What Is Social Media Marketing and Why Is It Important?
In today’s digital age, social media has transformed the ways businesses interact with consumers. Social media marketing, what we social media marketing agencies like to call SMM, has become a fundamental tool for brands who want to engage with consumers, build brand awareness, generate leads and reach an insane number of potential customers.
But what exactly is Social Media Marketing and how does it work? In this blog, we’ll deep dive through the ins and outs of social media marketing and the basic steps in building a social media strategy.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Simply put, social media marketing is a form of marketing that takes place on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and TikTok. These platforms provide a massive audience reach with over 2 billion people using social media every day! That’s a lot of potential leads waiting to be tapped into!
Building brand awareness
Setting up a social media page is one thing, being consistent and driving traffic to your pages is another. Building a consistent routine across your chosen platforms is a must to build a strong presence and enhance your brand's visibility. Not only will it signal to your audience that you are a reliable and trustworthy brand, but every post will also build brand awareness in new spaces.
Building customer relationships and engagement
Unlike traditional marketing channels like newspapers, TV ads and billboards, social media offers a direct line of communication between brands and their audience. This interaction is highly valued by both businesses and consumers. It allows brands to build communities around their products or series by creating meaningful interactions with customers.
Businesses can also address customer questions, provide real-time updates on offers, item launches or behind-the-scenes footage and allow business owners to receive instant feedback on their products. This level of engagement not only helps a business build trust and loyalty but also provides valuable insights that can inform future marketing plans and strategies.
Insights, insights, insights
If you’ve only ever used social media for personal use, the word insights might be a little new to you.
All social media platforms offer in depth analytical insights into your audience and their interactions with your posts. This information details everything from gender to peak times the majority of your followers are online. These FREE tools are a social media marketer’s bible and can give your content the extra boost it needs. Take advantage of these statistics and tailor each piece of content to that specific audience. For example if you’re a clothing brand specialising in custom children’s clothing and your audience is mostly women aged 25-40 who are online at 7am, your post needs to speak to them specifically and be uploaded around 7am!
Don’t let the numbers overwhelm you, once you understand the metrics, insights are much easier than they look!
How to craft a social media strategy
Yes, being on social media is great for brand awareness and building a sense of legitimacy around your brand however, creating a steady and consistent social media strategy is really where your brand is going to shine!
To craft a great social media strategy you will need to
Identify the core themes or topics that resonate with your target audience and brand values.
Create content pillars, these will be core themes to base your high quality content around and showcase your brand in all aspects. These pieces of content need to be informative and engaging.
Create a content candler to create an outline of when and where you will be uploading your content. Remember to make sure to optimise your content using the insights from each social media platform!
Make sure you set time aside to do community management to engage with your audience and provide helpful responses. This includes responding to comments, actively communicating with other accounts and forming new, meaningful connections with fellow creators or businesses.
We recommend using a social media strategy for a minimum of 3 months to see if it is generating a response or meeting the objective you set out at the beginning of your strategy. This strategy will need to be revisited after the 3-month trial to determine if your efforts have been successful in achieving your outlined goals. If it hasn’t, it is the perfect opportunity to revamp your strategy by pulling in new ideas you may have jotted down along the way. Alternatively, you can reach out to us and we can help you restructure an awesome strategy!
This has been a basic introduction to the world of social media marketing and content creation. Yes, it can be very time-consuming but well worth it! If you don’t have time to do all this yourself and would rather focus on different aspects of your business, our small but mighty team can help you build your social media strategy and take on the task of content creation.
