Social media marketing: what is it?
Using social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and X (previously Twitter) to market your business and sell goods or services is known as social media marketing.
Social media marketing is when your company releases a new product and you intend to use social media to advertise the launch. Social media marketing is when you communicate with your customers through comments. Social media marketing also includes producing interesting content that highlights the principles and narrative of your company.
You must employ social media management techniques and resources while doing this type of marketing. You must have a plan for your social media marketing, just as you would with other parts of your marketing strategy.
A social media marketing strategy: what is it?
A social media marketing strategy is a thorough plan that combines your team's goals, the larger business objectives, and your social media initiatives. This alignment guarantees that your efforts are not only performance-optimized but also yield quantifiable outcomes that support your overall marketing success.
A well-thought-out social media marketing plan also establishes limitations for the time and experience of your staff. Despite the fact that almost everyone utilizes social media, this ubiquitous use frequently causes people to overestimate their level of competence.
Requests to post content that is improperly formatted or inconsistent with the overall campaign have been made of all social media managers. A strong social media marketing plan gives you the confidence to say "no" when it is needed, keeping your efforts concentrated and productive.
What advantages may a social media strategy offer?
For social media-savvy marketers, this question may seem like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, gaining support from other stakeholders requires the ability to effectively communicate the benefits of a well-thought-out social media plan. A clear social media strategy helps your company and brand in the following ways:
It raises engagement and brand exposure.
Ninety percent of consumers use social media to stay up to date on cultural events and trends, according to The Sprout Social IndexTM. Social media has arisen to meet the seemingly limitless demand for material in the midst of a divided cultural landscape.
In order to create a brand identity that stands out from the competition and connects with a target audience, firms must dedicate themselves to a consistent social media marketing plan. Figo Pet Insurance is one example.
The Figo team pledged to post four to five TikTok videos per week in 2022. They were able to identify the messages that resonate with their audience over time. Several viral videos and an increase in the audience were the results of these efforts.
You can create more targeted marketing that not only draws in more fans but also encourages higher levels of interaction as you continue to hone your approach.
It fosters trust in the brand.
Social has a noticeable effect on brand trust, especially among younger customers.
78% of consumers strongly/somewhat think that a brand's social media presence has a greater impact on whether or not they trust that brand than it did a year ago, according to a Q2 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey. For Generation Z, that figure rises to 88%. What factors most affect that trust? the material you share on social media.
In the 2010s, people may be put off by a badly designed website because they fear fraud. The same idea still holds true for social media today. Customers will raise red flags and lose trust if they visit your profiles and notice erratic changes, inconsistent message, or content that does not match where it was put.
Performance measurement is supported.
Your social media marketing plan builds the framework required to demonstrate the return on investment of your work. You might be able to report on social media KPIs without one, but it will be much more difficult to demonstrate how they relate to strategic goals.
Let us take an example where you work for a car company and one of your main goals is to gain more market share among parents of small children. In light of this, you can create a strategic content pillar centered on this particular audience and track the effectiveness of those posts over time.
You may even compare your brand's share of voice to that of your main rivals using a social listening service. This is a very efficient method of determining the market share and visibility of your brand in your sector.
Study up on social listening resources.
It generates income.
According to our Q2 2024 Pulse Survey, 81% of consumers use social media to compare prices for their next purchase, making it the most popular platform for product discovery.
A full-funnel experience is now supported by social media as the use of social commerce continues to grow rapidly both domestically and internationally. Social media is being used by B2B brands as well to improve lead generation and accelerate pipeline expansion.
For instance, the advertising success platform Simpli.fi generated $90,000 in earned media value in just three months after including staff advocacy into their social media approach.
How to develop a strategy for social media marketing
After discussing social media marketing and its advantages, let us move on to the process of developing a strategy.
This is our six-step method for creating a successful social media marketing plan.
Step 1: Create objectives and KPIs
Setting goals is the first step in creating a social media strategy. The first step to achieving your social goals is taking the time to identify them, whether they are to increase the size of your team, your following, or the activity of your community.
