“How Can Social Media Help Promote My Businss?”
Social Media Marketing
Gilbert Social Media Agency Serving Clients Nationwide
Gain Awareness, Leads & Engagement Where Your Customers Are Active:
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is the use of both organic social media optimization and paid social media advertising to promote your business.
Some digital marketing professionals have traditionally used the phrase “marketing” interchangeably with PPC advertising. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. However, that is confusing since the word “marketing” implies the use of both earned and paid media to promote a business, even before the advent of the internet.
Mirex Marketing considers the word “marketing” in it’s more traditional use and similar to how Search Engine Marketing is both Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Advertising (SEM = SEO + SEA), Social Media Marketing is both Social Media Optimization and Social Media Advertising (SMM = SMO + SMA).
Furthermore, the use of the label “pay-per-click” advertising is also becoming outdated, since there are now digital advertising platforms that allow the advertiser to pay for other high-value actions besides clicks. Mirex Marketing will therefore abbreviate digital advertising as PPC+, for “pay-per-click plus”, as in clicks plus other high-value actions.
A “social media” site would technically be any site online that has Web 2.0 features, meaning the user can contribute content to the site or communicate with other users on the site. Web 2.0 or social media features can include becoming friends, following, likes, comments, shares, reviews, messaging, chat, uploading content, etc.
Social media sites are often categorized as blogging, social networking, microblogging, content sharing, project collaboration, forums, social bookmarking, social gaming and possibly other categories. So, based on this definition, the deeper we dive into Social Media Marketing, the harder it becomes to distinguish it from Content Marketing.
The Social Media Marketing services that are available from Mirex Marketing will generally include the more popular social media sites that are commonly used to promote businesses, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (formerlly Twitter), Tiktok, Reddit, Pinterest, Nextdoor and others, especially if the platform is image- or video-based.
If you have another site in mind that might be better for your particular business, then Mirex Marketing is always available on a consulting basis and our creative team can assist you with content regardless of where you are publishing it. We can either provide services on an hourly basis or create a custom package for you.
Why you want Social Media Marketing:
Engage Where Your Customers Are Active To Convert Them To Leads
Social Media offers a unique opportunity for businesses to engage with their customers. If your customers are active on certain platforms online, then it would be beneficial for your business to be active there too. People spend around 2.5 hours a day on social media and the registered users of social media platforms cover all common demographics. They also offer opportunities for very uncommon demographics or unique targets through their features of creating groups and starting a dialog for very specific topics.
Social media training programs often go into detail about which demographics are covered best on each platform. For example a training program might say that Instagram is a great platform for targeting women. Yet that doesn’t mean you cannot use instagram to target men. If a particular platform serves your niche very well, then it can become your primary marketing strategy. But in most other cases it’s not a matter of which singular platform you’d use, but which combination of platforms you’d use. In most cases Facebook would be part of the mix since it is the most popular platform, and it has the most sophisticated features for both organic and paid awareness and leads.
Social Media Marketing is often where startups and smaller businesses want to focus all their marketing because the owners of those businesses think they can do it on their own, and because most of the popular platforms have a free profile. That does not mean that it does not come with a cost. Most business owners who have tried DIY social media marekting will attest to this. One of two things usually happens: either they neglect the marketing altogether because they are overwhelmed and wearing too many hats, or they bust their butt trying to do everything properly and then only get a handful of leads.
This is exacerbated by multiple business organizations who are always attempting to train their members to do everything on their own, instead of teaching them the power of delegation, which is much more sustainable for any business. While DIY is often a startup strategy, the business usually needs to evolve to the point where the social media is managed by someone who is doing it full time. Because of the ways social media is designed, it’s also not practical to expect a marketing agency to do everything remotely. Social media often works best when the business has someone with “boots on the ground” doing high-value social media activies that cannot be done remotely, while the agency is supplementing their efforts with what can be done remotely.
