Marketers from various industries are expanding the role of social media marketing (SMM) beyond just being a standalone tool to gain insights on a rapidly growing audience, due to the undeniable influence it has on buying decisions, as reported by more than 80% of consumers who deem social media and particularly influencer content pivotal.
From 2004, when MySpace became the first social media platform to reach one million users, until 2022, interactive digital channels have experienced such explosive growth that social media now rivals the reach of television and radio.
As of the first quarter of 2022, the number of social media users worldwide reached 4.6 billion, which is more than 58% of the global population, indicating a growth of more than 10% within a year.
As social media usage continues to increase, marketers are refining their methods to capitalize on the notable competitive edge that engaging with this primary audience can provide, outstripping traditional marketing approaches in terms of speed and efficiency.
What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing (SMM), also referred to as digital marketing and e-marketing, employs social media platforms where individuals establish social networks and exchange information to create a brand for a company, boost sales, and generate website traffic. Apart from equipping companies with an opportunity to interact with its current customer base and expand it, SMM includes specialized data analytics tools that aid marketers in monitoring the effectiveness of their campaigns and discovering more techniques to engage with their audience.
Why Is Social Media Marketing So Powerful?
The unmatched ability of social media to facilitate connection, interaction, and collection of customer data is what fuels the effectiveness of social media marketing (SMM).
Social media provides businesses with an opportunity to establish connections with customers through a diverse range of channels, including social networking sites such as Facebook, content platforms like YouTube, and microblogging platforms such as Twitter, which was once impossible.
The way people engage with each other on social media creates an opportunity for businesses to benefit from free advertising through electronic word-of-mouth recommendations. This dynamic interaction can be either direct communication or passive actions such as liking posts. Electronic word-of-mouth has a positive contagion effect that influences consumer decisions. Additionally, interactions on social media are measurable, allowing businesses to determine the ROI from their social media marketing campaigns. Social equity is a term used to describe this concept.
Customer data is a valuable asset that can enhance marketing efforts, and a properly constructed social media marketing plan can provide just that. Unlike the daunting complexity of big data’s 3Vs (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools can extract crucial customer data and convert it into useful market analysis, or even employ the data to generate innovative strategies through crowdsourcing techniques.
How Social Media Marketing Works
The rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has led to a transformation in social media. It has not only changed the way we interact with each other but has also given businesses the power to influence consumer behavior by promoting engaging content and using geographical, demographic, and personal information to make their messaging effective.
For an effective social media marketing (SMM) strategy, the key is to make it more targeted. Hootsuite, a top software provider specializing in social media management, suggests the following action plan to create an SMM campaign with an execution framework and performance metrics.
- Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
- Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
- Conduct a competitive analysis of your competition (successes and failures)
- Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
- Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
- Create best-in-class content
- Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed
Social media marketing offers unique benefits over traditional marketing in terms of customer relationship management (CRM). Unlike traditional marketing which primarily relies on capturing purchase activity to track customer value, SMM provides two types of interaction that allow for targeted CRM tools – customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. This means that SMM can track customer value through direct methods like purchases as well as indirect methods such as product referrals.
Businesses can utilize the increased connectivity of social media marketing (SMM) to produce captivating content, known as “sticky” content, that captures customers’ attention, entices them to make purchases, and motivates them to share the content. This form of word-of-mouth marketing enables businesses to reach previously unreachable audiences and leverage the endorsement of trusted acquaintances. Consequently, creating shareable content represents a crucial method for utilizing social media marketing to foster growth.
Social media marketing (SMM) offers businesses the opportunity to benefit from earned media, which refers to brand exposure that is not achieved through paid advertising. This can include customer-generated product reviews and recommendations, which are highly effective in promoting a brand’s reputation.
Viral Marketing is a social media marketing approach that banks on the audience to initiate the message. It is a sales tactic that aims to prompt the fast dissemination of product information through word-of-mouth. When the marketing message reaches a vast audience beyond the original target demographic, it becomes viral. This is an inexpensive and straightforward method of enhancing sales.
Customer segmentation in social media marketing (SMM) allows companies to narrow down their target audience more effectively, enabling them to concentrate their marketing efforts on specific groups. This results in better utilization of marketing resources.
6 Steps to Maximize Your Social Media Presence
To build a strong social media presence that effectively advertises your brand to the right audience and supports business growth, a meticulously planned approach is necessary.
Let’s jump straight in below.
- Work with Micro-influencers
As social beings, we desire to establish connections with individuals that share our interests and lifestyles. To accomplish this for your business, consider seeking micro-influencers on social media platforms. Such influencers can offer a customized approach that many consumers prefer over product endorsements from celebrities or brands.
Nevertheless, modern customers are better educated than in the past, and they have a clear understanding of their preferences and trustworthy sources. Regrettably, endorsements of products by celebrities on social media platforms are being criticized heavily as numerous followers accuse these celebrities of promoting products they do not actually use or brands they lack enthusiasm for.
It is crucial to identify a suitable influencer who can effectively represent your brand.
A majority of individuals, 51%, will stop following a brand that shares content that they do not approve of which can result in major harm to your brand’s reputation. As an alternative to celebrity advertising, contemplate collaborating with micro-influencers.
