Social media marketing stands as a potent tool for businesses of every scale to connect with prospects and customers. Through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, people find, explore, follow, and make purchases from various brands. If your business isn't actively present on these platforms, you're overlooking significant opportunities. Employing effective social media marketing can lead to remarkable success, generating loyal brand advocates and driving substantial leads and sales for your enterprise.
- What social media marketing is, with benefits, stats, and tips.
- How to build a social media marketing strategy and a plan to carry it out.
- The two best social media marketing platforms and how to use them
Social media marketing represents a digital marketing approach that harnesses the influence of well-known social media platforms to accomplish your marketing and branding objectives. However, it goes beyond merely setting up business accounts and posting sporadically. Social media marketing demands a dynamic strategy with measurable goals, encompassing:
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.
Given its extensive usage and adaptability, social media has become one of the most potent and cost-effective channels for marketing businesses today. Here are several distinct advantages of social media marketing:
- Humanize your business: Social media provides a platform to transform your business into an engaged participant in your market. Through your profile, posts, and interactions with users, you can create an approachable persona that resonates with your audience, fosters familiarity, and builds trust.
- Drive traffic: With the link in your profile, blog post links in your content, and advertisements, social media stands as a leading channel for boosting traffic to your website, where you can convert visitors into valuable customers. Additionally, social signals indirectly contribute to your SEO efforts.
- Generate leads and customers: Social media platforms offer various features to directly generate leads and conversions. Utilizing options like Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call-to-action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities can lead to valuable customer acquisitions.
- Increase brand awareness: The visual-oriented nature of social media allows you to establish and enhance your visual identity among vast audiences, leading to improved brand awareness. Heightened brand awareness, in turn, positively impacts the outcomes of all your other marketing campaigns.
- Build relationships: Social media opens up both direct and indirect channels of communication with your followers, facilitating networking, gathering feedback, conducting discussions, and establishing direct connections with individuals. This nurturing of relationships can significantly benefit your business in the long run.
The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve your marketing goals.
Want to implement SMM but don't know how to?
Book your meeting today and learn more.Let's back up the mentioned benefits with some compelling social media marketing statistics that demonstrate its power:
- The average US adult dedicates 2.25 hours per day to social media.
- Over 70% of individuals who have a positive experience with a business on social media are likely to recommend it to their networks.
- Facebook users click on an average of 12 Facebook ads each month.
- 81% of people use Instagram as a platform to research products and services.
- Nearly 80% of Twitter users feel more positively about a business when they receive a response to their tweet.
- 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn are influential in driving business decisions.
- 46% of TikTok users engage with the app without any other distractions, indicating high levels of focused attention.
While a successful social media marketing strategy will vary for each business, certain common elements contribute to its effectiveness:
- Audience Understanding: Gaining insight into your audience's social media preferences, usage patterns, content preferences, and interests is vital. Knowing who they follow and why helps tailor your approach.
- Brand Identity: Clearly define the message you wish to convey through your social media presence. Consider how you want your audience to feel when engaging with your content.
- Content Strategy: Despite some spontaneity, a structured content strategy is essential to maintain a consistent voice and deliver quality content regularly.
- Analytics: Utilize quantifiable insights to inform your strategy. Understand your reach, identify the most engaging content, and determine the optimal posting times.
- Consistent Activity: Social media operates in real-time, demanding regular engagement. Consistency in posting, responding to interactions, keeping up with trends, and maintaining accurate profiles is essential for business growth.
- Inbound Approach: Focus on adding value through useful and engaging content rather than using social media solely for promoting your business. Building relationships and supporting others will organically foster promotion and word-of-mouth referrals.
By incorporating these shared elements, businesses can create a powerful social media marketing strategy tailored to their unique needs, enabling them to connect effectively with their target audience and achieve their objectives.
Want to implement SMM but don't know how to?
Book your meeting today and learn more.Now that you have grasped the essentials of a social media marketing strategy, it's time to put it into action through a well-structured social media marketing plan. This plan will serve as your roadmap, enabling you to measure your success and allocate resources effectively. Here's a step-by-step guide to creating your social media marketing plan:
- Choose Your Platforms: Select social media platforms based on your target audience, industry trends, and your available resources. Start with a manageable number of platforms you can actively maintain, and gradually expand as you become more proficient.
