Social media marketing is now an essential part of the marketing strategy for countless businesses, regardless of their size. With a staggering 4.9 billion individuals using social media platforms globally, it’s crucial to establish a strong online presence to engage with existing and prospective customers. No matter your industry, social media is an effective way to reach your target audience, strengthen your brand, establish a loyal customer base, and increase your revenue.
Marketers aim to boost engagement through social media marketing, but they often struggle with generating captivating content that truly sparks the desired level of engagement. Given the significant role social media plays in the initial stages of customer interaction, it becomes crucial to grasp effective strategies for leveraging the platform to achieve your objectives.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing means using social media platforms like Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Facebook to promote your brand and sell your product or service.
If your company releases a fresh product and you intend to advertise its launch on social media, that’s what we call social media marketing. When you engage with your customers through comments, that also falls under social media marketing. Moreover, if you produce captivating content that highlights your brand’s values and narrative, that’s yet another aspect of social media marketing.
You’ll need to utilize your social media management skills and tools for this type of marketing. Similar to how you plan for other parts of your marketing strategy, it’s important to have a solid plan for your social media marketing.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Let’s dive into the advantages of social media marketing by looking at it from the user’s point of view. Whenever I scroll through my Instagram feed, I always come across fresh posts and stories from XXX Company. I’ve always admired their boots, clothing, and accessories, but I also enjoy the content they share on their Instagram profile. Their photos all have the same filter, giving their profile a professional, artistic, and organized look when visitors, like me, check out their page. XXX’s account also fosters engagement between the company and its followers by encouraging them to use a specific hashtag to get featured on the page when they post photos of their products.
But why is social media marketing so important? And how do you build a social media marketing strategy that’ll work for your business?
There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. We’ve created a list of the most beneficial reasons to consider. Let’s dive in
- Increase your brand awareness
If you’re not on social media, you’re missing out on reaching a massive audience. With so many people using these platforms, you have the potential to connect with thousands, or even millions, of users. Social media is a powerful tool for increasing brand awareness through engagement. When people interact with your content by commenting, liking, sharing, reposting, or saving it, your brand gets a boost. Moreover, social media can drive traffic directly to your website, helping you expand your brand’s reach. By including links to your website and other offers in your profile, bio, and posts, you can make it easier for users to discover and explore what you have to offer.
- Generate leads and boost conversions
Sharing your products on social media is an easy way to enhance lead generation, drive more conversions, and ultimately boost sales. This is because you’re reaching out to individuals who have willingly chosen to connect with you by following your account.
Here are some examples of ways to use social media to generate more leads.
Create contests for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
Include links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
Host live videos to announce new products and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company
Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
Sell your products through your social profiles.
For example, You have the option to activate the Shop Section on Facebook or the Shopping feature on Instagram for your profiles. This will let your visitors and followers click on the products you’ve posted to see details like price, material, and size. They can then smoothly go through the checkout process on the platform and purchase the item from you.
- Foster relationships with your customers
Building strong connections with your social media followers is crucial for fostering long-term relationships with your business. One effective way to achieve this is by actively engaging with them through your posts, promptly addressing their queries and comments, and offering assistance whenever required. Additionally, you can seek their opinions on your products and understand their pain points by asking them questions. Another great strategy is to organize giveaways, which not only helps in building trust but also demonstrates your appreciation for their feedback and support.
- Learn from your competitors
Social media provides an excellent opportunity to stay updated on your competitors. You can observe their social media strategies, the products they are promoting, the campaigns they are running, and how they engage with their followers. By analyzing what works and what doesn’t for your competition, you can make informed decisions about what aspects of your company’s approach need to be adjusted. Additionally, examining your competitors’ social media accounts ensures that your marketing efforts are distinctive and stand out in relation to your brand.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Contents
Step 1: Set social media marketing goals that align with business objectives
Step 2: Learn everything you can about your audience
Step 3: Research the competition
Step 4: Conduct a social media audit
Step 5: Set up accounts and improve existing profiles
Step 6: Find inspiration
Step 7: Create a social media content calendar
Step 8: Test, evaluate, and adjust your strategy
Step 1: Set social media marketing goals that align with business objectives
The more detailed your plan is, the better the results will be. Establish SMART objectives and monitor the appropriate indicators to position yourself for achievement.
