What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the
power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and
branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and
posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving
strategy with measurable goals and includes:
Maintaining and optimizing your profiles.
Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand
and attract a relevant audience.
Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your
reputation.
Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to
build a community around your brand.
Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where
you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of
highly targeted users.
Benefits of social media marketing
With such widespread usage and versatility, social media is one of the
most effective free channels for marketing your business today. Here are
some of the specific benefits of social media marketing:
Humanize your business: Social media enables you to turn your business
into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and
interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience
can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
Drive traffic: Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your
posts, and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to
your website where you can convert visitors into customers.
Generate leads and customers: You can also generate leads and
conversions directly on these platforms, through features like
Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call to action buttons on
profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
Increase brand awareness: The visual nature of social media platforms
allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and and
improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better results
with all your other campaigns.
Build relationships: These platforms open up both direct and indirect
lines of communication with your followers through which you can
network, gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with
individuals.
The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks,
the easier it will be for you to achieve your marketing goals.
Social media marketing statistics
With regard to the benefits above, don’t just take our word for it. Let’s
take a look at some social media marketing statistics that prove its power:
The average US adult spends 2.25 hours on social media every day.
Over 70% of people who have a positive experience with a business on
social media will recommend that business to their networks.
Facebook users click on 12 Facebook ads on average every month.
81% of people use Instagram to research products and services.
Nearly 80% of Twitter users feel more positive about a business when they
get a response to their tweet.
4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn drive business decisions.
46% of TikTok users engage in the app without any other distractions.
The essentials of a successful social media marketing strategy
A successful social media marketing strategy will look different for every
business, but here are the things they will all have in common:
Knowledge of your audience: What platforms they use, when they go on
them and why, what content they like, who else they’re following, and
more.
Brand identity: What is the message you want to convey to your
audience? How do you want them to feel when viewing your content?
Content strategy: While there is a level of spontaneity on social, you’ll
need a structured content strategy to be able to have a consistent voice and
produce quality content regularly.
Analytics: Quantifiable insights will inform your strategy, including who
you’re reaching, the right content to share, the best times to post, and
more.
Regular activity: Social media is a real-time platform. If you want to use
it to grow your business, you need to post regularly, stay on top of
engagements with your business, engage back, keep up with trends, and
maintain accurate profiles.
Inbound approach: Don’t use social media to pitch your business. Focus
on adding value through useful and interesting content and building up
those around you. This, in turn, will organically promote your business
and others will promote it for you.
For more help, head to our Easy Guide to Social Media for Small
Businesses
Creating your social media marketing plan
Now that you know the essentials of a social media marketing strategy, it’s
time to put it into action. Your social media marketing plan is the roadmap
to carrying out your strategy. It puts structure around your efforts so you
can measure your success and make sure you’re spending your resources
wisely. Here’s how to create your social media marketing plan:
1. Choose your platforms: Choose based on your target audience, platforms
popular for your industry, as well as your bandwidth. Only take on the
number of platforms you can actively keep up with. You can always start
with one and then add on more slowly as you get the hang of them.
2. Set goals and objectives: These should be simple and task-like to start,
like post once a day for a month, get your profiles set up, or do
a competitive analysis. Once you get into a rhythm and gather insights,
you’ll be able to set more specific and strategic goals like increase your
following by X% or publish X [content types you’ve found your audience
likes] per month.
3. Report and adjust regularly: Use each platform’s analytics to identify
which posts generate the most engagement, whether you’re getting more
followers, and to see your audience demographics. Harness and scale up
what works and nix what doesn’t.
Social media marketing tips
Ready to get started with marketing on social media? Here are a few social
media marketing tips to kick off your social media campaigns.
Create diverse content
Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns supreme
when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you post regularly
and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find
helpful and interesting. This includes:
How-tos, quick tips
Local and industry news
Data and insights
Polls, questions, contests
Updates and announcements
It also means making use of the variety of formats social media offers,
including images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more.
