In our current digital age, it’s important to stay on top of the newest marketing trends and strategies. For example, a social media marketing (SMM) strategy can greatly improve how consumers perceive your business.
With this, it’s worth considering: have you implemented an SMM strategy recently?
In this article, we’re going to discuss social media marketing: what it is, and how implementing a social media marketing strategy can help grow your business and boost a variety of metrics, from brand visibility and online engagement to lead generation.
Social Media Marketing: What Is It?
Social media marketing (SMM) is defined as the use of social media websites and platforms to promote products and services and connect with audiences. SMM can help in a variety of ways when it comes to building your business’s brand, from driving website traffic to increasing sales and overall brand awareness. For as many social media platforms that exist at our fingertips, such as Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and Pinterest, there are double the number of reasons to implement a comprehensive social media marketing strategy to improve the online performance of your business.
Brand Visibility and Recognition
Did you know that even the largest brands and businesses sometimes struggle to feel seen through traditional marketing techniques? This is where the power of social media marketing begins to resonate with businesses of all shapes and sizes. Social media marketing can help to easily enhance your brand’s visibility and recognition at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.
By advertising your business on social media, you can measure the number of impressions your posts are garnering and the amount of reach your posts have accumulated. As opposed to traditional marketing methods through avenues such as television, radio, and print, you can easily access quantifiable data that is ready to review and analyze at any time. This way, it is much easier to tweak your marketing strategy if need be.
Check out our recent article on the difference between reach and impressions to learn more.
Audience Engagement and Interaction
When it comes to successfully advertising your business on social media, communication between the brand and the consumer must be a two-way street.
For example, if someone comments on an Instagram post of yours saying how much they love your product or service, don’t just let that positive comment fall into the digital abyss. Instead, take the time to like the comment, and respond appropriately. This will show your followers that their comments are not only being seen but are also truly appreciated by the brand itself. These types of interactions create lasting positive sentiments towards your brand and can enhance customer loyalty and retention rates.
Targeted Marketing and Analytics
Say your brand is advertising a very niche new product or service: are you worried you won’t be able to reach the right audience for this unique product offering? No worries! With social media marketing, you can finetune and hone in on your audience to be as specific as desired.
For example, a platform that allows for this type of specific targeting is Meta. Within their Ads Manager, you can easily create custom ad audiences based on several demographics, including age, gender, location, and even targeted interests and behaviors. This way, the only people seeing your ad are those who will be interested in your product offering. This streamlined process has proven to be extremely successful in driving conversions for small and large businesses alike. With this type of ultra-specific targeting, you can also obtain detailed insights into your ads to refine your marketing strategy as needed.
Building Trust and Credibility
It’s no secret that establishing your business as a credible, reliable brand will help to instill a sense of trust within your consumer base. Through a strong social media marketing strategy that includes the use of authentic imagery and informed communication, consumers will see that your company is more than just the product or service it offers, and rather is a fully rationalized, humanized brand that appreciates both its customers and its employees.
For example, a brand that has used the power of social media marketing to humanize its image is the language-learning application Duolingo. Recently, the company’s brand image has become synonymous with the friendly Duolingo owl, who is always interacting with followers, as well as commenting and engaging with other brands’’ posts in an informed, light-hearted manner.
Before this change in strategy, Duolingo was perceived as just another language-learning application, but now has effectively become a part of mainstream digital culture through an effort to humanize and authenticate the brand and the people behind it.
Driving Website Traffic
At this point, you may be saying to yourself, “Okay, social media marketing sounds great and all, but how does it increase traffic to my website? How does it bring in leads and create conversions?”
With the power of a comprehensive social media marketing strategy, you will surely see a boost in website traffic. For example, social media platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin allow you to insert a clickable link right into the caption of a post, making the customer journey from your social media platforms to your website a very quick and easy one.
Once consumers have reached your website via a clickable link, there will be a higher potential for leads and conversions, whether that be through form completions, phone calls, or other methods of communication. In saving the consumer’s time and energy by making your website so easily accessible, they will repay you by allowing themselves to put more energy behind viewing your website, therefore producing a higher potential for a meaningful conversion.
Competitive Edge and Market Insights
In building a comprehensive social media marketing strategy, it is dually important to remember that social media does not exist in a vacuum. In saying this, your SMM strategy must allow for the opportunity to keep one eye and one ear open to monitoring competitors at all times.
With third-party social listening platforms such as Agorapulse and Hootsuite, as well as built-in listening platforms such as the Meta Business Manager, you can gain valuable insights into your content at any time.
In addition to a specifically tailored social media marketing strategy, using any of these social listening tools will give you the edge you need to beat out other competitors. Using these tools will allow you to see who is talking about your brand and what they’re saying about it, so you can then take the proper precautions to either keep up the positive brand sentiment or do away with the negative brand sentiment.
Social Media Marketing: Build a Strategy Today
In the current digital marketing landscape, it is important to stay on top of emerging trends, including those to do with marketing and social media.
As discussed, there are many ways to create a competitive social media marketing strategy, whether that be through social listening, effective communication, the use of authentic imagery, and much, much more.
In creating a comprehensive social media marketing plan, you can stay on top of emerging digital marketing trends and have the potential to greatly boost your company’s lead generation, positive brand sentiment, and conversion rate.
So, what are you waiting for? As a full-service digital marketing agency located in Charlotte, North Carolina, we can help you build a comprehensive social media marketing strategy tailored to your brand’s audiences, image, and product offerings. Get in touch with us now, we’re here to help!