What Is Social Media Marketing? Complete 2024 Guide for Businesses
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses social media networks to promote your brand and products or services online. Keep reading to learn more about social media marketing's definition, how it can benefit your business, how to create your social media marketing strategy, and more!
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 is one of the most powerful ways to engage and interact with your audience on multiple levels. But social media marketing is more than just posting content for likes. It requires careful planning and strategizing to execute successfully.
Today, we’re breaking down all there is to know about social media marketing, from what it is to how you can create your own strategy. Stay tuned as we cover the following topics:
What is social media marketing, and how does it work?
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.
The best way to explain how social media marketing works is to cover its five core pillars. The five pillars of social media marketing address key stages in the marketing process:
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.
Planning & publishing: Planning and publishing content is key to a successful marketing campaign on social media. Posting at the right time is critical to ensure your content reaches your target audience, so planning out content in advance is crucial.
Listening & engagement: Tracking mentions of your brand across social media platforms and replying to those comments can help you engage with your audience and nurture relationships that turn into brand loyalty.
Analytics & reporting: Understanding your social media audience and how they interact with your campaigns is critical to your success. With social media analytics you can gain valuable insights into which tactics and content are helping your company achieve your goals, and optimize those strategies for future success.
Advertising: Social media platforms have powerful ad targeting capabilities that can reinforce your organic content strategy. With them you can specify exactly who you want to see your ads and ensure they reach the people most likely to purchase your products or services.
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.
Expert insights from
Hunter NicholsonWebFX Director of Social Media Advertising
Having a social media strategy as part of your marketing plan is vital to maximizing your reach on the channels your audiences are already on. By maintaining a presence across platforms, you’re getting directly in front of potential new customers and allowing your existing client-base an opportunity to connect more with your brand. You’re also able to tailor your approach to your social media marketing to best align with your overall business & marketing goals to maximize results.
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.
The best social media marketing platforms for businesses
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:
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 people use 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.
Instagram
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, Live videos, and more, making it a great platform for creating different types of engaging content for your audience.
X/Twitter
People love to use X (formerly known as Twitter) to get the latest news, follow brands, participate in energized discussions, and more.
X is the perfect platform to allow your audience to contact you for customer support and engage with users in fun discussions.
LinkedIn
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.
YouTube
When it comes to video content, YouTube is the place to be. As the second largest search engine on the Internet, YouTube brings in a diverse audience through it’s variety of content offerings, from how-to videos to vlogs.
YouTube presents the perfect opportunity for brands looking to share inside looks at their company, show off products, share industry insights, and more!
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:
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.
The first thing I recommend is to get to know each platform & what type of users are typically frequenting them. You can easily find demographic details, engagement metrics, and overall insights to compare against your target audience details & find where you have the best overlap and best chances of seeing impactful results.
Hunter Nicholson, WebFX Director of Social Media Advertising
There are dozens of platforms you can choose from, including:
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.
Social media marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves connecting and interacting with audiences on various social media platforms to promote your business and generate leads.
Social media marketing can help you build meaningful relationships with followers and nurture leads into loyal customers, resulting in better customer retention and sales.
A social media marketer is someone who specializes in promoting a company’s products or services on social media platforms through various social media best practices.
There are three main types of social media marketing:
Organic content marketing
Organic social media content refers to the content you create and post on your feed. There’s no bell and whistles, just quality content posted to your normal feed without promotion.
Organic social media content comes in the form of things like:
Text posts
Status updates
Photos & carousels
Long- and short-form video content
Links to external articles, pages, and sites
And more!
Social media advertising
Social media advertising refers to paid social media efforts. This includes running ads, promoting posts, and other paid social media methods that work to increase your content’s visibility and reach.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves partnering with influential people and organizations to endorse your company and its products. Influencer marketing on social media is a great way to increase brand awareness and reach new audiences.
On average, businesses can spend anywhere from $100 — $5000 per month, or $20 — 450 per hour on social media marketing. That said, the cost of social media marketing varies from case to case and depends on a variety of factors, including:
Whether you do social media marketing in-house or outsource to an agency or freelancer
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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!
