The key to successful social media marketing is to create branded content for a well-defined audience.

1) Establish a unique brand

Few customers clearly defined the brand code before we started working with them. Brand books are the blueprint for development, and employees are its engineers. Clear guidelines are essential to ensure brand consistency. Without text or image guidance, any content creation plan can be confused.What style and tone is used when your company writes articles, brochures, or newsletters?Is your communication goal easy, serious, detailed or fascinating?Are you descriptive, lyrical, or straightforward?Questions like this are important because they define what the public thinks of you.

For the same reason, unique visual brands are important - especially given the growing importance of social media to businesses. The basic starting point here includes a fixed palette, as well as guidelines for image usage, font size, font size, and text location. While it's certainly good to allow your employees to create content in a natural way, the right framework can provide boundaries and enable your company to develop an identifiable, unique, and engaging personality that can survive any change in people.

2) Get to know your audience

Social media represents an extraordinary advance in marketing because it allows companies to effectively target only potential customers based on customizable demographics that provide unparalleled accuracy. But to take advantage of this revolutionary new tool, marketing teams need to know exactly how to identify potential customers based on age, geographic location, preferences, and more.What is your target customer like?Where do they live and work?How old are they?Will they read the Bangkok Post?Metropolis?Dostoevsky?JK Rowling?Do they like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn?

The best way to find out is to conduct some targeted audience research with your customers and create a range of target roles. Next, you must try to figure out what problems these potential customers might have with your company and industry. The results of these queries will form the basis of your content production strategy. In fact, this article is the result of an audience role study. If you're a Bangkok-based business person and clicked on this article, we're doing the right thing.

3) Use thought leadership to build the company's credibility

You are an expert in your chosen field, whether your business is finance, baking or advertising. You have some insights that amateurs don't have. The Internet is a place for people to hear all voices and opinions. Why not start sharing your expertise with others? If people start connecting you with your department's experience and expertise, the next time they need the type of product or service you offer, they'll naturally think of you.

The easiest place to get started is to write a blog for your company's website. The article should be written within the framework of the Brand Code and focus on topics of interest to previously identified target audiences. These topics may include investment ideas for financiers, cake recipes for bakers, and social media posts for digital marketing companies. Always make sure to include call-to-action language at the end of the article to tell the reader what to do next;

One of the added benefits of generating thought leadership content is that Google recognizes your site as an authoritative source of topics for you to write. So even if you help position yourself as an expert in the field, your content makes it easier for people to find you on search engines.

4) Produce attractive visual content

After you create a thought leadership article, consider how you can also visually communicate your message. Interpreter videos, video interviews, quote images and infographics not only bring your blog posts to life, but also give you a variety of ways to tell your story on social media. They also let the reader know that you are serious and committed to your field, because you are clearly not fully committed to plain text, but to real, high-quality content.

We've discussed the importance of consistent branding, but by using a limited range of fonts and colors in visual content, your audience can more easily identify your brand. Consider the uniqueness of the Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Apple and McDonald's logos. None of them are particularly fancy or technically difficult, but their design genius still has a powerful impact.

5) Fill out your social media calendar

Many companies jump into social media without a clear plan or strategy, with the inevitable result that participation is low, coverage is low, and return on investment is poor.Post ads on social media that don't have branded content designed for your target audience, like outThere was no wind in the sea.Over the years, we've seen too many companies start using this fool's approach and need to prevent more people from making the same mistakes, which is why it took us 700 words to come up with the subject of this article.Thank you for your persistence.

Now that you've done your research and created high-quality content, it's time to build a social media calendar. Every social media platform has different expectations and requirements, so I'm focusing on Facebook today, and if done well, Facebook will always provide the best ROI.

At this point, you should have brand thought leadership articles designed to engage your target audience, as well as complementary brand visual materials. If you have enough content, you can post different content every day of the week (Monday: article, Tuesday: infographic, Wednesday: explain video, etc.) and start a whole new topic next week.

Take your audience to your page by providing them with free service and answering questions you think they have. Invite them to read your article and remember to keep your tone consistent, which should at least be more interesting on Facebook than serious.Companies that try to sell aggressively on Facebook tend to have little effect, but are quickly hidden and ignored, but those that focus on long-term brand building and customer engagement tend to thrive.

Facebook punishes low-engagement business pages, so don't post too much content, at least early on. For start-ups, one post a day is enough. And week after week, month after month. This is a marathon, not a sprint.While sharing images and articles from others may help increase your engagement, highlighting external content has no obvious business benefits.It's a good idea to set aside resources to create more of your own original content and post it on Facebook only if you have something to say.

By creating your own profile, you'll be able to circle to engage customers, engage them with content on social media, bring them to your site, impress them with their expertise, and then offer them the opportunity to buy. If you have completed the study (and completed the next section correctly), you are guaranteed to implement this sales channel.

6) Smartly target your social media marketing

Facebook has more than a billion users, and its algorithms are designed to filter out irrelevant content so that people can get really useful news on their feeds. In some ways, this is bad news for businesses because their content is competing with users' close friends and family for relevance and importance. The fact that corporate pages on Facebook naturally attract only 2% of followers suggests that it is difficult to beat family photos and sports updates in the news stream.

