What Is Social Media Marketing? Complete 2023 Guide for Businesses
Last updated: August 18, 2023
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media networks to promote your brand and products or services to your audience online. It involves creating custom content to share on your page, engaging and communicating with your audience, launching paid advertisements, monitoring engagement metrics, and more.
Using social media for marketing, whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or another platform, is one of the most powerful ways to engage and interact with your audience on multiple levels, building your brand awareness and interest to drive leads and sales.
This guide serves as your partner for learning the definition of social media marketing and getting started with your campaign.
Here’s a quick overview of everything we’ll cover in our guide:
- What is social media marketing?
- Benefits of social media marketing
- How does social media marketing work?
- The best social media marketing platforms
- How to create your social media marketing strategy
- Social media marketing resources
Keep reading to learn more about marketing on social media!
Key takeaways
- Social media marketing is the use of social media networks to promote your brand and products or services to your audience online.
- Key benefits of social media marketing for businesses includes forming long-lasting relationships, driving website traffic, and accessing new marketing data.
- The process of how social media works involves five core pillars: Strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and advertising.
- Some of the best social media marketing platforms for business are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok
- You can create a social media strategy by identifying your target audience and your chosen platforms, setting goals, determining how you want to portray your brand, and identifying the metrics you want to track.
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What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media networks to promote your brand and products or services to your audience online. It involves creating custom content to share on your page, engaging and communicating with your audience, launching paid advertisements, monitoring engagement metrics, and more.
Benefits of social media marketing
Now that you know the social media marketing definition, let’s dive into the pros of using social media for marketing.
The benefits of social media marketing for businesses include:
- Build relationships: With social media marketing, your business can connect with users in real-time via comments and private messages, which are great outlets for building brand awareness, increasing trust, and improving customer loyalty.
- Access new marketing data: Social media networks also provide your business with additional marketing data, which you use to better understand your audience. Review your analytics to determine which topics resonate with users, when to post new content, and more.
- Nurture the buying funnel: Another advantage of social media is it also provides another way for your business to nurture consumers or business buyers. Use posts, comments, ads, and more to move users from being aware of your brand to being ready to buy.
- Drive traffic to your website: Your social media account page, posts, and ads all provide an opportunity to add links to your website, enabling you to get more people to visit your site and browse your products or services.
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How does social media marketing work?
We’ve gone over the social media marketing definition and its benefits, but how does it work exactly?
The best way to explain how social media marketing works is to cover the five core pillars of a campaign, which are:
Let’s explore each one!
1. Strategy
The first step in marketing your brand on social media is to develop your strategy. At this stage, you’ll think about what goals you want to achieve with your campaign, which platforms you’d like to use, and the types of content you want to share.
We’ll explain more about how to create a social media strategy for your business below!
2. Planning and publishing
Planning and publishing content is the key to a successful marketing campaign on social media. And posting at the right time is critical to ensure your content reaches your target audience, which is why you’ll need to plan your posts in advance.
Various social media tools can help you plan and publish content with ease, like Hootsuite or Buffer.
3. Listening and engagement
Social media gives you a unique opportunity to constantly communicate with your audience and build long-lasting relationships that turn into brand loyalty. But you can only do that if you listen to and engage with your audience.
Listening and engagement requires you to track mentions of your brand across social media platforms and reply to those comments to delight and engage your audience.
4. Analytics and reporting
Driving results with your social media campaign requires you to continuously improve your strategies. And to improve, you’ll need to know which content and strategies drive the best results for your company.
That’s where analytics and reporting comes in. Many social media platforms give you access to audience analytics so you can easily see who views your content, along with many more important metrics, like your audience’s most active times on the platform.
With the right reporting strategy, you can gain valuable insights into which tactics and content help your company achieve your goals so you can optimize those strategies accordingly to drive even better results in the future.
Check out our resource about the best social media analytics tools in 2023 that will help you better understand your social media audience and how they interact with your campaigns.
5. Advertising
If you have enough in your marketing budget, you’ll want to look into investing in social media ads. Advertising on social media is a great way to expand your reach and get your products and services in front of your target audience.
Plus, most social media platforms have powerful targeting capabilities that enable you to specify exactly who you want to see your ads so you can ensure your ads reach the people most likely to purchase your products or services.
The best social media marketing platforms for businesses
So, now that you know more about the role of social media in marketing and how it can benefit your company, let’s dive into which networks you can use to promote your brand.
The best social media marketing platforms for businesses include:
Let’s dive into each one in more detail below!
When it comes to marketing on social networks, Facebook is a top choice for many businesses.
