Weirdly, if you were to search for “social media marketing” on your favorite search engine, you will likely receive results from the same couple of websites, as well as an assortment of targeted ads. This is a prime example of social media marketing in action. Search ranking, recognition, and branding are essential elements of your future marketing strategy, 

Throughout this course we will be referring to the concept of brand authority; it is an appropriate goal of many businesses, and with it will come sales and engagement. To reach brand authority: you must first have brand awareness and recognition: this is where social media marketing comes in. 

Social media marketing involves consistently using appropriate strategies to engage your audience and raise awareness of your brand. Simply posting is not enough. Your posts need to be relevant and strategic.  

This course will make social media marketing simple. The concept of social media marketing can seem challenging and convoluted. And, with a haphazard attempt towards it, social media marketing can be. You will need to have a clear strategy, that will help you reach your clearly defined goals. When it comes to the results of marketing, ignorance is not bliss. You would never implement a traditional marketing campaign without first clearly planning it and outlining several specific goals; so why would you do it online? One of the biggest mistakes people make in implementing social media marketing is not acknowledging the stark difference between regular marketing and online marketing. Many of the foundational principles are the same, yet new skills and elements exist and will be necessary to comprehend.

Before beginning, it is important to note that this course not directed towards one specific business type, it is for everyone who is using social media to market. The course may include phrases like “your product”, “your service” or “your business.” What is meant, is whatever you have to offer! Use the elements that apply to your business, do not falsify a business to fit with anything other than your goals.

We will begin by discussing what social media marketing is. It is important to have a complete understanding first so that you can do a better job of working through the remainder of the course. It may be prudent to answer all the rhetorical questions posed within the coming pages to truly outline your overall business goals and how you can use social media marketing to achieve them. 

The course will then go on to discussing the key elements of social media marketing; this section will provide you with a list of ideas and questions that you can include in a strategy. It is important to remember that not every part of social media marketing will be relevant to you and your business. You need to find and focus on the elements that are most applicable to you and your goals, while also taking into account your audience and their media usage. We will then go on to discuss how you can implement a media marketing strategy; it will provide you some tips and hints of the top things that you should be considering in creating a strategy and provide you with ideas for some goals that you could set. The course will then discuss branding which is in itself a kind of marketing. Having a brand would be a central aspect of building a loyal audience. 

This course will then run through the importance of analytics. Tracking analytics and data is some of the most essential skills for someone who is trying to run a business online to have. Without them, you will not be able to tell your progress, nor will you know if your marketing is effective. We will discuss how you can use tools to do so as well as simple metrics to track. 

Following this, this course will discuss the benefits of some of the different social media platforms. However, it will not go into detail into which demographics use which platform. It simply will provide an overview of the types of content that will be created on them.   

Throughout all this, however, it is important to remember that each business and each audience is different; for this reason, there is not a one size fits all approach to marketing. Rather than giving you a strategy, this course will give you the tools and understanding that you need in order to produce your own. This will allow you to build a tailored strategy to your goals, skills, and abilities in order to make the most out of your strategy.