Social Media Marketing for the Business: Your All-Out Guide

Social media is a powerful tool to utilize for marketing. Irrespective of your business size, you can exploit it. Today, people use social media to learn about and follow brands. In fact, they shop from brands there. You can leverage social media marketing for the business that you run. 

Besides, we have created this post as your all-out guide to social media marketing. In this guide, we’ll talk about the following things:

• What Is Social Media Marketing?
• Benefits of Marketing on Social Media
• What Do Statistics Reveal about Social Media Marketing?
• What Makes an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?
• Tips on Marketing on Social Media and a Few Real-Life Examples  

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to marketing on popular social media platforms to achieve marketing and branding goals. However, it does not work like making business accounts and posting on social media. As a matter of fact, you need a successful strategy to drive results from your social media marketing efforts. We shall shed light on the essentials you need to craft such a strategy later in this post.   

Benefits of Marketing on Social Media

Here are the benefits you leverage with marketing on social media:

1. Humanize Your Brand

Social media marketing turns businesses into active participants with business profiles, posts, and user interactions. Put differently, it humanizes brands on social media that audiences can familiarize, connect with, and trust.  

2. Drive Traffic 

Marketing on social media helps businesses drive traffic to their websites via blog post links, ads, etc. Most importantly, it helps businesses win converts with website visitors turning into their customers. 

3. Generate Leads and Customers

Specific social media platforms help businesses directly generate leads and customers. A few good examples in this respect are Instagram & Facebook shops on Instagram and Facebook, respectively.  

4. Improve Brand Awareness

Thanks to the visual nature of social media platforms, businesses can improve brand awareness using them! For instance, you can build your visual identity on TikTok, Pinterest, etc., across vast audiences and improve your brand awareness.   

5. Establish Relationships

Social media platforms allow businesses to communicate with their followers directly and indirectly. It helps them gather users’ feedback, hold discussions, and establish a community on social media.    

What Do Statistics Reveal about Social Media Marketing?

Here is what statistics (stats) reveal about social media marketing:

• On average, adults in the United States (US) spend 2.25 hours on social media daily. 
• More than 70% of social media users with a positive experience with businesses recommend them to others in their networks. 
• In general, Facebook users click on 12 Facebook ads every month.
• 81% of Instagram users use Instagram to know about products and services.  
• Almost 80% of Twitter (X) users feel confident about businesses once they get responses from them to their tweets.
• Out of 5, 4 people use LinkedIn to drive business decisions.
• 46% of TikTok users engage in using TikTok without any distractions.

Considering these stats, you can comprehend the point of using social media marketing for the business.  

What Makes an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?

The following are the essentials (ingredients) that constitute an effective social media marketing strategy:

1. Knowledge of the Audience 

It means you know your audience well. That is to say, you know the following things about your target audience:

• What Platforms Does Your Audience Use and When? 
• Why Your Audience Use a Specific Special Media Platform 
• What Content Does Your Audience Like? 
• Who Does Your Audience Follow?

2. Brand Message 

It means what message you want to convey to the audience about your brand. At the same time, your brand message should make your audience feel how you want them to feel. 

3. Content Strategy

You need a structured content strategy ensuring quality with a consent brand voice to succeed on social media. For example, you can create interactive content to engage audiences on social media, such as polls and quizzes. However, it is imperative you create high-quality content regularly for social media marketing.  

4. Analytics

Analytics is also an essential part of an effective social media marketing strategy. It lets you know about the strategy working for you, the best times to post, and more. 

5. Consistency 

As social media is a real-time platform, you need to post content on social media platforms regularly. Not to mention, it allows your business to stay on top of audience engagements on social media and grow.

6. Inbound Approach 

Focusing on an inbound approach, you can provide value to your social media audience with interesting content. It is important to mention that inbound marketing refers to content creation targeting audiences’ needs and preferences. So, an inbound approach lets you organically promote your business and encourage social media users to promote it for you.    

Tips on Marketing on Social Media and a Few Real-Life Examples  

Here are our tips on leveraging social media marketing for the business you manage:

1. Create Diverse Content 

To make the most out of marketing on social media, you should create diverse content. That is to create content on how-tos, polls, data & insights, etc. Also, use a variety of formats for your marketing content, such as animated videos, images, live streams, and so on. 

2. Stay Consistent

Staying consistent means you should create content for marketing while adhering to unique requirements and voice for specific platforms. Also, keep your brand identity consistent, irrespective of its type whether it is friendly, fun, or trustworthy.   

3. Participate, Too

Besides posting content, participate on social media platforms to encourage discussions. As an example, respond to comments from your audience on social media. 

4. Repurpose, Repost, and Recycle (The Three Rs) 

Here is what these 3 Rs mean:

1. Repurpose

It means taking an entire content or pieces of content and transforming them into new ones. For example, you can transform a case study about your brand into a customer spotlight on Instagram.

2. Repost

It refers to the act of sharing someone else’s content on your social media page or profile. For instance, you can repost UGC (User-Generated Content) about your brand on social media.  

3. Recycle

It means using previously shared content on a new social media platform, which you used on a different platform. For instance, you can recycle your TikTok videos and Instagram Reels on YouTube.

5. Try Paid Social 

You can try paid social media marketing to cost-effectively expand your reach. As a matter of fact, many social media platforms offer businesses the capability to target the right audience. Ponder leveraging Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram advertisements for that purpose.  

Here are a few real-life examples of the successful social media marketing campaigns:

1. Apple – #ShotOniPhone  

Apple aimed to increase user engagement through its user-generated #ShotoniPhone marketing campaign. Customers could enter into this campaign while using the hashtag in the caption of their social media posts. Consequently, this campaign helped Apple generate vast UGC for its brand marketing to exploit.   

2. Make-A-Wish Foundation – #ShareYourEars

It is a marketing campaign reflecting the partnership between Make-A-Wish Foundation and Disney. In this campaign, audiences were asked to share their pictures wearing Mickey Mouse Ears. Then, they had to caption the pictures with #Share Your Ears. Disney Parks donated $5 for each post of this campaign, which turned into $1M (million). Because of the success of this campaign with immense participation, Disney doubled the original donation amount.

Conclusion

Social media is a powerful tool to utilize for marketing. Further, it refers to marketing on social media platforms for accomplishing marketing or branding goals. It helps humanize a brand, increase brand awareness, and benefit brands in various other ways, too. Further, stats also reveal the benefits of leveraging social media marketing for the business. Furthermore, knowledge of the audience, brand message, and content strategy are some of its essentials we want to recapitulate. Lastly, here is a reiteration of our tips on leveraging social media for marketing:

1. Create Diverse Content 
2. Stay Consistent
3. Participate, Too
4. Repurpose, Repost, and Recycle
5. Try Paid Social