Andre L. Vaughn 0:00

This is episode five of the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast and we're going to be discussing, this is the final episode on our Focus Four series. And in this episode, we are going to discuss social media marketing.

Intro 0:19

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast where we help creators and entrepreneurs just like you magnify your brand message through digital marketing tips and strategies. And now your host...Andre L. Vaughn.

Andre L. Vaughn 0:35

Give you a recap. In Episode Two, we discuss personal branding, episode three, brand messaging, Episode Four content creation. And today we're going to speak about social media marketing.

Alright, so I'm here on the Google machine again. So I googled what is social media marketing. And I'm just always interested in what these different sites are saying about different subjects or these different you know, websites see what they're saying. So I'm on buffer buffer.com. And their definition of social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It also says this involves publishing great content on your social media platforms listening to and engaging your followers analyzing your results, and running social media advertising.

And they pretty much just told you right there what is social media marketing. So I'm gonna break it down like this, I'm gonna go over a couple of things. Things such as well, I'll just go into a right now. Um, Brand Identity, and I kind of, you know, spoke about this in, in the personal branding episode, and also another brand messaging, Episode, your identity, what is your identity, your brand identity, you know, you want to make sure that you are conscious about brand. And, you know, the little things when it comes to branding, because that's how people are going to view you online.

So you know, when it comes to things, like I said, previously, things such as colors, the colors on your website, the colors on your, you know, the colors on your website should match the colors on your social, you know, your social platforms, if you putting up you know, different banners, such as you know, your YouTube channel, or, you know, things such as that.

Also, what platforms? Are you using? What,what social media platforms? Where,where are the people hanging out? That you're trying to meet? Are they on Pinterest? Are they on Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Facebook, or should we call it Meta now? IG Twitter? Where are they hanging out? You know, you have to, you have to determine that. So you have to, you know, put content out there to see how have discussions with people on narrow. It's, like, share each other's work, you know, go in the comment section, and have discussions with people.

Also, you have to know that these platforms, they're not the same. They're all you know, they're all different. But in a sense, if you look at the core of all of them, they're very similar. A lot of times we get into that habit of just sharing stuff on social platforms, we want to, we want to pretty much ask more than we want to give in other words, not not just going on or you know, asking someone for something on our but asking in terms of, you know, we want people to share our work, you know, we want to go on there and share our work and share and share and sharing and flood, you know, the different feeds with our own stuff.

And that's the same way. It's the same way as asking, you know, you kind of formulate it that way. And I'm just piggybacking off of Gary Vaynerchuk's book, "Jab, Jab, Left Hook," where he's basically just talking about you should give more than you ask. The jab, as you know in boxing equates to Well just read the book, I'm not gonna go too much into that. But I think you all understand what I'm saying. So give more than you ask, basically.

But all the platforms are not the same, all the social media platforms are not the same, and they're there, they're ever changing, as well. So you always have changing algorithms. These companies are a lot of them, you know, now are publicly traded companies. So they have shareholders now. So of course, they're going to change, they're going to change all the time. Keep that in mind.

I believe you should focus on one, no more than two. In other words, wherever you find, I guess the, the, either the bang for your buck, so to speak, or wherever you find your audience, pretty much. You are you ought to create a presence in that particular space. So if it's Facebook, cool if it's Instagrams cool, Pinterest, LinkedIn, why wherever you should focus on one platform, focus on one platform or two. Or if you have a team, hey,do more than that. I should say a team and the resources, do more than just that one.

Cool thing about focusing on one or two of the of the platforms, if you build a presence there, you're not going to have to worry about getting traffic to your site. You're not going to have a whole lot of problems doing that. Organic traffic is much better than paid traffic. Remember that. That's the purpose. And then in return will, you will generate leads and sales to whatever it is you're trying to put out to the world, your products and your services.

Whatever site that you get on make sure that you dive into your analytics, your analytics are going to tell you everything. So whether it's YouTube, make sure you look into the analytics, they're gonna tell you everything about your, the people that's following you, the people, you know, your list, your your listeners, your, your quote, unquote, fans, followers, whatever you want to call them. Look into your analytics, I don't care which which platform you're on. So if they offer you analytics, make sure you dive take a deep dive into them and see what's going on. And you have a better understanding of your audience.