The goals you set will inform the key performance indicators (KPIs) you track, and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.
Example social media goals for 2024 and beyond
What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.
Below are some example social media marketing goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.
Goal example 1: Increase brand awareness
Brand awareness means getting your name out there. According to the Index, 93% of consumers agree it's important for brands to keep up with online culture.
Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes your brand’s voice and story. The Index further found consumers favor brands that post original content and interact regularly with their audience.
For example, in this TikTok video, Sani, a family-owned apparel company features a day in the life of the brand’s founders while visiting India for business.
If you want to increase brand awareness, here are the social media metrics you’ll want to focus on:
Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
Impressions: At the post level, impressions are how many times a post is displayed to someone. Impressions are a good indicator of how popular a piece of content is, and that people may be viewing a post multiple times.
Hashtag performance: What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most linked with your brand? Having these answers can help influence the focus of your material moving ahead.
Video views: This may come off as a vanity metric. But on particular channels, like TikTok, views count as impressions, and are therefore vital to track.
Goal example 2: Generate leads and sales
Whether online, in-store or directly through your social accounts, followers don’t make purchases by mistake. For example, are you notifying customers about new items and promos? Are you connecting your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running unique bargains for followers? Social networking gives you an avenue to create cash.
Here are the metrics you’ll want to measure if you’re focused on lead generation and sales:
Conversions: A conversion is when someone does a desired action, such purchasing something from your site or signing up for an upcoming event.
Conversion rate: This metric assesses how successfully your campaign or social media advertisement persuades users to take a desired action.
Example 3 of the goal: Expand the audience for your brand
Finding methods to present your brand to people who have never heard of it before is essential to gaining new followers. Finding the most important discussions about your company and sector is another way to expand your audience.
Without keeping an eye out or listening for particular terms, phrases, or hashtags, it is almost impossible to sift through your social media feeds. You may reach adjacent audiences and grow your core audience much more quickly if you keep an eye on these discussions.
Key indicators of audience growth include:
Growth of followers: The net number of new followers you acquired during a given time frame is measured by your follower growth.
The proportion that indicates how rapidly your audience is genuinely expanding—or contracting—over a given time frame is known as the follower growth rate.
Example 4 of the goal: Offer comprehensive customer service
According to the Index, the majority of consumers think that a brand's ability to reply to customers on social media is what makes them remember it the most.
This implies that when it comes to customer service, businesses must experiment with messaging and content. Does your team, for instance, have a procedure in place for dealing with comments and @-mentions? Have you prepared answers to frequently asked questions? Does your company support hashtags and user-generated content? Only if you give your clients a reason to raise their voices can they become your greatest supporters.
The following customer service KPIs should be monitored if you wish to enhance your company's social customer care strategy:
The time it takes for your team to respond to incoming client messages inside business hours is known as the average initial reply time.
Reply or reaction rate: The frequency with which brands reply to daily messages or comments.
Resolution rate: The proportion of client questions that are satisfactorily answered. This indicator can show how well-prepared your entire business is to respond to consumer questions.
Example of a goal 5: Increase website traffic to show the return on investment of your social media initiatives.
According to the Index, marketing executives want to use audience growth, social interactions, overall engagement, website traffic, and share of voice as metrics for gauging social media performance.
Easy enough. Social media can help you achieve your goal of increasing website traffic or lead generation. You can more accurately assess your return on investment (ROI) via social media by monitoring the following data, whether through social ads or organic promotional posts:
Website traffic: You may accurately credit growth to particular campaigns or viral pieces by keeping an eye on website traffic.
People who come to your website straight from social media postings and pages are referred to as social media referral traffic.
Any combination of these objectives is acceptable and can also assist you in determining which networks to target. When in doubt, stick to a straightforward social media marketing plan instead of overcomplicating it with too many goals that could divert your attention. Choose one or two, then unite your group around them.
Extra resource: The gap between unfiltered social data and immediate corporate value can be closed with a strong deck. Make a strong case for your upcoming campaign, project, or yearly plan using this presentation template.
