What is Social Media Marketing and Why Should My Business be Doing it?

Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, helping you boost sales, build your brand, and increase website traffic. If you want to beat your competition, you can’t afford to go without it. So, what does it involve?

Social media marketing is communicating with your audience via social media platforms. This can involve posting exciting content, engaging with followers, and running paid social media ads – all of which we’ll explain in this article.

Short on time? No problem. Cut to the chase and compare trusted social media marketing agencies with our free comparison tool. Simply answer a few questions, and we’ll match you with the most suitable experts who’ll offer free, no-obligation quotes.

Alternatively, keep on reading to learn why your business should be using social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is using social media channels to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic, leveraging popular platforms to achieve your marketing and branding goals.

The most popular social media platforms are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Snapchat

However, to get results, you need to do more than just create profiles on these platforms and post any old content. For starters, you need to create a social media marketing strategy, with measurable goals. You also need to track your progress to help you deliver even better results in your next campaign. Don’t worry, it’s much easier and cheaper than you expect.

Further down the page, we’ll explain what’s usually involved with social media strategies.

What are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

Social media is more popular than ever. With that, social media marketing is now one of the most effective ways to grow your business. Below are its biggest benefits…

Generate Leads and Boost Sales

With 3.96 billion users, social media is an invaluable resource for leads, customers, and sales. With social media marketing, you’re exposing your business to leads who may not have found your business outside the social media sphere. As well as posting content and running paid ads, you can also generate leads directly on social media platforms using features such as Facebook shops, direct messaging, and call-to-action buttons on your profiles.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Social media is one of the best channels for directing traffic to your website, where you convert visitors into customers or clients. This is done by including links to your website on your social media profiles, blogs, and adverts, which will redirect social media users to your website or online store.

Increase Brand Awareness

Social media marketing is ideal for building your brand image. Whether via LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, you can explain to huge audiences what your business sells, does, and stands for. Meanwhile, with visually-led platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you can convey your brand identity more effectively than you could with blogging or email marketing. In fact, over 70% of people who have a positive experience with a business on social media will recommend that business to others.

Build Relationships and Gain Insights

Social media is great for, well, getting social. These platforms are designed to bring people together, and from a business standpoint, they bring you closer to your audiences. For example, you can chat directly with customers and reply to comments in real time, helping you gather feedback, hold discussions about your brand, and connect with individuals.

What are the Drawbacks of Social Media Marketing?

Even though social media marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business, it’s not perfect. In truth, nothing is. But despite the wealth of benefits, there are some drawbacks:

Risk of Negative Feedback

You could have the best product or service on the market, but there’s always the risk of negative customer experiences. That unhappy social media user can make their feelings visible to others online, which could potentially damage your brand image.

Can be Time-consuming

Posting regularly can be time-consuming, especially if you have other tasks to think about. That’s why it’s a good idea to hire a social media specialist or use a social media marketing agency to handle everything for you while you focus on other areas of your business.

Paid Ad Mistakes Can be Costly

Paid ads allow you to advertise your company to specific, targeted audiences. However, if you make a mistake or target the wrong audience, you risk wasting your entire budget and getting zero returns.

How Does Social Media Marketing Work?

Social media strategies will be different for every business, depending on the target market and brand goals. That said, every strategy will normally involve these principles…

Competitor Research

Through competitor analysis, you can see what your rival brands have done well, or not so well, which should give you a better understanding of what works in your target market.

Know Your Audience

For your content to get likes, shares, and comments, you need to know everything about your target audience. What platforms do they use? When do they use them? Do they prefer live videos or blog posts? You should also learn their age and interests, which can be done by creating profiles of your ideal customer.

It’s no good creating a Snapchat or TikTok campaign, which would be ideal for 18 to 25-year-old users, if your target audience is 35 to 50-year-old business owners. The older demographic is likely to be active only on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Build Your Brand Identity

Understanding your own identity will guide the message you communicate to your audience. How do you want social media users to feel when seeing, watching, or sharing your content? The social media approach for a law firm might be a bit different to that of a pizza restaurant.

Create a Content Strategy

Creating a measurable strategy allows you to build a consistent presence across your platforms, which is vital for building brand awareness, gaining followers, and boosting sales. Hold creative workshops to come up with best-in-class content ideas, which will help your business stand out from the crowd. You can also use scheduling tools, like Hootsuite, to help plan your content for the coming months.

Stay Active on Social Media

Building on your content strategy, you should also post spontaneously when the opportunity presents itself. You should also pounce on current trends, reply to comments, and maintain accurate profiles, which will keep your brand fresh in people’s minds.

Analyze Results

Constantly reviewing your results and insights will help improve your strategy going forward. You’ll learn which type of posts get the best engagement, when your audience is most active, and other important metrics. You can view your results directly on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but you can also use third-party tools like Hootsuite or Google Analytics.

Find Expert Help

Businesses around the world use social media marketing to gain new customers and build their brand. But if you’re worried you don’t have the time or skills to get started, you’re not alone – many businesses use social media marketing agencies to handle everything for them.

With social media marketing services, you’ll have dedicated experts create and maintain a bespoke social media strategy for you, letting you focus on other areas of your business. The best part? It couldn’t be easier to find them.

If you’d like to hear from trusted social media marketing agencies, and learn more about how they can help grow your business, then use our free comparison tool. Simply answer a few questions about your business, and we’ll match you with suitable experts who’ll offer no-obligation quotes for you to compare. It’s quick, easy, and only takes a minute.

Are Paid Social Ads Worth it?

In short, yes – if you play it well. With paid social ads, you can advertise your website or content to a specific, targeted audience. The overall cost of social media marketing depends on your needs, and the type of advertising you go for.

For example, the average cost for Facebook PPC (pay-per-click) ads is $0.97, which is what you pay each time someone clicks on your paid social media ad or link. So, if you get 1,000 clicks on that ad, you’ll spend $970. When you think about it, that’s a small price to pay for 1,000 potential customers, clients, or website visitors. And when you consider Facebook users click on 12 Facebook ads every month on average, paid ads are likely to bring you results.

Like we said, paid social ads are worth the investment – when done correctly. Otherwise, you risk wasting dollars that could be better spent on a new coffee machine. Worried about added costs? We understand. If you have a tight budget, the best social media marketing agencies for small businesses can create a strategy for you that maximizes your limited budget to bring you more customers in the most cost-effective way.