This Pay Per Click ads in the social platforms are great. You have to find what works for you. But what I love more than anything, first of all, look at it this way Facebook, and Instagram, Facebook, and Instagram, they're basically the same companies are owned by the same company. So their platform, their ad platform is on the you know, the Facebook Ad Manager you find you that's where you can go in and you can run Instagram ads also.

The same as with Google Ads, if you're running ads using a Google platform for Google search, same platform as YouTube. YouTube has what's called In Stream Ads, those are the ads that you see when you're when you click on a video and they come on before the video those are In Stream Ads the 15 second and you know, you can run ads longer than that, also, but those four right there and I just name those four right there are great if you know how to use them.

And that's more of an advanced, you know, for you know, advanced if you have an established platform or what have you, if you want to, you know, run ads, or if you maybe know a company that run ads or what not, you know, whatever your budget is, you have to do what's best for you. If you want to burn through a lot of money, trial and error. You can always do that.

But also important part with Pay Per Click ads, make sure you are doing A/B testing whatever you do, do A/B test and that's how you possibly won't blow through a lot of money because you need to test all these different aspects of your ads.

Also to get back into you know places such as Facebook and Instagram there's different aspects or different parts of those platforms to run ads, like you have the Facebook feeds. And now we have the stories. Same as Instagram also, then you have the, I guess the key to that is you have to find out our notice who, you know, where's the inventory and you know, because if you have a lot of inventory, let's say running ads, regular Facebook ads, you're gonna spend a lot more money, and your cost per click is gonna be a lot more. So you have to look at other alternatives like Instagram stories, or you may have a budget to run all of them, you want to see which ones convert.

So that's the, that's the key and doing all this sandwich. ads on those platforms convert the best. But also Facebook, you have a Messenger. So you can run ads through, you know, the the messenger, but I guess they kind of ventured that off as a separate app or what not, the Messenger app, but you know, you can run ads over there also. But there's so much that we can talk about in social media marketing, but also, there's so much we can talk about throughout the Focus Four that we discuss personal branding, brand messaging, content creation, social media marketing.

The reason that we that I wanted to do a series on these four broad topics is because that's these broad topics and what we're going to be primarily discussing on the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast in future episodes. Even though, you know, some of them some of our subjects might be a little broad, but we're gonna go into some some of those sub topics as well, where we might dive into Facebook, you know, we might dive into blogging, we might dive into podcasting, in terms of you know, the content creation before I was talking about social media marketing. But also in brand messaging, you know, we'll talk about different things. And in personal branding, we'll talk about different things as well.

So like I discussed in, I guess in the previous episode, we're going to put out to two to three episodes, up until we get to a certain number. And then we'll probably start putting out one episode per week. But in the meantime, make sure you guys Subscribe, make sure you guys leave a review, leave a rating and review on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you can leave reviews that and when you do that, it helps get the message out to others also, and they help our podcast grow a bit and, you know, we can help do a lot of great things for creators and entrepreneurs all over the world.

As always, to keep the discussion going, we want to invite you guys over to our private Facebook group over at DigitalMarketingCreators.com/group that's DigitalMarketingCreators.com/group. And for our show notes for this episode, you can also go to Digital Marketing Creators hide always say Digital Marketing Creators Podcast but DigitalMarketingCreators.com/episode5 DigitalMarketingCreators.com/episode5. I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna get there, right one day digital marketing creators.com forward slash episode and then the number. In this case, Episode Five.

I told you guys a will. We'll make several mistakes on this podcast and everywhere but we'll try to clean them up. And that's why we want to invite you guys to the Facebook group because you know, maybe you guys want us to you know, want me to talk about a, you know, a certain subject or what not. So that's why we started the Private Facebook group. And you know, maybe you can correct me on some maybe I can learn from you guys. I don't know everything. I don't profess to know everything as well. So that's why I invite you guys to, you know, to have a safe space in our private Facebook group. We welcome everybody.

So thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast our Focus Four series. Thanks so much, and we'll see you guys in future episodes.

Outro 14:47

Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Creators Podcast at www.digitalmarketingcreators.com.