Set SMART goals
Before diving into social media marketing, make sure to set clear objectives and goals. Without them, it’s hard to track your progress and determine your ROI. Make sure each goal should be.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
An example of a SMART goal for your business might be “Grow our Instagram audience by 50 new followers per week.” With SMART goals, you’ll make sure your goals actually lead to real business results, rather than just lofty ideals.
Track meaningful metrics
Measuring metrics such as retweets and likes may seem enjoyable to showcase and simple to monitor, but their actual value to your business is difficult to demonstrate. It’s better to concentrate on objectives like leads produced, web referrals, and conversion rate. Consider tracking distinct goals for various channels, or even different purposes for each channel.
Step 2: Learn everything you can about your audience
1. If you’re not actively listening on social media, you’re flying blind when it comes to shaping your business strategy. You could be overlooking a goldmine of valuable feedback and insights from real people who are discussing your brand or industry online.
Here’s how to start listening and building your understanding of your audience and their needs.
Create audience personas
Understanding your audience and their preferences on social media is crucial for crafting engaging content that resonates with them. This insight is essential for strategizing how to convert your social media followers into loyal customers for your brand.
Gather real-world data
Avoid jumping to conclusions. Utilizing social media analytics can offer a wealth of useful data regarding your followers’ demographics, location, language preferences, and engagement with your brand online. These details help you enhance your approach and tailor your social media advertisements more effectively.
Step 3: Research the competition
Odds are, your competitors are already using social media—and that means you can learn from what they’re already doing.
Conduct a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis gives you insights into your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. It helps you understand the standards in your industry, enabling you to set social media goals for yourself. Additionally, this analysis helps you identify potential opportunities.
For example, maybe one of your competitors dominates on Facebook, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.
Engaged in social listening
Monitoring your competitors through social listening can help you stay updated on their strategies and any changes they make on their social media accounts. By paying attention to their posts and campaigns, you can learn from their successes and failures to improve your own goals and plans.
Step 4: Conduct a social media audit
Conducting a social media audit helps you assess how well your current social media use works for you.
Evaluate your current efforts
If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already accomplished. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s working?
- What’s not working?
- Who’s connecting with you on social?
- Which social media sites does your target market use?
- How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
After consolidating all this information in a single location, you’ll have a solid foundation to begin strategizing on how to enhance your outcomes. Your audit should provide you with a clear understanding of the purpose behind each of your social accounts. If the purpose of an account is unclear, take a moment to consider if it’s worth maintaining. It could be a valuable account that simply requires a strategic shift, or it might be an outdated account that no longer serves your interests.
To help you decide, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my audience here?
- If so, how are they using this platform?
- Can I use this account to help achieve meaningful business goals?
Asking these tough questions now will help keep your social media strategy on track as you grow your social presence.
Step 5: Set up accounts and improve existing profiles
Decide which networks you’ll focus on, and then set up and optimize your accounts.
Determine which networks to use (and how to use them)
As you decide which social channels to use, you’ll also need to define your strategy for each network. For example, you might decide to use Twitter for customer service, Facebook for customer acquisition, and Instagram for engaging existing customers.
It’s a good exercise to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for each account on each social network.
For example, you could decide that:
- Facebook is best for acquiring new customers via paid advertising.
- Instagram is where you build brand affinity with existing customers.
- Twitter is where you engage press and industry influencers.
- LinkedIn is where you engage existing employees and attract new talent.
- YouTube is where you support existing customers with education and video help content.
- Snapchat is where you distribute content to build brand awareness with younger consumers.
If you can’t create a solid mission statement for a particular social network, you may want to reconsider whether that network is worth it.
Set up (and optimize) your accounts
After choosing the networks you want to prioritize, it’s important to set up your profiles or enhance current ones to match your strategic goals. Remember to complete all profile sections, incorporate relevant keywords, and upload properly sized images for each network.