Collaborating with micro-influencers is becoming more and more fashionable on social media. Apart from being more economical for your budget, they have audiences that are more deeply involved than those of famous influencers. If you aim to create a brand that people can familiarize themselves with and learn to have faith in, teaming up with micro-influencers is essential.
- Offer Social Shopping
Social media is no longer just a source of entertainment as it has evolved into a multifunctional platform. It serves as a comprehensive hub where users can connect with their loved ones, browse and engage with images and videos, and also have the privilege of convenient shopping.
To ensure your social media account meets your audience’s needs now and in the future, including social shopping is a wise choice. This feature enables your audience to make purchases without leaving their social account. With social adverts and ‘buy now’ tags, you can promote your products and direct users to a payment screen upon clicking. With social shopping increasingly prevalent, it is a highly effective strategy for boosting your business on social media.
Social media managers everywhere are thrilled with this news, as it allows for the use of social content to expand the brand’s online presence. This goes beyond simply extending a company’s website or Instagram feed; it now permits links to eCommerce sites, which enables users to make real-time purchases!
To optimize your social media presence in retail, consider implementing these tactics:
- Offer social shopping through your eCommerce strategies even if you offer a service vs a product.
- Promote social video content through your social scheduler as a way to capture the attention of shoppers and encourage them to click on, interact with, and share links that lead back to product pages in an online store.
- Consider implementing chatbots, real human chat support, or other automated customer service tools into social channels so users can grab those impulse buys in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep.
- Create social content that is interactive and gamified to encourage more social engagement.
Utilizing social media is the key to garnering followers and using a company’s online store as an effective means of marketing and generating traffic and sales leads.
- Invest in Tools for Social Media Management
Enhancing your social media presence necessitates more than just regular posts; it also entails posting during the most advantageous times. Unless you have a social media manager solely focused on this task, it’s improbable that you’ll be able to log into your social accounts and publish your latest news throughout the day. Consequently, it’s necessary to invest in social media management tools.
With social media management tools, you can efficiently boost your social media presence without spending excessive amounts of time. These tools enable you to synchronize your accounts, plan posts ahead of time, publish them at optimal times, and assess their effectiveness.
Utilizing a social media management tool enables you to conveniently publish posts on social media platforms and plan them ahead of time. This time-saving technique is essential for entrepreneurs as it frees up extra time to concentrate on other important aspects of the business.
A social media management tool offers more than just assistance to your business’s social media presence. Certain companies provide added benefits such as managing your reputation, curating posts, suggesting content, enabling team collaboration, offering visual calendars for your clients, automating posting, providing customization features, and saving time to increase productivity and maximize opportunities.
In the highly competitive world of social media, businesses are facing greater difficulty in staying relevant without the aid of a social media management tool. By utilizing such a tool, businesses can effectively keep up with the latest trends and deliver an authentic experience to their audience.
You can make your social media strategy intelligent by utilizing a handful of uncomplicated tools.
- social listening to understand what people are talking about in your industry and who is influential on social media. This information will help you identify potential partnerships, opportunities for content creation, etc.
- scheduling posts ahead of time so that you don’t need to work all hours of the night, the weekend, and the holiday.
- social media management with an inbox to help you stay on top of social activity from all channels and respond quickly to reviews, comments, and other types of engagements such as mentions.
- Brands – Broaden the Conversation
Too often, brands talk solely about themselves, their products, their services, their staff, their culture, and on and on. However, customers don’t just want to hear about you. They want to know what you can do for them. This is why it’s essential to broaden the conversation on social media.
Building content pillars is an effective approach to attaining this objective. These pillars embody significant aspects of your brand and enable you to expand into other reliable aspects of your customers’ lives.
Method’s #DirtyLittleSecrets campaign and General Electric’s #6SecondScience campaign are excellent illustrations of this concept. Even though neither of these topics focuses on their main products, they managed to attract audiences’ attention by conveying the brands’ essential principles.
- Create an Editorial Calendar
The key to social media success is keeping to a schedule, which the most accomplished brands achieve through editorial calendars. Considered a requirement and not an add-on, editorial schedules are integral to thriving social strategies.
To ensure consistency in the long run while managing numerous social platforms, it is highly recommended to utilize a pre-planned posting schedule for organized content.
Nothing can be more frustrating than commencing on a good note with fascinating posts and an expanding audience, only to lose inspiration and time after some time. An editorial calendar will keep your social media approach steady.
- Be Human
While this may be our last point, it could be considered the most crucial. Embrace your humanity. Social media blunders can be caused by appearing insincere or lacking personality. Your social media presence should showcase your brand’s values, including its quirks and idiosyncrasies. This is what distinguishes you as a human being.
Establishing trust between brands and customers is now more crucial than ever, which can only be achieved through transparency. Customers crave a more intimate understanding of your enterprise.
It is desired that they gain access to the inner workings and understand what drives your organization. Therefore, do not hesitate to throw in some humor, recount amusing anecdotes, and advertise raw content. Revealing the personable aspect of your business is among the most effective strategies to foster stronger bonds.
The social media profile of your business must showcase all aspects of your brand, including the positive and unconventional elements that demonstrate your human side.
In order to build trust between brands and clients, transparency is crucial. Therefore, don’t hesitate to incorporate humor, entertaining anecdotes, GIFs, and engage with your audience in a fun and appropriate manner.
