Social Media Marketing
What is SMM (Social Media Marketing)?
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is marketing that targets social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales.
Below you can see the number of monthly users of the most popular social platforms.
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social media marketing |
Social media |
Active users, Monthly |
|
|
2.37 billion |
|
|
Over 1 billion |
|
TikTok |
800 million |
|
|
326 million |
|
|
303 million |
|
|
300 million |
Why is social media marketing important for every business?
SMM is the easiest way to reach a huge audience - half of the world's population, 3.8 billion people, currently use social media. What's more, this number is constantly growing — since 2019, the use of social networks has increased by 9.2%.
Social media is very useful for increasing brand awareness. According to Hootsuite, 52% of online brand discovery happens in public social channels. In other words, most people learn about new brands on social media.
In 2019, people spent an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes each day. And this indicator also increased — the time spent on social networks increased by 1.4%. This makes social media a great way to not only reach your audience, but also communicate with them over the long term.
Social networks are becoming more and more important every year in terms of sales promotion. For example, in 2019, 43% of internet users used social media to research products before making a purchase. Although only 12% of people are ready to click the "buy" button on Facebook or Instagram, social networks are very important in the early stages of the buyer's journey.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing:
In addition to reaching a wide audience and interacting closely with customers, SMM has other benefits. Here are some benefits of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy.
Increase brand awareness
54% of users research products through social networks. So a brand should have high-quality accounts on various social networks to tap into users' interests on social networks. In this case, potential customers can reach the brand on their favorite platform. In addition, excellent service through social media is also key. People expect companies to help them, and if the help was excellent, they're happy to recommend a brand to others — 71% of users will recommend a company if they've had a positive experience with a company on social media.
Increase website traffic
Although many social media platforms allow brands to sell their products without having to visit an external website or landing page, social media is still a great way to drive traffic. For example, 11% of all mobile website traffic comes from social media.
Faster and easier content distribution
If you promote your business through content marketing, you can distribute your content more effectively using SMM. People always share useful, exciting and entertaining information with their friends on social media. It often goes beyond the boundaries of a single network and its members, facilitating the growth of your target audience.
SMM is a great way to inform your customers about special offers. Social networks help deliver information about sales or giveaways quickly and cheaply, although most users prefer to send promotional messages via email. To meet their preferences, try SendPulse and run an email campaign.
Regular interaction with the target audience
Since half of the world's population uses social media for almost three hours every day, SMM is the best way to communicate with your audience. This way, your brand is already in the place where your customers prefer to spend their time, helping you to stay close and be more trustworthy.
In addition, SMM – more than any other marketing channel – helps you get customer feedback. Any way possible — through reviews, likes, comments, etc. If your clients have a bad experience with your product, they'd rather let you know via social media than via email or phone call. It creates an opportunity to respond appropriately and retain that particular client and attract others.
Industry, marketplace and competition statistics
Social media gives you a great opportunity to track not only the satisfaction of your customers, but also the latest trends in the industry and the activities of your competitors. Get more content with the latest industry news - you can use them as topics to discuss with your followers.
Get inspiration from your competitors to improve your product or your approach to SMM – never stop learning from those around you.
Social Media Marketing Goals:
With social media marketing, you can pursue a wide variety of goals – it depends on your overall marketing strategy. Here are some examples of popular goals for SMM:
- increasing community involvement;
- sales and lead generation;
- customer retention;
- website traffic growth;
- audience growth;
- negative feedback processing;
- seeking feedback;
- monitoring competition and trends;
- increasing brand awareness;
- consumer demand survey.
No matter what your goals are, you need to define them precisely - this will help you create your SMM strategy and content.
Social Media Marketing Tools:
Ten years ago, social media was a small field and easy for marketers to manage manually. Today, promoting your brand through social media is a tough job that requires a lot of other tools to make it all work.
Social media marketing tools can be used to:
- mentions monitoring;
- creating and scheduling posts;
- communication between the brand and the user;
- performance analytics.