Step 6: Find inspiration
It is crucial for your brand to possess a distinct and unique identity. However, you can still find inspiration from other successful businesses that excel in the realm of social media.
Social network success stories
All of the social networks feature success stories that highlight how brands are using their tools effectively. You can usually find these on the business section of the social network’s website. These case studies offer valuable insights you can apply to your own goals for each social network.
Step 7: Create a social media content calendar
It is crucial to share valuable content, no doubt, but it is equally vital to have a well-defined strategy for maximizing its impact. Additionally, your social media content calendar should consider the time allocated for engaging with your audience.
Create a posting schedule
The social media content calendar serves as a comprehensive guide, outlining the specific dates and timings for publishing various types of content across different channels. It provides an ideal platform to strategize and organize all your social media endeavors, encompassing everything from sharing images and links to posting blog articles and videos.
By incorporating your day-to-day posts as well as content for social media campaigns, the calendar ensures that your posts are well-distributed and published at the most opportune moments.
Plot your content mix
Make sure your calendar aligns with the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, ensuring that every post you make contributes to your business goals.. For example, you might decide that:
- 50 percent of content will drive traffic back to your blog
- 25 percent of content will be curated from other sources
- 20 percent of content will support enterprise goals (selling, lead generation, and so on)
- 5 percent of content will be about your employees and company culture
Placing these different post types in your content calendar will help ensure you maintain the ratio you’ve planned. If you’re starting from scratch and you’re simply not sure what types of content to post, try the 80-20 rule:
- 80 percent of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
- 20 percent can directly promote your brand
After setting up your calendar, make use of scheduling tools or bulk scheduling to get your posts ready in advance instead of constantly updating them throughout the day. This way, you can concentrate on perfecting the language and format of your posts, rather than hastily writing them whenever you find a spare moment.
Step 8: Test, evaluate, and adjust your strategy
Your social media strategy is a crucial document for your business, and it’s unrealistic to expect perfection on the initial attempt.
As you begin to execute your plan and analyze your outcomes, you might discover that certain tactics fall short of expectations, while others exceed them.
Track your data
Besides utilizing the analytics tools provided by each social network, make sure of UTM parameters to monitor visitors’ activity on your website. This way, you’ll be able to pinpoint which social media posts are driving the highest amount of traffic to your site.
Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again
When data starts coming in, use it to reevaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your strategy in real time.
Social media is always evolving. New platforms pop up, and existing ones undergo major changes in their user base. Your business will also experience fluctuations. Therefore, your social media plan should be flexible and updated regularly. Use it as a guide, but feel free to tweak it to align with your current objectives, resources, or strategies.
When you update your social strategy, make sure to let everyone on your social team know, so they can all work together to help your business make the most of your social media accounts.
How often should you post on social media?
As a rule of thumb, you should only post on social media when you have quality content to share (meaning that there’s a reason you’re posting it). This can help you strike the right balance when it comes to posting frequency.
Odds are, every single one of those posts isn’t going to be very valuable to the ideal customer, Instead we recommend downsizing in quantity and upping the quality.”It’s better to post two or three times a week with super valuable content, versus posting seven times a week with only one or two valuable posts.
Look at your analytics to see when you get the most engagement, and create a posting schedule that speaks to those times. Then, you can begin experimenting with more or fewer posts – as well as other factors such as the time of day you’re posting on social – to determine what provides the highest level of engagement.
Social Media Marketing Platforms
Users: 2.8 billion daily active users worldwide
Audience: Cusp of Gen Z and Millennials (most users aged 24-35)
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: Brand awareness, advertising, community building
Facebook is the largest and most established social media platform. Since its launch in 2004, it has become an invaluable tool for B2C businesses, offering advanced advertising tools and organic opportunities.”
Tiktok
Users: 1 billion active monthly global users
Audience: Primarily Gen Z followed by Millennials
Industry impact: B2C, then B2B
Best for: Short-form, creative video content, user-generated content, building brand awareness
When you think of short-form video, you probably think of TikTok. The platform rose in popularity in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s one of the best platforms for community building, with marketers ranking it in third place behind YouTube.
