With over 80% of consumers reporting that social media—especially influencer content—significantly impacts buying decisions, marketers across industries are driving the evolution of social media marketing (SMM) from a stand-alone tool to a multipronged source of marketing intelligence on an increasingly important—and growing—audience.
Within 18 years, from 2004 to 2022, the dramatic growth of interactive digital channels took social media to levels that challenge even the reach of television and radio.
By Q1 of 2022, there were 4.6 billion social media users globally—over 58% of the world’s population—an increase of over 10% in one year alone.
As the use of social media trends upward, marketers are perfecting strategies to capture the significant competitive advantage that engagement with this key audience can deliver even more rapidly and effectively than traditional marketing.
What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing (SMM) (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, social media marketing (SMM) has purpose-built data analytics that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.
Why Is Social Media Marketing So Powerful?
The power of social media marketing (SMM) is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
Connection: Not only does social media enable businesses to connect with customers in ways that were previously impossible, but there is also an extraordinary range of avenues to connect with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social sites (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).
Interaction: The dynamic nature of the interaction on social media—whether direct communication or passive “liking”—enables businesses to leverage free advertising opportunities from eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) recommendations between existing and potential customers. Not only is the positive contagion effect from eWOM a valuable driver of consumer decisions, but the fact that these interactions happen on the social network makes them measurable. For example, businesses can measure their “social equity”—a term for the return on investment (ROI) from their social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.
Customer Data: A well-designed social media marketing (SMM) plan delivers another invaluable resource to boost marketing outcomes: customer data. Rather than being overwhelmed by the 3Vs of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools have the capacity not only to extract customer data but also to turn this gold into actionable market analysis—or even to use the data to crowdsource new strategies.
How Social Media Marketing Works
As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off, social media transformed not only the way we connect with one another but also the way businesses are able to influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.
SMM Action Plan: The more targeted your social media marketing (SMM) strategy is, the more effective it will be. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign that has an execution framework as well as 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
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing has several distinct advantages, including the fact that SMM has two kinds of interaction that enables targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. In other words, while traditional marketing tracks customer value primarily by capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value both directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).
Shareable Content: Businesses can also convert the amplified interconnectedness of SMM into the creation of “sticky” content, the marketing term for attractive content that engages customers at first glance, gets them to purchase products, and then makes them want to share the content. This kind of word-of-mouth advertising not only reaches an otherwise inaccessible audience but also carries the implicit endorsement of someone the recipient knows and trusts—which makes the creation of shareable content one of the most important ways that social media marketing drives growth.
Earned Media: Social media marketing (SMM) is also the most efficient way for a business to reap the benefits of another kind of earned media (a term for brand exposure from any method other than paid advertising): customer-created product reviews and recommendations.
Viral Marketing: Another SMM strategy that relies on the audience to generate the message is viral marketing, a sales technique that attempts to trigger the rapid spread of word-of-mouth product information. Once a marketing message is shared with the general public far beyond the original target audience, it is considered viral—a very simple and inexpensive way to promote sales.
Customer Segmentation: Because customer segmentation is much more refined on social media marketing (SMM) than on traditional marketing channels, companies can ensure they focus their marketing resources on their exact target audiences.
Tracking Metrics
According to Sprout Social, the most important social media marketing (SMM) metrics to track are focused on the customer: engagement (likes, comments, shares, clicks); impressions (how many times a post shows up); reach/virality (how many unique views an SMM post has); share of voice (how far a brand reaches in the online sphere); referrals (how a user lands on a site); and conversions (when a user makes a purchase on a site). However, another very important metric is focused on the business: response rate/time (how often and how fast the business responds to customer messages).
When a business is trying to determine which metrics to track in the sea of data that social media generates, the rule is always to align each business goal to a relevant metric. If your business goal is to grow conversions from an SMM campaign by 15% within three months, then use a social media analytics tool that measures the effectiveness of your campaign against that specific target.
How to Create A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
Showcase your authority.
With all the misleading information one can find on the internet, people are craving genuine expertise. A strong viral marketing campaign should educate users and make clear why you are the authority on this subject. If your content contains accurate, thought-provoking information, it’s more likely social media users will want to share it.
Appeal to emotional intelligence.
Think about the videos, memes, and photos you see on social media. The ones that receive the most likes and reposts typically are the ones that evoke an emotion. Whether the content makes people laugh, cry or pause to think, your marketing campaign needs to appeal to their emotional intelligence. Businesses that can connect emotionally with customers are more likely to establish long-lasting relationships.
Keep in mind the emotion you’re sparking and why — it’s OK to provoke anger as long as the anger isn’t your business. Your marketing campaign should emphasize how you can help solve the situation that is making the user upset.
