What Is Social Media Marketing: Strategy and Best Practices

Social media marketing is a central focus for organizations across the business spectrum today. Or at least, it should be. No matter your marketing objective — be it brand awareness, consideration, or conversions — a sound social media strategy will be instrumental in helping you achieve it.

Bridging this strategy to your goals and creating a sustainable social media marketing plan for growth is one of the most important steps a company can take. But doing so requires that you fully understand the lay of the land, the tactics that work, and the direction of emerging trends.

We’ve got you covered. Read on and enjoy a brisk crash course in mastering social media marketing. You’ll find plenty of helpful links and resources along the way.?

Social Media Marketing 101: Your Complete Guide

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the practice of leveraging social media platforms to share content, build networks, and engage users with the goal of growing a brand or business. As the social landscape expands, this is an increasingly broad term with a vast range of practical applications.??

Generally, we find that social media marketing strategy breaks down into three phases: show, grow, and flow.

Show: Gaining visibility and awareness in the social space is an important first step toward driving bottom-line results for your brand. Building out your profiles, and establishing a consistent voice and cadence, will help get your company seen on social networks.

Grow:?With baseline awareness measures in place, you can start to focus on growing your social media presence. Start using hashtags and joining relevant conversations. Increase your activity. Activate employees to speak on behalf of the brand.

Flow:?Finally, you’ll want to develop a sustainable ongoing model to keep awareness, engagement, and conversions flowing continually. Test new social media marketing ideas while striking the right balance of paid and organic. Measure and optimize to maintain forward momentum.?

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Before we get into the benefits and actionable aspects of developing a strategy around social media marketing, let’s first take a high-level look at the state of social and why it shouldn’t be on the backburner.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing Today

According to HootSuite, there are now?roughly 3.5 billion social media users globally, accounting for nearly half the world’s population. In the past year, more than 1 million people have started using social media every day on average.?

The rationale is simple: If you want your brand to be present where your customers (and future customers) are, you need to be active on social media. The downsides of a marketing strategy that doesn’t deeply incorporate social media are self-evident: You’re missing an opportunity to get in front of people, making your brand less discoverable, and giving your competition a potentially substantial advantage.?

With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the concrete benefits of investing in social media marketing.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

The perks of a comprehensive social media marketing strategy are numerous, and can positively affect many different areas of your operation.?

• Gain Awareness. Presences across multiple social channels create more opportunities for people to find and learn about your brand.
• Distinguish Your Voice. Today’s customers want to do business with companies they know and trust. Your social accounts offer an opportunity to establish your brand’s personality and credibility, while forming a reputation for thought leadership in your niche.
• Engage with Customers and Prospects. Through transparency and interaction, your brand becomes more accessible. This, again, contributes to the vital objectives of building trust and brand loyalty.
• Increase Inbound Traffic. Sharing links to your website and landing pages will invariably direct more traffic to them, especially as you solidify your community and generate greater interest in your content.
• Experimentation Grounds. Running campaigns and tests through social media can provide valuable data and feedback, helping guide your broader content strategy. The larger your following, the more substantive the sample.
• Reporting and Research. Most social networks today offer robust analytics tools for brands and advertisers, helping you uncover valuable insights about your audience.?LinkedIn Analytics, for instance, allow marketers to tap into a wealth of information about the professional demographics of members engaging with your brand (industry, seniority, job title, location, etc.).
• Drive Conversions. Through both organic and paid campaigns, you can leverage social media to drive direct business results and bolster your pipeline.?
• Improve Search Visibility. Activity across various social networks can increase your likelihood of being discovered via search.?