Users: 1 billion monthly active users
Audience: Nearly even distribution of Gen Z and Millennials
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising
Instagram launched 13 years ago and has taken the world by storm. When it comes to sharing visually compelling content, Instagram is where brands go. Another thing that sets the platform apart is its advanced eCommerce tools.
X (formerly Twitter)
Users: 550 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials
Industry impact: B2B and B2C
Best for: Public relations, customer service, community building
While Instagram focuses on visuals, X (formerly Twitter) focuses on words. Since the early days of 140-character Tweets (the limit is now 280), the platform has now expanded to include an audio tool called X Spaces, a community-building tool for creators called Twitter Subscriptions, and Twitter Blue for those interested in an elevated Twitter experience.”
Users: 770 million active users worldwide
Audience: Older Gen Z (24+), Millennials (largest user base), and Gen X
Industry impact: B2B
Best for: B2B relationships, business development, and social selling
LinkedIn is Facebook’s professional cousin. It’s perhaps the only platform where its audience is clearly defined: Working professionals looking to network and seek out new opportunities.That makes it the ideal platform for B2B companies looking to identify key decision-makers and build an industry-specific community.
Youtube
Users: Over 2.4 billion users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
Industry impact: B2C and B2B
Best for: Brand awareness, long-form entertainment, how-to and explainer videos, SEO, advertising
YouTube is the second most visited website in the world. In addition, marketers name it the second-best platform to build community.In addition to being an incredibly popular platform, its users tend to stay longer because it features mostly long-form content – making it an ideal platform to share educational content.”
Snapchat
Users: 406 million daily active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Generation Z
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: Brand awareness, advertising, location-based marketing
When Snapchat came out in 2011, leading the charge in ephemeral content. It introduced content that you could share with your friends and that would expire after 24 hours.Many thought the brand would disappear once Instagram introduced Stories, the same feature with a different name, but it continues to be popular among young adults.
Users: 482 million monthly active users worldwide
Audience: Primarily Millennials with a solid audience in Gen Z
Industry impact: B2C
Best for: Visual advertising; inspiration
Think of Pinterest as a visual storyboard that allows users to get inspiration for everything from fashion to home decor.85% of Pinners say Pinterest is where they go to start a new project. In addition, 80% of weekly Pinners say they’ve discovered a new brand or product on the platform.
How to Analyze Your Social Media Marketing Impact and Results
One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is ensuring your efforts are successful in helping you meet your goals. To determine this, you’ll need to keep track of your posts on every channel. You can do this by reviewing and managing your social media metrics.
Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics are data related to the success of your posts and your impact on your audience and customers on various platforms. These metrics may include data about levels of engagement, likes, follows, shares, and all other interactions on each platform. These are the ten most important metrics I recommend tracking:
Engagement: This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your social media posts. There are also platform-specific types of engagement, such as “Saved” posts on Instagram and “Pinned” posts on Pinterest.
Reach: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
Followers: This is the number of people who have clicked your “Follow” button and regularly see your content in their feeds.
Impressions: This is the number of times a post is seen, regardless of interaction. Impressions usually come from someone scrolling through their feed.
Video views: On Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views each gets.
Profile visits: The number of people who have visited your profile is the number of profile visits.
Mentions and tags: This is when someone mentions your brand, business, or profile in their own post. Someone might add your profile’s hand to a piece of their content with a direct tag, usually using the “@” symbol. For example, “loving these new shoes from @nike.”
Reposts: This is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.
Shares: This is the number of times people have shared content from your profile to their own or with their network.You can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile by using the same tactics you use to generate leads and boost conversions.
Start Marketing on Social Media Considering there are billions of people on social media today, it’s easy to see why so many businesses and marketers use the channel to promote their products and engage with customers. Although determining your company’s social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding how social media marketing works and leveraging the resources available about the topic (like this piece!) Start working on your business’s social media marketing strategy today to increase your followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions.”