I believe Facebook is the biggest gift for marketers ever, but the key is to have a clearly defined target audience. Remember the audience survey we did in Step 2? It's time to make that information available to Facebook's demographic targeting tools. Whether you're a mass-market behemoth or a glikey industry, Facebook lets you segment your audience and create specific content for different groups.

Some segmented audiences tend to read your content, while others tend to get the same information in the form of infographics or explanatory videos. Cow Force O shoots a simple example of if you're marketing a child's cereal or toy, you're going to provide parents with a message for another child. By segmenting your audience, you can ensure maximum value by showing their favorite content to different audience demographics. Keep in mind that every time you post, you have the opportunity to invite people to your site and become more familiar with your brand.

You'll need to pay Facebook to get content from news feeds for your target audience role, but this is a new ad with great potential. The goal here is not to sell hard, but to interact with your audience, engage in the conversations they've already had, and raise the topics you want to address. If done right, you can increase brand awareness and increase the likelihood of sales in your core audience.In addition to Facebook, other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn allow paid audiences to be targeted with varying degrees of accuracy.

7) Develop your social media promotion

If you don't want to pay for ads, social media promotion can be a very effective way to expand your content and reach it. There are key influencers in every industry, and getting one of them to share your content is an important shortcut to brand awareness. They don't want to share your first interaction, but over time, these relationships produce great results.

In real life, building relationships takes time and trust. However, you can consistently produce high-quality content to build credibility among influencers. Get their attention by following their social channels, sharing and commenting on their output. You can then invite them to do the same thing for you.Networking is a credit, and social media is the greatest of all levelers.If your content is good enough, it will eventually win, and getting influential people to defend you is a shortcut to success.

In your audience survey, you should also find out where your audience is hanging out online, either in a business group on LinkedIn or in a specific forum or blog. No matter where they are, they should provide professional insights and invite people to interact with your content.

8) Reuse your data

We've discussed using your thought leadership content as a foundation for supporting visual media, but your content can still go further. Once you get into the habit of producing high-quality content on a regular basis and start connecting with industry influencers on social media, you can start looking for other ways to get the most value out of your content. Obvious ways to do this include rewriting your content to post live posts on LinkedIn blogs or Facebook. Rewriting the language ensures that Google does not punish your site for hosting duplicate content.

You can also try to publish your content in paper magazines and newspapers, as well as rewrite it as a guest post on other companies' blogs. Once you have a few proud articles, you can make them the focus of your monthly news. An e-mail comes in to give your potential customers a chance to read your content while reaching out to those who can't use social media. Another option is to create a subsequent article. If your audience has well accepted part one, why not write part two to part five? You should also consider translating the most popular content into other languages - english-to-Thai translation is the most obvious option in our context.

If your audience is positioned correctly, every comment you receive about articles and posts is a valuable opportunity to do audience research. These comments can provide you with inspiration for more topics and provide feedback on how you should adjust your strategy. Seize these opportunities because social media marketing is an interactive process that allows you to have direct conversations with your customers. It also gives you a level playing field that makes you more targeted, engaging and responsive to stand out from the competition.

9) Measure success and return on investment

There are several indicators of the success of social media advertising campaigns. In the end, they should make money directly or indirectly. First, however, a balance between qualitative and quantitative measures should be found. All useful metrics such as likeable pages, attraction and reach rates can be found on all major social media platforms, but keep in mind that targeting your audience is key. It's easy to target widely (at a fee) and reach your content on social media every day and attract more than a million random people. However, it's a good idea to reach only your target audience.

If you've done your research and are confident that your demographics are correct, you'll know how many people are right for the audience you need. It's probably a million people, and if that's the case, that's great. But even if your target audience is less than 10,000, the key is always to design content based on their needs and interests.

Website traffic is another important measure of your campaign's success, especially when it comes to how long people spend on your page and what actions they take on your site. If your article reads for an average of a few minutes, you can be sure that your content is already showing in front of your target audience. However, if the average visitor stays on your site for only a few seconds, you're likely to target the wrong people.

Put all this data together to measure your growing brand awareness in your audience. Ideally, as your target audience becomes more aware of your presence and starts looking for the latest articles from your company, the number of people reading each of your articles should increase. Regularly evaluating your Google search results will also show your progress on SEO to help you determine which keywords and topics should be included in future articles.

10) Go back to step 3 and start over

The success of social media is an ongoing process that produces results by increasing profits. By regularly creating quality branded content for your target audience, you'll always be at the forefront of their thinking when you make a purchase. Advertising budgets are increasingly shifting to digital marketing, and this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Traditional forms of analog marketing cannot compete with social media data, positioning and responsiveness, nor can they provide brand, search engine, and positioning advantages for live thought leadership activities.

There are many pressing reasons for companies, especially in Thailand, to market social media early. Thai companies have been slow to see the potential for this breakthrough technology, partly because of ignorance and partly because there are not enough skilled workers to know enough about the industry. But Thailand is destined to catch up with the rest of the world soon, so if companies here want a valuable lead over their competitors, it's time to act.