SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

But why is social media marketing so important? Why should you spend time creating social media accounts for your business? ?

In this guide, we’ll cover the answers to all of these questions — but first, let’s define social media marketing.

1. What Is Social Media Marketing?

2. Benefits of Social Media Marketing

3. Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

4. Social Media Marketing Resources

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the action of creating content to promote your business and products on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Your unique content should be tailored to the specific platform it’s being shared on to help you boost conversions and increase brand awareness.

Social media marketing is all about meeting your target audience and customers where they are and as they socially interact with each other and your brand.

While social media marketing as a whole is incredibly valuable and beneficial to your business growth (as you'll see in the following section), your strategy will differ based on which social networks your audience spends their time on.

Facebook

• Users: 1.73 billion daily active users worldwide
• Audience: Generation X and millennials
• Industry impact: B2C
• Best for: Brand awareness; advertising

Twitter

• Users: 126 million daily active users worldwide
• Audience: Primarily millennials
• Industry impact: B2B and B2C
• Best for: Public relations; customer service

Instagram

• Users: 1 billion monthly active users
• Audience: Primarily millennials
• Industry impact: B2C
• Best for: Natural-looking media, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated content; advertising

LinkedIn

• Users: 675 million monthly active users worldwide
• Audience: Baby boomers, Generation X, and millennials
• Industry impact: B2B
• Best for: B2B relationships, business development, and employment marketing

YouTube

• Users: Over 2 billion logged-in monthly users worldwide
• Audience: Millennials, closely followed by Generation Z
• Industry impact: B2C
• Best for: Brand awareness; entertainment, and how-to videos

Snapchat

• Users: 229 million daily active users worldwide
• Audience: Primarily Generation Z
• Industry impact: B2C
• Best for: Brand awareness; advertising

Pinterest

• Users: 367 million monthly active users worldwide
• Audience: Primarily older millennials and younger baby boomers
• Industry impact: B2C
• Best for: Visual advertising; inspiration

Now that we've detailed the fundamentals of each social media network, let's discuss why social media marketing is beneficial for your business.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. We’ve created a list of the four most beneficial reasons to consider.

Let's dive in.

1. Increase Brand Awareness

In 2018, there were over 3.2 billion people on social media globally. Due to the sheer amount of people on social media, you can see why ensuring your business is sharing content related to your products as well as details about your company via a platform or two has the potential to help you improve brand awareness.

In fact, social media has been proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement. Social engagement includes things like comments, likes, shares, and re-posts. Social media also helps you increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including direct links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.

Featured Resource

• How to Build a Brand for Your Company

2. Generate Leads and Boost Conversions

Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.

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• 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 make announcements about 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 can enable Facebook’s Shop Section or Instagram's Shopping feature on your profiles. These features allow your visitors and followers to click on products you’ve shared in posts to view information such as price, material, and size. Then, visitors can easily proceed to checkout through the platform and buy the product directly from you.

3. Foster Relationships With Customers

By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you’ll be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and providing them with any help they may need.

You can also ask your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.

4. Learn From Competitors

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.

Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach. Lastly, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

1. Research your buyer personas and audience
2. Determine which social platforms you’ll market on
3. Create unique and engaging content
4. Organize a schedule for your posts
5. Analyze your impact and results