To find out more about useful SMM tools, their implementation, key features, and pricing, check out our list of the 10+ Best Social Media Marketing Tools for 2020.
Social Media Marketing KPIs:
KPIs, or KPIs, are also essential for marketing, sales, and SMM. These are measurable values that help you understand how successful your marketing is in terms of achieving goals and overall performance.
However, 19% of marketers in 2019 did not know how to measure the effectiveness of their SMM. Measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing goes far beyond counting likes, shares, comments and followers. Today, it's possible to see exactly how your SMM efforts are impacting your business.
To make it easier, let's divide SMM KPIs into several groups according to the specific goals they measure: engagement, reach and conversion.
Engagement metrics:
In addition to the likes, shares and comments statistics available on each social media channel, you can combine them with some more complex metrics to get the full story.
Average Engagement Rate – allows you to track how users interact with your campaigns.
Amplification Rate – shows how your followers are sharing your content with others.
Virality rate – helps you understand which of your content has the potential to go viral.
The table below contains formulas for calculating engagement metrics.
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Matrics |
Formula |
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Average engagement rate |
(Likes+Comments+Shares) / Followers *
100 |
|
Amplification rate |
Shares / Followers * 100 |
|
Vitality rate |
Shares / Impressions * 100 |
Hit metrics
These metrics help you understand how many people outside of your followers can see your content.
Post - Shows how many people have seen your post since it was published.
Audience Growth Rate – Helps track how fast your page is growing in terms of followers.
Social Share of Voice (SSoV) – shows how many times people have mentioned your brand compared to your competitors.
Conversion metrics
Your content may be engaging and shareable, but how does it benefit your business? Conversion metrics can show you that.
Conversion rate – helps you understand how many people converted to customers after your post.
Click-through rate (CTR) – shows how many people responded to your call to action.
Formulas
for conversion metrics are given in the table below.
|
Metrics |
Formula |
|
Conversion rate |
Conversions / Clicks *
100 |
|
Click-through rate
(CTR) |
Clicks/ Impressions*
100 |
How can I create a social media marketing strategy?
It’s impossible to do effective marketing on social networks without a well-produced social media strategy. We’ve already published a precise guide on how to create a content marketing strategy to promote your brand. Here we’ll just sum up the main points:
Determine your goals for social media. Align your SMM goals with the overall goals of your business.
Analyze the target audience of your brand. You have to define your customer persona to reach their hearts. Learn how to work with your target audience on social media.
Choose key social media platforms. Not all of them may suit your business, use platforms that are popular with your target demographic.
Choose your brand’s tone of voice. The way that you interact with customers defines how they perceive your business.
Create an SMM content plan. Include several types of content, namely promotional, entertaining, and informative.
Define KPIs to measure your success. They should strongly correlate with the initial goals of your social media marketing efforts.
How to integrate a chatbot into your social media strategy?
Social media is great for continuous customer interaction. Additionally, at least half of your clients expect your business to be open and ready to help 24/7. The only way to meet this need without using additional budget resources is to integrate chatbots into your social media platforms.
The finance, healthcare, education, travel and real estate sectors benefit the most from the use of chatbots. In fact, their use is beneficial for any business that specializes in customer care rather than sales and requires customer support or other types of advice. Chatbots help businesses save 30% on customer support expenses.
Chatbots are also perfect for small businesses – they help you get started with one of the most modern marketing channels, messenger marketing, and minimize your messaging expenses.
7 Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners:
Ready to start with SMM but still wondering how you can take full advantage of it? We’ve brought you several tips on how to make social media marketing effective.
Create a content plan for each platform
Doing SMM without a content plan is a bad idea – you will quickly get confused and your marketing will be ineffective. Additionally, you should create a different plan for each platform – they can vary based on average posting frequency, topics, post formatting, etc. Your job is to find the optimal options for each platform you use and make sure it works as well as possible.