- Set Goals and Objectives: Begin with simple and task-oriented goals, such as posting once a day for a month, setting up your profiles, or conducting a competitive analysis. As you gain insights and momentum, you can establish more specific and strategic objectives, like increasing your following by a certain percentage or publishing a specified number of content types that resonate with your audience each month.
- Monitor and Adjust Regularly: Leverage the analytics provided by each platform to identify which posts generate the most engagement and how your audience demographics evolve. Use this data to refine your approach, scaling up what works and eliminating what doesn't yield desired results.
Excited to embark on your social media marketing journey? Let's kick off your campaigns with these essential tips:
Create Diverse Content: Just like in other realms of online marketing, content is crucial in social media. Ensure you post consistently and provide genuinely valuable information that resonates with your target audience. Consider sharing:
- How-tos and quick tips
- Local and industry news
- Data-driven insights
- Engaging polls, questions, and contests
- Updates and announcements
Make the most of social media's various formats, such as images, videos, stories, live streams, online stores, and more, to keep your content fresh and engaging.
Leveraging social media for marketing allows your business to extend its brand image across diverse platforms. While each platform possesses a distinct environment and voice, maintaining the consistent core identity of your business—whether it's friendly, fun, or trustworthy—is essential. This coherence ensures that your brand remains recognisable and resonates with your audience, irrespective of the social media channel they encounter.
To put it differently, don't treat social media as a mere scheduling tool where you log in once a month to automate posts. Instead, view social media channels as vibrant communities that require active engagement. It's crucial to pay attention to those interacting with your content and respond in kind. Engage back by acknowledging comments, liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts. Utilize live streams, polls, and real-time questions to ignite discussions. Additionally, reposting others' content fosters a sense of camaraderie and strengthens your presence within the community. Remember, active participation and genuine interactions are the keys to building a thriving social media presence.
Ignore anyone who claims that Instagram is the only visual platform because, in reality, all social media platforms thrive on captivating visuals. To stand out in a user's feed, it's imperative to pair your posts with appealing visuals—whether it's striking photographs, beautiful illustrations, or artistic text designs. Leveraging content creation tools like Canva can be incredibly advantageous. These platforms offer templates and features that enable you to swiftly craft professional-looking visuals. You can effortlessly incorporate your logo and maintain consistency with your brand identity, ensuring your content remains eye-catching and aligned with your overall branding strategy.
In the crowded realm of social media, gaining traction with your audience requires consistently posting exceptional content. The key to achieving this lies in the three Rs:
- Repurpose: Unleash the potential of your content by repurposing it across different platforms. Transform a customer review into a captivating Facebook post, slice up a blog post into a series of engaging Tweets, condense a case study into a customer spotlight on Instagram, or convert a webinar deck into an appealing carousel post on LinkedIn. The possibilities for creative repurposing are boundless.
- Repost: Exercise moderation, but don't overlook the power of reposting to fill gaps in your content calendar. Share user-generated content and influencer posts on Instagram and retweet them on Twitter. Additionally, curate valuable content from authoritative sources and include these links in your posts to enrich your audience's experience.
- Recycle: Give your content extended life by recycling it on different platforms. Share your TikTok videos and Instagram Reels on YouTube, reaching a broader audience. Re-share your most successful blog posts each month to capture the attention of new followers. Moreover, add your Facebook Live recordings to your YouTube channel for increased visibility.
While our focus often revolves around appearing in others' feeds, we mustn't overlook the significant value derived from our own. Here are three types of accounts worth following:
- Competitors: Keeping tabs on your competitors can offer valuable insights. Observe their strategies, get ideas that align with your own approach, and identify areas where you can outshine them.
- Influencers: Following influencers allows you to stay informed about the latest trends and updates in your industry. Educate yourself through their expertise and discover new perspectives.
- Inspirational Brands: Follow brands that share your values or possess exceptional content strategies. Draw inspiration from their innovative ideas and outside-the-box thinking, which can spark creativity in your own marketing endeavors.
Assessing the success of your social media marketing strategies requires data tracking. Google Analytics serves as an excellent tool to measure the effectiveness of your techniques, identifying triumphs and highlighting strategies that may need to be abandoned. By attaching tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns, you can monitor them effectively. Additionally, make sure to utilize the analytics features within each social platform for more comprehensive insights into the performance of your social content with your audience. With proper data tracking and analysis, you can refine your social media marketing approach and optimize your efforts for the best results.
