What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing (also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company’s brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, SMM has purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.
If your business comes out with a new image and you plan to promote the launch on social media, that’s social media marketing.
If you interact with your customers via comments, that’s social media marketing. And if you create engaging content that showcases your brand’s values and story, that’s social media marketing too.
This form of marketing requires you to use social media management skills and tools. Just as you prepare other aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to have a plan for your social media marketing.
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 user interactions form an approachable persona that your audience can familiarize, 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. Plus, social signals are an indirect SEO factor.
- 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 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.
- benefits of social media marketing
- The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve your marketing goals.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Although social media constantly evolves, most foundational steps to succeed stay the same. Essentially, you’re following the same steps you would take to create a marketing strategy and narrowing it to a specific channel.
Step 1: Set clear goals.
The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is to define your social media goals and ensure that they align with your overall business objectives.
Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve through your social media efforts? Examples could be increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, boosting customer engagement, or improving customer satisfaction.
Once you’ve set your high-level goals, break them down into smaller, actionable steps. This helps you identify the specific actions and strategies needed to achieve your goals.
For example, if my goal is to increase website traffic through social media, helpful, actionable steps could include increasing posting frequency, optimizing content for sharing, or running targeted ad campaigns.
Step 2: Research your buyer personas and audience.
Whatever Thoreau once said about building castles and setting foundations under them is absolutely true.
Okay, yes, he was definitely not talking about social media marketing, but bear with me — you’ve set your goals (built castles), and now you need to define how you’ll meet them (the foundation). Your goals will mean nothing without the foundation that helps you meet them.
That’s why, after establishing your goals, the next step is to outline how you’ll meet them, and one of the best ways to start is to determine who your buyer personas and audience are so you can target their needs and interests appropriately.
Without knowing who they are, you won’t be able to share the content they’re looking for to entice a response from them that helps you meet your goal.
To do this, consider the people you’re trying to reach, why, and how you would classify them as a group. For example, if your company sells trendy leggings and joggers, you might classify your target audience as millennials who like to wear stylish athletic apparel regularly — a style known as athleisure.
By considering your buyer personas and audience, you’ll then be able to determine what content will attract the type of followers and customers you hope to gain. Plus, learn how to create engaging content to keep your followers interested.
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Pro Tip: I recommend gathering feedback from your followers to get insights into their preferences, pain points, and satisfaction levels. This data can help you identify areas for improvement and refine your buyer personas.
Step 3: Determine which social platforms you’ll market on.
As a social media marketer, it’s important to determine which platforms you’ll use.
I can’t give you a yes or no list regarding which social channels your business should use — it’s more about the needs of your target audience, where they spend their time, and the kind of content you want to create.
“It’s important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow,” said Andrew Delaney, former social media marketing manager at HubSpot. “It’s better to be ahead of the curve than behind.”
For example, Gen Z is all about TikTok. If that’s your primary audience, I would consider it a best practice to use that platform and meet them where they already are.
If you’re going for that target audience of athleisure-loving millennials, you may want to focus most of your social media efforts on Instagram — millennials are the largest user base on the platform.
Stephanie Morgan, founder and CEO of Social Lock, a top social media agency, echoes this sentiment.
“Think about their behaviors and where they hang out online. If that’s Pinterest, use that platform for your brand. If that’s TikTok, use that platform for your brand,” Morgan adds. “Don’t waste time on a platform that your ideal client avatar is not very active on.”
When it comes to the content you want to create, consider what each platform specializes in. For example, if you want to share video-forward content, a platform that favors that, like YouTube, is your best bet.
All of this to say, you aren’t restricted to best-fit channels. Having a presence on multiple platforms is important, and I always encourage experimentation on emerging platforms or platforms that don’t entirely align with your social media marketing needs. Not only does it diversify your strategy, but it also helps you interact with the unique audiences and requirements of each platform.
However, I can only recommend this type of experimentation for businesses with established marketing strategies on platforms that work and deliver your desired results. Placing all of your stake in something new if you’re just getting started can do more harm than good.
Step 4: Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.
Your social media strategy should be data-driven, regardless of your goals or industry.
That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, dig into data that aligns directly with your goals.
What metrics am I talking about? Check out the breakdown below:
Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understanding what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This shows how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
Organic and paid likes. Beyond a standard “Like” count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
Sentiment. This measures how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and discover how people talk or feel about your brand.
Step 5: Get to know your competition.
Whether you’re just starting with social media marketing or have years under your belt, it’s always important to understand the current state of your industry, especially when it comes to your competitors.
This is where I call your attention to a trusty competitive analysis: it allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set your own social media targets.
It will also help you spot opportunities. Say, for example, my main competitor is dominant on Facebook but puts little effort into Twitter or Instagram. Rather than solely focusing on winning fans away from a dominant player, I can also look to networks where my audience is underserved. I’m not abandoning Facebook (because I know it works), but I’m diversifying my strategy and building a presence where an untapped audience is ready to hear from me.
Pro Tip: I recommend monitoring your competitors’ customer reviews to gain insights into what their customers like and dislike about them. Pay attention to common complaints or recurring themes to understand their pain points, and aim to solve those pains in your own strategy.
7 Top Social Media Marketing Platforms
There are a number of social media marketing platforms you might want to take advantage of when you develop a social strategy. As you explore your options, you’ll find that some platforms are a better fit for your brand and target audience than others. Here’s a brief overview of several platforms that can help you leverage the power of social media marketing.
TikTok
TikTok is a newer social media platform that revolves around short-form videos. It tends to target younger females so it may make sense if you’re trying to reach that particular demographic. As a business on TikTok, you can use hashtags that relate to your posts, brand and offerings. When users search for these hashtags, they may come across your content.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform, making it a smart choice for almost any business. You can use it to boost brand awareness, gain followers, generate leads and increase sales. It also offers the chance to display highly customizable, targeted ads. Keep in mind that while Facebook is an effective platform for social media marketing, it also comes with a lot of competition.
Instagram began as a basic platform to share images. Over time, it’s evolved into a place where brands can engage their audience with attractive photos and videos. Instagram also offers stories, reels, live streams and shops that can take your marketing efforts to the next level. If your business relies on visuals to sell your products or services, you can’t go wrong with Instagram.
Twitter uses short posts called “tweets” with text, images, animated GIFs, videos and links. You can use Twitter to connect with your audience through short yet valuable messages. Depending on the nature of your business, it may allow you to provide customer service, build brand awareness and look for topics and information related to your industry and target audience. A tweet can usually contain up to 280 characters.
YouTube
YouTube is a streaming social media platform and the second-largest search engine next to Google. If your brand has the desire and ability to produce meaningful video content, YouTube should definitely be on your radar. With YouTube, you can explain complex topics, showcase interesting processes, promote the unique features of your offerings and so much more. It’s a great way to include videos in your marketing strategy.
Pinterest is known as a “visual discovery engine” that inspires users. Users often search the platform for ideas that help them renovate their homes, take dream vacations, plan weddings and fulfill other dreams in their lives. If your brand provides products or services that can allow users to discover their dreams and achieve them, Pinterest is the way to go.
LinkedIn is a business networking platform that’s particularly useful if you’re a B2B business. It’s geared toward professionals and can give you the opportunity to share your industry expertise. You might also use it to promote job openings within your company, connect to your employees and even generate leads through paid ads.
The Bottom Line
Social media marketing (SMM) uses social media platforms to interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. As social media usage grows around the world, both via computer and mobile devices, the ability to drive sales from certain user populations is a growing business rife with competition for views and clicks.