To manage all this variety, use special services for automatic sending. They will help not only schedule posts, but also track metrics on all your social accounts.
Publish regularly and often
The main rule of thumb for successful social media marketing is to post regularly because your followers will get used to receiving your content on a schedule. They will be upset if you don't deliver it on time. Frequency is also important – brands that publish new content once or twice a day will engage twice as many users as brands that post several times a week.
To keep that high frequency, try using scraps of old content – convert the existing blog posts, landing pages and offers you have on your site into a new format adapted to each platform. For example, you can publish an infographic from your landing page as a self-contained post.
Include hashtags to increase brand awareness
When used correctly, hashtags help your content appear in search engine results, increase awareness of your brand, and create a tight-knit community. Track popular hashtags in your industry and make sure they haven't been used before. Analyze how they work with your audience.
In addition to using existing hashtags, try creating your own branded hashtags like Pringles did. Creating your own hashtags allows you to track what your followers and customers are saying about your media presence and product.
Use visuals to increase engagement
Incorporating visuals into your social media marketing isn't an option, it's a necessity – 80% of marketers are already doing it. And it works – users like this kind of content and are more willing to share it with others. For example, tweets with images or other types of visuals are retweeted 1.5 times more often than posts without them.
One of the most engaging types of visual content is video – 60% of people said they watched videos on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram in the past month. And you can create videos without an enormous budget or a team of professionals. Instead, try creating animated videos with free services, film your workday on a smartphone, or use user-generated content like Lime Crime does.
To get the most out of video marketing, check out our guide to creating and implementing a video marketing strategy in 2020.
Explore different content formats
Each social media platform offers different content formats. For example, you can post long reads, short text posts, standard and 360-degree videos, and stories on Facebook. Instagram allows you to publish stories, photos, short videos and long videos to IGTV.
However, not all of these content formats work well for every business. Stories are considered "somewhat effective" or "very effective" by 57% of marketers. Meanwhile, only 12.2% of brands use IGTV. Try the different features that social networks offer you, track the results and use the ones that work well for your business. For example, National Geographic works with 360 videos and gets a lot of reactions from their followers.
Interact with your audience
Audience interaction is the primary role of SMM. Regularly monitor comments and discussions, always answer your followers' questions, and never delete negative feedback and reviews. If your client is not satisfied — do your best to change the impression and improve their current and future experiences. Your goal is not only apologizing but also helping the customer solve the problem as Domino’s Pizza does on Facebook.
Entertain your subscribers
Finding funny and entertaining content is the main reason that people use social media — for instance, 45% of people aged 16-24 and 33% of 35-44 said that they use socials for entertainment. So, posting jokes on your company’s social media account gives your audience what they want and may increase their engagement. But be careful: jokes should be funny yet polite, industry-related, and dosed accurately.
If you feel awkward posting jokes, try another way to keep them amused with other entertaining content formats such as text games, questions, or challenges. Here is a dose of inspiration from Asos — the company posted a brain teaser and got more than a hundred comments.
Social Media Marketing Examples
Learning from others is always a good idea. Let's look at some examples of good SMM, including a successful campaign, working with user-generated content, and SMM for B2B.
Starbucks
In 2017, Starbucks launched a unicorn frappuccino campaign. The company was promoting its new drink - a gigantic pink iced coffee that looked amazing in Instagram photos. The trick was that the unicorn frappuccino was only available for one week.
Instagram users readily shared their photos with the #unicornfrappuccino hashtag and continue to do so — with nearly 155,000 posts using the hashtag. But most importantly, this week-long campaign helped Starbucks increase global sales by 3% in the second quarter of 2017.
Essie
Nail polish brand Essie is a great example of how to promote your products on social media without launching a new product or collecting data. The company encourages its customers to share their photos using the hashtag #essielove, and gets plenty of user-generated content for free.