Advertising on social media offers numerous advantages, and one of the most compelling reasons is its cost-effectiveness in expanding your reach. When executed strategically, you can present your content and offers to a vast audience at a remarkably low cost. Social media platforms provide highly precise targeting capabilities, enabling you to allocate your budget to reach individuals who are most inclined to be interested in your business. Here are some valuable tips and resources to begin your journey with paid social media marketing:
The best social media marketing platforms for business include Facebook, and Instagram from our experience. Different social media marketing sites require different approaches, so here’s a brief overview on the two—its user base, main vibes, pros, cons, and content types.
Being the largest global social media platform and a significant local business directory, Facebook attracts users of various age groups who utilize it to connect with friends and family, engage in groups and forums, discover local businesses, and follow brands. Leveraging Facebook as a social media marketing platform provides several valuable opportunities, including:
- Building Relationships with Current Customers: Interact and engage with your existing customers, fostering a sense of community and loyalty through regular communication.
- Announcing Hours Changes, Events, and Milestones: Effectively communicate important updates and milestones related to your business, such as changes in operating hours or upcoming events, reaching a broader audience.
- Holding Discussions and Live Streams: Utilize Facebook's interactive features to host meaningful discussions and live streams, encouraging real-time engagement with your audience.
- Targeting Baby Boomers: With a diverse user base, Facebook is an excellent platform to target and market to the older demographic, including baby boomers, who are active users.
Organic reach on Facebook is limited, so if you’re looking to generate leads or find new audiences, Facebook advertising is highly recommended.
Want to leverage the power of facebook ads for your business?
Book your meeting today and learn more.Despite arriving later than LinkedIn and Twitter, Instagram swiftly outpaced both platforms, achieving one billion monthly active users in 2018. Renowned for its diverse content formats, including Feed posts, Stories, Lives, Reels, and IGTV, Instagram captivates users who follow influencers and brands that resonate with their values and purchasing preferences. Your Instagram bio can serve as a powerful tool for:
- Social Shopping: Utilize Instagram's features to drive social shopping, showcasing products and services to encourage seamless purchases.
- Influencer Marketing: Collaborate with influencers to expand your brand's reach and appeal to their engaged audiences.
- User-Generated Content: Leverage user-generated content to boost authenticity and strengthen connections with your audience.
- Company Culture: Offer a glimpse into your company culture, fostering a sense of authenticity and trust.
While Instagram ad costs may be higher compared to Facebook, the platform's organic reach is notably higher, presenting ample opportunities to connect with a broader audience organically.
Even though each social media platform is accessible and free to use, a successful social media marketing strategy often necessitates employing multiple platforms and a blend of organic and paid methods. However, managing this multifaceted approach can become resource-intensive. As your audience grows through social media efforts, it becomes increasingly challenging to keep up with the demands. To address these challenges, businesses can explore a variety of social media marketing services tailored to their needs. These services come in diverse forms and sizes, offering valuable assistance in maximizing the potential of social media. Some examples include:
- Social Media Management: Professionals such as EXPA Media Marketing can handle content creation, scheduling, and engagement, streamlining your social media efforts.
- Social Media Advertising: Experts can help design and execute targeted ad campaigns, optimizing reach and conversions.
- Influencer Marketing: Partnering with influencers can be facilitated by services that identify relevant influencers and facilitate collaborations.
- Social Media Analytics: Tools that provide in-depth analytics help gauge the effectiveness of strategies and optimize future campaigns.
- Content Creation: Services offering creative content development, such as graphics, videos, and copywriting, can enhance the visual appeal and messaging of your posts.
Using social media in marketing does more than improve site traffic and increase your reach. It turns your business into a personality that your audience can communicate and connect with on a deeper level. Regardless of which platforms you use or how you use them, the most important thing to remember is that social media is not a platform to pitch your business. It’s a community for you to express your personality, demonstrate your values, share useful information, and build up those around you. With people naturally following you and promoting your content, there will be no need for pitching. And with this approach, you’ll achieve not just your business goals but all of the other intangibles that translate to gratification and fulfillment.