With more than 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Facebook is also a great platform if you want to reach baby boomers and millennials, with 87% of millennials and 84% of baby boomers on Facebook.
Many users utilize Facebook to get updates from their favorite brands, making it the perfect platform to announce events, updates to your business hours, or your newest products or services.
Surpassing over one billion active monthly users, Instagram is another popular social media platform for promoting your products or services.
Instagram features a variety of content formats, including Stories, Reels, Lives, Feed posts, and more, making it a great platform for creating different types of engaging content for your audience.
Plus, Instagram is one of the best platforms for influencer marketing since many people flock to the platform to follow their favorite influencers.
People love to use Twitter to get the latest news, follow brands, contact companies for customer support, participate in energized discussions, and more.
Twitter is the perfect platform to allow your audience to contact you for customer support and engage with users in fun discussions.
LinkedIn is a professional network that people use to search for and promote jobs, share industry insights, and learn more about a company’s culture and work environment.
That makes LinkedIn a great platform to:
- Attract new team members
- Network with businesses, partners, and customers
- Share company news and updates
- And more
TikTok
One of the fastest-growing social media sites, TikTok is one platform you won’t want to miss out on. TikTok enables you to post fun, short-form videos that engage and entertain your audience while they learn more about your brand.
Due to its constant video challenges and trends, TikTok is an excellent platform for growing your brand awareness and reaching a younger audience demographic.
How to create a social media marketing strategy
Before you launch your first social post, you must establish a few things to ensure you’re successful with your strategy. Here’s how you can set your social media marketing strategy up for success:
- Identify your target audience
- Identify your platforms
- Set your goals
- Determine how you want to convey your brand
- Identify the metrics you want to track
1. Identify your target audience
When you learn how to do social media marketing, one of the first steps to take is to identify your target audience. You won’t succeed with your strategy if you aren’t targeting the right people, so you must identify who’s most interested in your business.
To determine your target audience, look at the typical customer that frequents your business. Determine information like:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Income
- Hobbies
- Interests
You can use this information to form buyer personas, which help you understand who you’re targeting on social media. When you compile this information, you can determine which social media platforms are best for your business. You can focus on platforms where your target audience is likely to spend their time.
For example, let’s say you’re in the business of workforce management software and most of your clients are manufacturing and mining companies. You can create personas based on their industries, and focus on social media platforms and messages with these prospects in mind.
2. Identify your platforms
Once you know who you’re targeting, the next step is to identify your platforms. You want to use social platforms your audience is likely to use so that you can reach them. There are dozens of platforms you can choose from, including:
3. Set your goals
Before you start using social media for marketing, you must determine the goal of your social media strategy. What do you want to achieve through social media?
You can choose from numerous goals, including:
- Increase brand recognition
- Increase engagement
- Increase leads
- Increase sales
Without goals, you’ll post on social media aimlessly. Goals help you keep your social content focused so that you can drive results.
4. Determine how you want to convey your brand
One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it enables you to convey your brand’s personality through posts. Before you launch your first post, you need to determine your brand identity. You want to determine how you’ll convey your brand to your audience.
Do you want to take a fun-loving and casual approach like Target?
What about a comical and quirky approach like Dollar Shave Club?
That’s what you need to figure out with your social media identity. You need to determine your brand’s personality and how you want to convey that personality to your audience.
5. Identify the metrics you want to track
When you promote your brand on social media, you learn that tracking your campaigns’ success is critical. You need to see how your content performs to optimize your strategy to continually drive better results.
You’ll want to identify your key performance metrics (KPIs) to track your campaigns’ performance. Your social media KPIs will depend upon your campaign goals, but some standard metrics to track include:
- Engagement Rate
- Website traffic
- Brand awareness
- Post reach
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Bounce rate
- Conversions
Learn more: Additional social media marketing resources
Learn more about promoting your brand on social media with these helpful social media marketing resources:
- Is Social Media Marketing Worth It? 6 Reasons to Use Social
- Social Media Promotion: 4 Steps for Promoting on Social Media
- Why Marketing Through Social Media is Effective
- Social Media Marketing Basics You Didn’t Know You Needed
- Top 14 Social Media Sites for Businesses
- 9 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2023
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Get professional help with social media marketing
Now that you know the answer to the question, “what is social media marketing,” you can get started with your strategy!
Need help getting started? Not sure if your business will benefit from social media? Get in touch with our social media specialists!
We can have a chat about your unique business and goals and discuss how social media could fit into your existing strategy, along with how it can help you achieve your goals.
Plus, our social media services give you access to a team that can help you manage every aspect of your campaign with little to no effort on your part!
Contact us online or call us 888-601-5359 to get started!