Ikea
The US division of a Swedish furniture brand has found a way to increase their sales through Instagram. The company put the phrase "Shop Instagram Pictures" on its site. They also added a link to their landing page that collects Instagram posts and redirects users to the product page on their main website. This allows customers to directly purchase an item they saw on social media.
General Electric
Even complex products can be promoted via social media as General Electric shows. The brand inspires followers with stories and examples of using their products in different industries and everyday life.
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Electric Power |
Slack
The best-known messenger for business communications nailed it with their Facebook account. The company posts product updates, useful articles, and tips, and accompanies it all with vibrant visuals — images, gifs, and videos. The result of these efforts is almost 125 thousand subscribers on Facebook alone.
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7 Disadvantages of Social Media Advertising:
Expensive and time consuming
Social media advertising is a gradual process that requires a lot of consistency to make a company known. In theory, this seems like an easy task. However, social media advertising takes a lot of time and patience from a business owner, especially when it comes to social media management.
Not to mention that you will most likely need a good year for immediate results, so if you want to speed up your ad campaigns, you can increase your social media ads. However, it comes at a hefty price. Advertising on social media is a financial risk that you must be willing to accept.
Negative feedback and business risks
As a commercial social media advertiser, you run risks such as transferring some of the management and reputation of your brand to employees and customers. If any of these groups feel they have been treated unfairly, they can use their social media profiles to publicly complain about your company.
This can discredit your brand. In addition, consumers may leave negative comments on their social media profiles, which can harm your potential customers. However, if you delete comments, users may think you are hiding something.
Low ROI
Another negative aspect of social networking for businesses is the low return on investment. Social media marketing ROI is probably one of the lowest among online marketing strategies. You need to invest time, effort and money to make everything really work. If you are a social media lover, you should know this very well. If you don't post regularly or interact with your fans or people, you will notice that your follower count will start to drop. Only die-hard fans remain on social media.
Also, if your brand or business doesn't know much about a certain group of people or places, no one will actually become your true fan, trust me. So the formation of such an audience is very slow, unless it is very popular. This is why before you start social media marketing, you need to build some reputation and increase awareness of your brand and business. This way you don't have to stalk people or increase your subscribers by stalking and following people in groups.
Risk of security breach
With the growth of technological advancements, the number of hackers and other intruders is constantly increasing. They keep telling us that our social media accounts, apps and websites are safe. However, they remain at risk of potential security breaches from such online hackers.
When these hackers access our social media accounts and channels, they can harm us. They will have the power to destroy our image and reputation. So while this downside is rare, the stakes are even higher for business owners.
Measuring results
Measuring your social media marketing efforts is much harder and more difficult. This is precisely the disadvantage of social media marketing that many business owners will have to face. Whenever you have likes, comments, retweets and followers. On the other hand, you simply cannot determine with certainty whether these aspects are truly important to your efforts. Engagement and interaction are everywhere, and with that, you definitely can't be sure about your brand awareness strategies.
Expert opinion varies depending on the monetary likes on Facebook or Twitter, neither of which provide actual selling tips. It is almost impossible to judge brand success and conversions in terms of referrals. or determine how many contacted consumers have made a purchase or may do so in the future.
Constant user engagement
Since social media content must always be relevant, you can't just post an ad and assume your job is done. You need to constantly update your content and communicate with your audience. If you're not ready to put human resources into your social media ad campaign, your ad will seem boring and represent a company that's out of touch.Keep track of posts and comments, especially negative content can quickly get out of hand.
On the other hand, if you can handle negative comments and complaints, you have a good chance of turning a negative customer experience into a positive one.
Vulnerability to misinformation
It's no secret that social media is full of fake news and content. Let's say you accidentally offended or upset a customer. This client can use the power of social media to spread rumors and accuse you online. Users who do not detect such misinformation may fall victim to this disturbing customer lie.
In the process, social media advertising for customers can cost you potential customers and existing customers. As a result, misinformation can damage your reputation and your business on a massive scale.
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