Embrace current trends.
Tracking social media trends can help you understand the ever-changing online climate and the type of content and topics users are most interested in consuming. Do research not only on specific trends in your company’s niche but also on the pop culture events making headlines. Is there an authentic way to tie these together? Discern which trends are relevant for your industry, mission, and target audience. Not all of them will be appropriate for your business. Keep in mind the risks of hopping on a social media bandwagon that doesn’t fit your brand.
Include strong CTAs.
It may seem obvious but remember to ask people to share your content or take some other action, such as heading to your website for a 50 percent discount on an order. Your campaign posts should include a clear call to action (CTA) that encourages the user to do something and tells them how. If your content is worth taking an action on, keep people from scratching their heads on how to do so.
How To Avoid Going Viral For The Wrong Reasons
Be proactive.
When your goal is to go viral, your marketing campaign may involve content that’s provocative — so much so that it crosses a line. Before you launch, consider all possible reactions, good and bad. You can even gather employees to view the campaign and get their thoughts before you move forward. Having a cross-cultural team and soliciting their input can reduce the odds of making a marketing mistake that offends a particular group. In case the public interprets your campaign differently than intended, have a damage-control response ready to go.
Understand your target audience.
It’s easy to get caught up in the hope of reaching millions of people with a viral marketing campaign. But does it matter how many people see your campaign if they’ll never interact with your brand again? Your marketing efforts still need to be geared toward your ideal customer, the consumers you expect to convert. If you stray too far from your target audience’s wants and needs, your attempts at appealing to the masses could alienate the customers that matter most and cause them to turn on you.
Don’t focus only on views.
Going viral doesn’t necessarily mean your marketing campaign was successful. It can be very exciting to see your view count increase, but that metric can be just as much an indicator of your efforts being received negatively as positively. Plenty of videos have racked up millions of views on social media but were watched for bad reasons instead of good ones.
Furthermore, views don’t indicate the campaign’s impact on your bottom line. The real question is, how much revenue — or new customers or whatever your goal is — did you gain after your few days of social media fame? A viral marketing campaign is only successful if the audience completes your CTA and achieves its objective.
Understand the customer is always right.
It pays to be transparent in business and that includes when owning up to mistakes — even if you don’t think it was a mistake at all. As well-intentioned as your marketing campaign may be, the public may disagree and call it out. Respect and acknowledge their opinions. If you’re getting negative attention because your campaign isn’t going over well, doubling down and defending it will only bring more bad publicity. If your business goes viral for the wrong reasons, try to mitigate the damage. Admit that your company made an error in judgment, explain what you’re doing to correct the situation, and outline how you will do better in the future.
Beef up your servers.
If you’re expecting your marketing campaign to bring an influx of traffic to your organization’s website, you must ensure your server technology can handle the wave of traffic. Consider the nightmare situation Ticketmaster found itself in 2022: The company first went viral for promoting a new way of obtaining tickets for Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated concert tour, but when the organization’s website couldn’t handle the crush of users attempting to make purchases, Ticketmaster went viral again for letting people down and not fulfilling its promised services. Consider what technology needs to be upgraded in advance of your campaign to ensure the attention that going viral brings doesn’t become your undoing.
Limit access to your social media accounts.
Entrust your company’s social media administration to a small number of employees or a reputable third-party company that can run your marketing campaigns. While the genesis of a viral marketing campaign may be a large group effort, limiting who has access to your social media accounts can decrease the chances of getting hacked — or of a disgruntled employee toying with your campaign or social media profiles in an act of revenge. Numerous companies have found their perfectly curated feeds disrupted by a rogue worker posting inappropriate messages, as was infamously the case at the New York Post in 2022.
Hit the right note.
Some cringey brand fails on social media are the result of posts coming across as tone-deaf and out of touch. In addition to having staffers review your marketing campaign before publishing it, take some extra time to consider what else is occurring on your planned launch day. Did a natural disaster or some other significant tragedy take place recently? You may be better off postponing your campaign than posting something that goes viral not because it’s so great but because you’ve inadvertently come off as heartless due to your timing, prompting the masses to pummel your brand on social media. When it is appropriate to publish, you may need to change the language of your campaign to take into account recent events.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
Tailored social media marketing (SMM) campaigns that instantly reach a range of target audiences are clearly advantageous to any business.
But—like any social media content—SMM campaigns can leave a company open to attack. For example, a viral video claiming that a product causes illness or injury must be addressed immediately—whether the claim is true or false. Even if a company can set the record straight, false viral content can make consumers less likely to purchase in the future.