Obtain the deck template.
Step 2: Choose your networks and conduct research on your target audience.
It is not good for marketers to make assumptions. Both leaders and practitioners can debunk assumptions from the useful information social data gives. Marketers can swiftly do audience research with the correct tool. No expertise in data science or conventional market research is required.
You already have the information you need about your audience to guide your social media marketing approach. All you need to do is know where to look.
Keep in mind that viewers are drawn to diverse platforms. Although benchmark statistics and social media demographics are excellent for determining the geographic location of your target audience, it is equally critical to comprehend the specifics of each social network in order to choose where your company should be.
Below is a brief synopsis of each of the main social media platforms to help you decide where to spend your time:
X
For most firms, X is a good place to start because it is clear-cut and easy to use. X is still one of the most popular platforms for customer care for a reason: it requires very little setup and offers a way to communicate directly with followers. Look no further if you want to learn the fundamentals of social media marketing, including hashtags, tagging, brand voice, and social media etiquette.
Facebook
Facebook is essential for physical businesses trying to reach local clients. It is an excellent location to develop a loyal local following because it permits check-ins and feedback. Additionally, they have amazing chatbot capabilities that may elevate your marketing efforts and customer service approach.
Like many social media algorithm upgrades, the platform's late 2022 algorithm modification presented difficulties for several companies trying to expand their Pages and maintain regular communication with fans. The current algorithm is far more advanced than the first one, which gave priority to Likes. It shows users the most meaningful and relevant content based on inventory, signals, relevancy ranking, and other variables. Nevertheless, Facebook's ad platform is the industry standard for social media advertising since it can assist companies in reducing the impact of algorithm updates and breaking through the clutter.
Instagram
Instagram is fundamentally a visual content-focused network. The platform, which is a significant gathering place for influencers, e-commerce sites, and physical businesses alike, pushes firms to be innovative. It all comes down to coming up with original ways to showcase your products, whether it is through striking images or witty captions.
Using social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and X (previously Twitter) to market your business and sell goods or services is known as social media marketing.
Social media marketing is when your company releases a new product and you intend to use social media to advertise the launch. Social media marketing is when you communicate with your customers through comments. Social media marketing also includes producing interesting content that highlights the principles and narrative of your company.
You must employ social media management techniques and resources while doing this type of marketing. You must have a plan for your social media marketing, just as you would with other parts of your marketing strategy.
A social media marketing strategy: what is it?
A social media marketing strategy is a thorough plan that combines your team's goals, the larger business objectives, and your social media initiatives. This alignment guarantees that your efforts are not only performance-optimized but also yield quantifiable outcomes that support your overall marketing success.
A well-thought-out social media marketing plan also establishes limitations for the time and experience of your staff. Despite the fact that almost everyone utilizes social media, this ubiquitous use frequently causes people to overestimate their level of competence.
Requests to post content that is improperly formatted or inconsistent with the overall campaign have been made of all social media managers. A strong social media marketing plan gives you the confidence to say "no" when it is needed, keeping your efforts concentrated and productive.
What advantages may a social media strategy offer?
For social media-savvy marketers, this question may seem like a no-brainer. Nevertheless, gaining support from other stakeholders requires the ability to effectively communicate the benefits of a well-thought-out social media plan. A clear social media strategy helps your company and brand in the following ways:
It raises engagement and brand exposure.
Ninety percent of consumers use social media to stay up to date on cultural events and trends, according to The Sprout Social IndexTM. Social media has arisen to meet the seemingly limitless demand for material in the midst of a divided cultural landscape.
In order to create a brand identity that stands out from the competition and connects with a target audience, firms must dedicate themselves to a consistent social media marketing plan. Figo Pet Insurance is one example.
The Figo team pledged to post four to five TikTok videos per week in 2022. They were able to identify the messages that resonate with their audience over time. Several viral videos and an increase in the audience were the results of these efforts.