The phrase “search engine marketing” might mean different things to the layperson and to digital marketing professionals. Within the industry “search engine marketing” is often synonymous with “pay-per-click” advertising on search engines, the most dominant being Google. Yet the traditional use of the word “marketing” means much more than just advertising; so the layperson may interpret “search engine marketing” to mean any use of search engines, both paid and organic, to promote their business. Mirex Marketing considers Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to be both Search Engine Advertising (which we would coin as SEA), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). (SEM = SEA + SEO). Further, the use of the label “pay-per-click” advertising is also becoming outadated, since there are now digital advertising platforms that allow the advertiser to pay for other high-value actions besides clicks. Mirex Marketing will therefore often abbreviate digital advertising as PPC+, for “pay-per-click plus”.
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Facebook Marketing (Facebook SMO)
Facebook SMO works towards gaining organic presence, awareness and leads on Facebook. Again, SMO stands for Social Media Optimization, which is distinct from using paid Facebook Ads to generate leads. Over the years Facebook has made it more difficult for businesses to generate organic leads, so businesses will often want to use a combination of SMO and Social Media Advertising (SMA or Facebook PPC+).
Facebook Optimization starts with the creation of a business profile on Facebook which is not the same as having a personal profile. Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta, so they can and should be connected with Meta business tools. Since this is a much more complicated process than most people anticipate, it is a service that businesses may want an agency to do, even if the agency does nothing else for their social media marketing.
Meta Advertising (Instagram & Facebook Ads, SMA or Meta PPC+)
After Google Ads, the Facebook Ads platform (which is actually owned by Meta and also delivers ads on Instagram and other Meta properties), is the most commonly-used advertising platform. It can be great for local businesses (ie businesses with a brick-and-mortar location that customers visit or an onsite service business with a specific geographic location). It can also be great for driving awareness and leads in a social context for other businesses that might have low search volume on search engines, or want to present new ideas and solutions to customers.
Since the ads are delivered within Facebook and Instagram feeds, they incorporate text with images and video, just like you might see on any Facebook or Instagram post. They are labeled as “sponsored” to indicate to the user that they are ads, but they appear natively within the platforms, as well as on sidebars. Since Facebook and Instagram allow video content, advertising on these platforms can also include video ads.
(BeeFriend in the image is a generic social media site that we made up to represent all social media advertising. It demonstrates that Social Media Advertising can have text, display and video ads, and include social media features such as likes, comments, and shares.)
Social Media Advertising On Multiple Other Platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest and others (SMA or Social Media PPC+)
Besides Facebook, there are many other social media sites that have paid advertising, and they often provide opportunities to target niche audiences. If you have a B2B business or a sales team, and you want to target corporate professionals from entry-level employees to executives, then LinkedIn might be the best fit for you. If you want to target the DIY home skills, crafts and decorators audience because you have something unique to offer them, then Pinterest might be the best fit for you. If you want to target parents who are asking other people about parenting tips (or any number of other niche audiences), then Reddit might be a good fit for you. If you have an offering where Facebook Ads policies are too limiting, then another platform might be a better fit for you, and there are many to choose from.
Social Media Posting Service (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X)
Social Media Posting as a service is the hallmark of Social Media Optimization (SMO). For best optimization it can no longer be a an isolated service, but it is a decent start and still a good practice to maintain presense and activity on your business profiles. It’s also one of the services that an agency can provide remotely for your business. You or your social media manager can have this task alleviated from your workload, allowing you to perform the boots-on-the-ground tasks, such as live streaming a ribbon cutting or taking an onsite photo of a completed project and posting it immediately from a mobile device.
Mirex Marketing has worked to provide a better social media posting service where the content is published to all four major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X when appropriate. Other agencies might charge more when posting to more than two platforms.
Unlike other social media agencies, we also understand the importance of search engines and will also include posting to your Google Business Profile.
Where other agencies post content that is overly generic and boring, we work to make sure the content is funny, useful or interesting, and synergistic with your brand.
