What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.

We’ve created this guide to provide you with an introduction to social media marketing and some starter social media marketing tips and training to improve your business’s social presence.

With these tips, you can begin developing your own social media marketing expert plan.

Social Media and Marketing: Start With a Plan

Before you begin creating social media marketing campaigns, consider your business’s goals. Starting a social media marketing campaign without a social strategy in mind is like wandering around a forest without a map—you might have fun, but you’ll probably get lost.

Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:

• What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
• Who is your target audience?
• Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
• What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?

Your business type should inform and drive your social media marketing strategy.

For example, an e-commerce or travel business, being highly visual, can get a lot of value from a strong presence on Instagram or Pinterest. A business-to-business or marketing company might find more leverage in Twitter or Linkedin.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help You Meet Your Marketing Goals

Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:

• Increasing website traffic
• Building conversions
• Raising brand awareness
• Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
• Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list!

You may be asking yourself, “What can a social media marketing company do for me?” The biggest benefit our social media marketing agency can provide you with is more time and a higher ROI at a minimal cost.

The key to creating a successful social media management campaign (or any digital marketing campaign for that matter!) is the ability to lower your CPA (cost per acquisition) and maximize your ROI (return on investment). The reason we help so many businesses with their social media marketing is because social media provides them the avenue to do just this.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for example offer a world of targeting options. You can target Facebook users by demographics, interests and behaviors and you can also upload your own list of customers or email subscribers to either retarget them or find new customers that look like them in a lookalike audience.

 

This gives business owners like you the ability to narrow down your targeting methods to solely attract qualified leads. When you fail to waste money on followers and leads that don’t fall into your target audience, you trim the fat on your marketing budget.