incorporating three types of social media marketing campaign within one.

In addition, each of these types of social media marketing has various demographic groups that they work best with.

Knowing which type of social media marketing to use will depend on who your target audience is.  If you have a clear picture of this target customer (sometimes called a target ‘avatar’) you will have the core information you need to work out which platforms to use and what type of content to engage them with.

In short - social media marketing raises awareness.

Whether you are doing social media marketing to drive product sales, notify people about a social issue, or event, or something else; social media marketing creates awareness with the intent to inspire the target audience to take action.

When you know your target audience you can then work out how to communicate with them and what will appeal most to them.   A social media marketing campaign might focus on a logical offer, an entertainment approach or an emotional appeal.  Ultimately this is in order to illicit a response from your audience.

In a good social media campaign, a carefully developed message along with understanding of how target demographics will respond and engage will ultimately result in those people being inspired to take action.

As such, social media marketing is about far more than just sharing images, posting quick videos, and sharing updates.

A good social media marketing expert will be able to understand your target audience and match them with the perfect platforms and content strategy to drive results for your business.  Without this expertise it is very easy to waste money on social media marketing, so we highly recommend working with an expert and having a clear strategy before you start investing.

This question is best answered with another question - who is your target audience?

The different social media platforms appeal to different audiences.  To demonstrate this - in Q4 of 2021

Get stats from Statistica

Facebook:

• Stats

Instagram

• Stats

Linkedin

• Stats

TikTok

• Stats

YouTube

• Stats

We all use social media regularly and know what ads on there look like - so crafting a social media strategy would be easy right? …. Wrong!   There are a lot of things to consider in developing a social media strategy and a lot of experience and knowledge needed to make one that is effective.  Social media is a great space to get amazing results when done well - but you can also waste money quickly on a poorly developed campaign.  It is well worth the time to develop a considered strategy and/or engaging with experts in bringing it together.

Where to start?  With your objectives.

Social media marketing strategy is very dependent on defining your objectives and goals.  That is then distilled into considering your audience and message to reach that goal.

The medium, format and channel need to all work toward that specific goal.  For example; using a wide range of video marketing on TikTok to reach CEO’s who are 50 plus, and get them to take action is unlikely to be successful. Whereas using a selection of videos, microblogs, and images via LinkedIn is more likely to reach them and lead to action.

Conversely, targeting teens on LinkedIn when you have a shopping brand is not going to be successful.

A successful social media marketing strategy needs to do the following:

1. Define your objectives and goals. Why are you wanting to market?  What do you want to achieve?
2. Identify your target customers.   Who does your product and offer tend to appeal to? What markets could your product appeal to that you haven’t been reaching in other channels?
3. Work out where your target customers are hanging out online.  Which platform/s makes the most sense?
4. Craft your message to appeal to that specific audience
5. Develop quality creative which leverages the strengths of your chosen platform and communicates your message well
6. Watch your reporting while your campaign is running and optimise it ongoing

If you follow these steps you will have the start of a social media marketing strategy.  There is a lot of specialist knowledge needed to really hone in on what makes a social media marketing campaign successful and avoid common pitfalls but this will help you get started.

You are reading this on the website of a Marketing Agency who offer Social Media Marketing Services - so the answer is going to be quite predictable - yes!  Let us legitimately justify it though so you can consider and make your own decision and are not just accepting my clearly biassed viewpoint.

We genuinely believe that it is best to engage with an expert social media marketing agency when you are starting out or looking to extend on your social media marketing strategy and there are a few key reasons why.

1. Experience is very valuable in any type of marketing

We have run hundreds of social media marketing campaigns for all sorts of different businesses, products, services and industries and in every campaign we are learning.  When you start a new campaign on your own there are numerous mistakes that you can make and by engaging an experienced agency you bypass this expensive learning phase.

We have also seen what works and what doesn’t across a wide range of adverts and platforms and can apply that knowledge to refine your targeting, messaging and creative.

There are also plenty of sticky situations where challenges arrive related to advert approvals or advert bans and having someone who knows how to navigate

1. We don’t just have social media experts, we have designers and videographers as well

When you are marketing on social media you need to be able to catch attention quickly while someone is scrolling through their feed.  In order to do this you need well crafted visual content and having access to professional designers and videographers is the key to making this happen.

This content can be challenging to produce without access to the best tools and techniques and our agency team have all of that at our fingertips to ensure the best possible content if created for our clients.

1. We understand the data and can use it to guide ongoing optimisation of the campaigns

Social Media Marketing should never be a ‘set and forget’ channel.  Regular monitoring of your campaign’s performance and ongoing optimisation of content and targeting are critical to success.

Or team work in these platforms every day and are intimately familiar with the reporting metrics that they can utilise to make data driven campaign optimisations.   This knowledge is important to achieve social media success and we bring that to the table for all of our clients.

1. Your success is our success

Remember that when you engage with us - your success is our objective.  Being completely frank - if you don’t have good results or see the difference that we are making to growing your business, you won’t keep working with us - and that means that we lose!

Each of our team members are motivated to drive results for you because we are passionate about growing our customers' businesses and we care about driving great results for you on a personal level. In the end our people work with your people and that is the connection that ends up mattering the most in a good agency relationship.

There are plenty of ‘social media gurus’ that sell courses on how to get the best from certain platforms, often people find it difficult to replicate results. This can partly be down to platforms changing their algorithms (making the training out of date) or platform updates. 

The other common alternative to using an Agency is to hire someone in house to do it instead.  This can be a good option but comes with a number of other drawbacks that don’t exist when working with an Agency.  For example, the staff member will be the only social media person in your business and might have limited experience when compared to a team in an agency.  There is also the risk of that person leaving and you not having a back up for your social media team.   It is also rare (and expensive!) to find someone who has both great social media marketing skills and quality design skills to provide the full package.  In an Agency these risks are mitigated by having access to a broader team, not just one person.

Hiring a social media marketing agency is one of the best investments that you can make in your marketing effectiveness and going it alone will rarely deliver you the same results and business growth.

Step 1 - talk to us!

The best thing you can do is get in touch with us right from the start of your social media marketing journey.  We can then help you all the way through the development and execution of your strategy.