Shorts, Stories & Reels Production for YouTube, Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram and more (Vertical Video Production)
The popularity of Tiktok has prompted multiple platforms to incorporate an option to publish short-length vertical videos, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others. Each platform may have a different name for these short-length vertical videos, (such as Shorts, Stories or Reels), and they may have different names depending on the purpose it is published (some may disappear after 24 hours while others stay perpetually).
When content is created for one of them, it can be published on all of them which allow vertical videos! This is some of the best content you can publish for your business because it is among the most engaging and it’s what social media platforms “want” you to publish. This means that their algorithms will actually allow it to be seen by both followers and non-followers alike. It’s what simple social posting used to be (ie publishing text and images in your posts feed).
For businesses in the Phoenix area, Mirex Marketing has a vertical video production package where a production team will come to your location to record video content for about 5-10 hours. This in turn gives us enough content to produce about 30 short-length vertical videos. You can choose to do this on any time interval, though monthly is highly suggested for best results. For businesses outside the Phoenix area, we can still assist you with video editing and other creative services.
YouTube Search Engine Optimization (YouTube SEO)
YouTube is the second-most popular search engine, getting more searches per day than all other search engines combined (except Google, and it happens to be owned by Google). It is also the first- or second-most popular social media site (depending on who you ask) with over 2.5 billion users logged in daily.
Quality video content published on YouTube will not only increase your chances of ranking for relevant search queries on YouTube, but the videos can also appear in Google search results. One of the ranking factors for videos is social engagement with the videos (channel follows, video likes, comments, shares, views), so it’s important to include a social call to action within the content and make the content useful and engaging for your intended audience.
As a video platform, a YouTube strategy would include video production, which can have a wide range of budgets from free on your own phone to commercial-grade video production. (It can also include the Shorts, Stories & Reels Video Production service mentioned above).
YouTube Ad Campaign Management (YouTube Ads or YouTube PPC+)
Video and display advertising on YouTube and YouTube TV is part of the Google Ad network, and leverages Google’s sophisticated targeting and bidding capabilities. It also includes conversion tracking when set up properly (which is always the case when Mirex Marketing is your Ad Manager; we always set up conversion tracking when it is available from the ad platform). Video ads can be used for both awareness and leads campaigns. Awareness campaigns are useful (or necessary) for when your product or service does not have a high search volume, and/or for when you want customers to search for your brand by name, and not just perform generic searches for what you and your competitors offer. Most of the time if they have searched for your brand by name, they have already decided to buy from your business.
Influencer Marketing (A hybrid of SMA and SMO)
Influencer Marketing is when a social media influencer is hired to promote your business or products to the influencer’s following on social media. This is a hybrid of social media optimization (SMO) and advertising (SMA) because the influencer is paid, but they promote to their following organically. While using an influencer with a larger following can generally produce higher results, using multiple influencers with smaller followings can also have a similar effect. Influencer Marketing can be especially useful when advertising policies of any particular platform make it difficult to advertise a particular product. An influencer does not have the same limitations and they often promote businesses or products in a more natural way, which feels less “salesy” to the customer.
Mirex Marketing can provide influencer marketing campaigns that are managed the same way as paid advertising. Our state-of-the-art tools will help match your business with influencers that can reach your target market, run the campaign within your budget and monitor similar performance metrics as paid advertising.
Creative Services & Content Marketing
As mentioned above, any site that has “Web 2.0” or social media features is technically a social media site and the deeper we dive into social media marketing, the harder it becomes to distinguish it from Content Marketing. In addition to your own blog (which is social media), there are places online where different types of content can be published for your business, including articles, images, ebooks, presentations, podcasts, videos and more. It’s a modern form of Public Relations which even supplements Search Engine Optimization. If your business needs assistance creating content for Content Marketing, then you’ll need the Creative Services of Mirex Marketing, which are performed by a vetted creative team and lead by a Creative Director.