Why should you spend time creating social media accounts for your business? And how do you build a social media marketing strategy that’ll work for your specific type of business?
In this guide, we’ll cover the answers to all of these questions — but first, let’s define social media marketing.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the act 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.
It’s all about reaching your target audience and clients where they are and how they communicate with each other and your company on social media.
If social media marketing as a whole is extremely helpful to your business’s development (as you’ll see in the next section), your approach can vary depending on which social networks your target audience uses.
Let’s break the approach by the platform before diving further into social media marketing.
- Users: 1.80 billion daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Generation X and millennials
- Industry impact: B2C
- Best for: Brand awareness; advertising
- Users: 190 million daily active users worldwide
- Audience: Primarily millennials
- Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- Best for: Public relations; customer service
- Users: 680 million monthly active users worldwide
- Audience: Baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials
- Industry impact: B2B
- Best for: B2B relationships, business
development, and employment marketing
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.
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.
Here are some examples of ways you can use social media to generate more leads.
- Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
- Create contests for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
- Sell your products through your social profiles. For example, you can enable Facebook’s Shop Section on 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.
- 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.
Increase Brand Awareness
In 2020, there were over 5.2 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.
By the interaction, social media has been shown to increase brand visibility. Posts, likes, shares, and re-posts are examples of social engagement. By generating sales directly to your website, social media will also help you raise brand awareness. Include clear links to your website in your profile, bio, and blogs to do this.
Learn From Competitors
Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s about their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.
Social media encourages you to see what is and isn’t going with your competitors, allowing you to determine what can and shouldn’t be changed in your company’s strategy. Finally, looking at your opponents’ social media pages will help you ensure that your content sticks out and is exclusive to your company.
Start Marketing on Social Media
With the billions of individuals who use social media nowadays, it’s understandable that so many companies and advertisers use it to advertise their brands and engage with consumers.
Although determining your company’s social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding social media marketing trends and using some of the many resources available about the topic. So, start working on your business’s social media marketing strategy today to increase your number of followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions.