You can create more targeted marketing that not only draws in more fans but also encourages higher levels of interaction as you continue to hone your approach.
It fosters trust in the brand.
Social has a noticeable effect on brand trust, especially among younger customers.
78% of consumers strongly/somewhat think that a brand's social media presence has a greater impact on whether or not they trust that brand than it did a year ago, according to a Q2 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey. For Generation Z, that figure rises to 88%. What factors most affect that trust? the material you share on social media.
In the 2010s, people may be put off by a badly designed website because they fear fraud. The same idea still holds true for social media today. Customers will raise red flags and lose trust if they visit your profiles and notice erratic changes, inconsistent message, or content that does not match where it was put.
Performance measurement is supported.
Your social media marketing plan builds the framework required to demonstrate the return on investment of your work. You might be able to report on social media KPIs without one, but it will be much more difficult to demonstrate how they relate to strategic goals.
Let us take an example where you work for a car company and one of your main goals is to gain more market share among parents of small children. In light of this, you can create a strategic content pillar centered on this particular audience and track the effectiveness of those posts over time.
You may even compare your brand's share of voice to that of your main rivals using a social listening service. This is a very efficient method of determining the market share and visibility of your brand in your sector.
Study up on social listening resources.
It generates income.
According to our Q2 2024 Pulse Survey, 81% of consumers use social media to compare prices for their next purchase, making it the most popular platform for product discovery.
A full-funnel experience is now supported by social media as the use of social commerce continues to grow rapidly both domestically and internationally. Social media is being used by B2B brands as well to improve lead generation and accelerate pipeline expansion.
For instance, the advertising success platform Simpli.fi generated $90,000 in earned media value in just three months after including staff advocacy into their social media approach.
How to develop a strategy for social media marketing
After discussing social media marketing and its advantages, let us move on to the process of developing a strategy.
This is our six-step method for creating a successful social media marketing plan.
Step 1: Create objectives and KPIs
Setting goals is the first step in creating a social media strategy. The first step to achieving your social goals is taking the time to identify them, whether they are to increase the size of your team, your following, or the activity of your community.
The goals you set will inform the key performance indicators (KPIs) you track, and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.
Example social media goals for 2024 and beyond
What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals. We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.
Below are some example social media marketing goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.
Goal example 1: Increase brand awareness
Brand awareness means getting your name out there. According to the Index, 93% of consumers agree it's important for brands to keep up with online culture.
Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes your brand’s voice and story. The Index further found consumers favor brands that post original content and interact regularly with their audience.
For example, in this TikTok video, Sani, a family-owned apparel company features a day in the life of the brand’s founders while visiting India for business.
If you want to increase brand awareness, here are the social media metrics you’ll want to focus on:
Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
Impressions: At the post level, impressions are how many times a post is displayed to someone. Impressions are a good indicator of how popular a piece of content is, and that people may be viewing a post multiple times.
Hashtag performance: What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most linked with your brand? Having these answers can help influence the focus of your material moving ahead.
Video views: This may come off as a vanity metric. But on particular channels, like TikTok, views count as impressions, and are therefore vital to track.
Goal example 2: Generate leads and sales
Whether online, in-store or directly through your social accounts, followers don’t make purchases by mistake. For example, are you notifying customers about new items and promos? Are you connecting your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running unique bargains for followers? Social networking gives you an avenue to create cash.
Here are the metrics you’ll want to measure if you’re focused on lead generation and sales:
Conversions: A conversion is when someone does a desired action, such purchasing something from your site or signing up for an upcoming event.
Conversion rate: This metric assesses how successfully your campaign or social media advertisement persuades users to take a desired action.
Example 3 of the goal: Expand the audience for your brand
Finding methods to present your brand to people who have never heard of it before is essential to gaining new followers. Finding the most important discussions about your company and sector is another way to expand your audience.
Without keeping an eye out or listening for particular terms, phrases, or hashtags, it is almost impossible to sift through your social media feeds. You may reach adjacent audiences and grow your core audience much more quickly if you keep an eye on these discussions.
