What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool. SMM aims at producing and propagating content that the users will share with their social network to help increase a company’s brand exposure and broaden its customer reach.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are the most commonly used websites/apps for SMM in India. Both types of SMM are geared towards increasing the product or service’s reach and visibility to newer audiences.

Types of Social Media Marketing

Organic Marketing:

This includes posting and sharing of product-related flyers/content, which can engage people effectively, and encourage repeated sharing of such posts on social networks, without paying any fee to social networks.

Paid Marketing:

This includes identifying potential customers to your product on your social network, followed by paying the social network to advertise the flyers/content to that target audience.

Organic Marketing & how it’s being approached currently

In my experience, most SMM companies practically fleece gullible startups and companies, and believe that SMM is limited to creating graphic content, posting it on the social media pages/accounts/feed, and expecting it to automatically create consumer engagement. Startups naively believe that employing such SMM companies will ensure that information about their product will reach newer and relevant audiences and increase sales. However, such SMM companies are nothing but glorified graphic designers. This approach would be ineffective unless you are doing a paid marketing campaign, which again is fickle and not necessarily a solution. Creating online content and ensuring its viral presence is difficult and highly dependent on luck. SMM companies alone cannot achieve this. Since no one can explain their brainchild better than the founders, they need to be actively involved with the SMM companies in making such campaigns successful.

How to make the most of Organic Marketing

Since startups always have a budget-constraint, they shouldn’t rely on paid marketing initially since it is very likely to drill a hole in their pockets. In my personal experience, doing it the hard way is the best way to begin with. This exercise teaches you more about the business than you could learn otherwise. You can also quantify the efforts of SMM companies towards your startup’s growth through measurable metrics and patterns.

The best ways to carry out organic SMM effectively would be:

1. Share your idea with at least 50 people before starting out

Pre-launch communication about your product/service with prospective consumers and vendors will give you a first-hand account about their expectations. Don’t be afraid to talk about your idea unless it’s patentable (in which case, you should primarily focus on prototyping and patenting). Case in point: At least 7 search engines were extremely popular even before Google’s launch. Thus, idea is 1%, whereas execution is 99%.

2. Make a minimum viable product (MVP), launch fast & take as much feedback as possible

Again, while starting out, talk about your product/service to maximum number of people, and take constructive feedback from them. This creates initial awareness about your product, along with improving your sales pitch. Also if the people you ‘pitch’ to, find your product/service interesting, they might share its information with others.

3. Post relevant & interesting content about your product on relevant groups

Firstly, you need to search for different groups/tags relevant to your commodity on social media websites. Then, focus on posting interesting and comprehensible content about your product on such groups, which can engage more people. If a group prohibits you from posting content about your commodity, you can share generic content, which is relevant to your product over there. Once you are talking to people in the community one-on-one, you can pitch your product to them and obtain their feedback. If your product is actually good, you might find your most loyal customers and even create evangelists in the process.

Remember not to expect your posts to go viral overnight; it requires continuous posting of engaging content and building a follower-base slowly and steadily.

4. Create your own marketing content

Freelancers/interns can design basic flyers for your commodity if you can’t do it on your own, and post them on the company's social feeds, thus reaching out to your SMM followers.

5. Encourage SMM reviews/testimonials by customers

Encourage your satisfied customers to review your product/service on social media; nothing works better for your product/service and your confidence than positive online recommendations. It's rightly said 'word of mouth' is the best publicity.

6. The delicate balance of customer feedback

Resolve the issues of unhappy consumers promptly as a part of your consumer service. This could possibly turn them into your loyal customers in the future. This also helps in identifying your product/service’s drawbacks, and helps you improve it.

If you keep receiving continuous negative feedback about your product/service (i.e. if it doesn’t add value to the customer or is highly-priced), maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Case in point: before becoming successful, AirBnb took to re-iterating and re-launching their product thrice!

Also remember this while gathering feedback on your product/service: listen to everybody’s suggestions with an open mind, but also filter and apply only those inputs, which work best for your product in your view

7. Perseverance

Keep at it! (Rome wasn’t built in a day) Organic SMM will help you reach your proof-of-concept stage, so that you can keep debugging your product till you achieve a useful product for the consumer, and then plan to scale-up.

How to make the most of paid marketing

An entrepreneur with over a decade of professional experience, my journey as a startup founder started over a year ago through www.tiffinity.com. Organic SMM has helped my startup in reaching around 700 unique customers in less than a year in a part of Ahmedabad, with around positive 100 social media reviews on local food community groups of facebook, zomato and the Tiffinity facebook page. All my learning about SMM is derived from this experience. So certain things mentioned here might differ based on your products & services.

Since we are bootstrapped, we haven’t yet incurred any marketing expenses, and have little or no experience in paid marketing. I would appreciate your suggestions on scaling through paid marketing effectively, what worked for you and what hasn’t, so that we can optimize our expenditure for maximum results.

Special thanks to Ankita Agarwal, for editing this article.