Key indicators of audience growth include:
Growth of followers: The net number of new followers you acquired during a given time frame is measured by your follower growth.
The proportion that indicates how rapidly your audience is genuinely expanding—or contracting—over a given time frame is known as the follower growth rate.
Example 4 of the goal: Offer comprehensive customer service
According to the Index, the majority of consumers think that a brand's ability to reply to customers on social media is what makes them remember it the most.
This implies that when it comes to customer service, businesses must experiment with messaging and content. Does your team, for instance, have a procedure in place for dealing with comments and @-mentions? Have you prepared answers to frequently asked questions? Does your company support hashtags and user-generated content? Only if you give your clients a reason to raise their voices can they become your greatest supporters.
The following customer service KPIs should be monitored if you wish to enhance your company's social customer care strategy:
The time it takes for your team to respond to incoming client messages inside business hours is known as the average initial reply time.
Reply or reaction rate: The frequency with which brands reply to daily messages or comments.
Resolution rate: The proportion of client questions that are satisfactorily answered. This indicator can show how well-prepared your entire business is to respond to consumer questions.
Example of a goal 5: Increase website traffic to show the return on investment of your social media initiatives.
According to the Index, marketing executives want to use audience growth, social interactions, overall engagement, website traffic, and share of voice as metrics for gauging social media performance.
Easy enough. Social media can help you achieve your goal of increasing website traffic or lead generation. You can more accurately assess your return on investment (ROI) via social media by monitoring the following data, whether through social ads or organic promotional posts:
Website traffic: You may accurately credit growth to particular campaigns or viral pieces by keeping an eye on website traffic.
People who come to your website straight from social media postings and pages are referred to as social media referral traffic.
Any combination of these objectives is acceptable and can also assist you in determining which networks to target. When in doubt, stick to a straightforward social media marketing plan instead of overcomplicating it with too many goals that could divert your attention. Choose one or two, then unite your group around them.
Extra resource: The gap between unfiltered social data and immediate corporate value can be closed with a strong deck. Make a strong case for your upcoming campaign, project, or yearly plan using this presentation template.
Obtain the deck template.
Step 2: Choose your networks and conduct research on your target audience.
It is not good for marketers to make assumptions. Both leaders and practitioners can debunk assumptions from the useful information social data gives. Marketers can swiftly do audience research with the correct tool. No expertise in data science or conventional market research is required.
You already have the information you need about your audience to guide your social media marketing approach. All you need to do is know where to look.
Keep in mind that viewers are drawn to diverse platforms. Although benchmark statistics and social media demographics are excellent for determining the geographic location of your target audience, it is equally critical to comprehend the specifics of each social network in order to choose where your company should be.
Below is a brief synopsis of each of the main social media platforms to help you decide where to spend your time:
X
For most firms, X is a good place to start because it is clear-cut and easy to use. X is still one of the most popular platforms for customer care for a reason: it requires very little setup and offers a way to communicate directly with followers. Look no further if you want to learn the fundamentals of social media marketing, including hashtags, tagging, brand voice, and social media etiquette.
Facebook is essential for physical businesses trying to reach local clients. It is an excellent location to develop a loyal local following because it permits check-ins and feedback. Additionally, they have amazing chatbot capabilities that may elevate your marketing efforts and customer service approach.
Like many social media algorithm upgrades, the platform's late 2022 algorithm modification presented difficulties for several companies trying to expand their Pages and maintain regular communication with fans. The current algorithm is far more advanced than the first one, which gave priority to Likes. It shows users the most meaningful and relevant content based on inventory, signals, relevancy ranking, and other variables. Nevertheless, Facebook's ad platform is the industry standard for social media advertising since it can assist companies in reducing the impact of algorithm updates and breaking through the clutter.
Instagram is fundamentally a visual content-focused network. The platform, which is a significant gathering place for influencers, e-commerce sites, and physical businesses alike, pushes firms to be innovative. It all comes down to coming up with original ways to showcase your products, whether it is through striking images or witty captions.
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