Back to Basics: What Is Social Media Marketing?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a type of marketing strategy that utilizes content posted to different social media platforms to generate engagement and leads. This content can be organic or paid content. Organic content consists of posts made to your feeds or stories. These posts typically do not require money to be posted or viewed. Social media marketing can also consist of paid content but doesn’t have to depending on what your budget and goals are. Paid content consists of ads that require payment to run. Social media marketing often consists of a combination of organic and paid content created to engage customers and generate new leads for your business.

What Are The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing?

Increase Brand Awareness

In the digital age, not utilizing social media at all is a misstep for your business. Billions of people across the globe are active on social media platforms every day. While you are likely not looking to target every person on the planet as a potential customer, there is still the very valuable asset of increased brand awareness available to businesses that utilize social media. Social content puts your business and brand in front of customers that might not have found you by searching on their own. Additionally, if your social media accounts are optimized for user accessibility, it should take two clicks or less for a potential customer to see a social media post and be able to get to your website. This is why social media is such an important tool when it comes to brand awareness.

Engage With Your Customers

If you want to create lifelong customers, only fostering a relationship with them when they’re hitting checkout or swiping their card at your business isn’t the way to do it! Social media allows you to frequently connect with your customers in ways that benefit both of you. Through social media, you can reach your customers and remind them of your services and your business, but you can also engage with them through comments as well as asking them questions or about their opinions of different products or services your business may offer. Social media is a great tool for keeping a sense of community with your customers even when they’re not directly engaging with your business.

Generate Leads And Conversions

Social media marketing is a great way to get leads, create conversions, and increase sales because the demographic that is viewing your content has already chosen to follow you for a reason. Anyone that follows your social media pages has an interest in your business whether they are previous customers or want to keep tabs on your business for a potential future purchase. Additionally, social media advertisements target users based on specified demographics and interests. 

What Social Media Platforms Should I Be Using?

There are a very large variety of social media platforms that you could use to interact with prospective consumers. Depending on the field you are in, there may be more niche social media platforms that will be beneficial for your business; however, these are currently the most common platforms for social media marketing.

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

 

If you feel overwhelmed looking at this list, don’t worry! There’s no need to market on all of these platforms. The nature of your business will dictate the platforms you should be marketing on. Are you a restaurant looking to appeal to customers in your area and target previous customers? Marketing on platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube would be a waste of your resources. Do you run a boutique and are looking for clients with a specific aesthetic? Pinterest and Instagram are going to become essential in your social media marketing campaign. 

Not all social media platforms allow for success in the same way. For example, if video content works with the type of business you have and you are looking to post on YouTube and TikTok, the frequency and length of your content will be very different. To have hope of striking it big on TikTok, your content needs to be short and you should be posting once a day minimum. Whereas, YouTube lends itself to more long-form content and daily videos are not necessary to keep you relevant in their algorithm. 

Should I Hire Someone For My Social Media Marketing?

The short answer is, most likely! If you have high expectations for your social media marketing and are hoping to go viral and find customers primarily through social media, an expert in the field can not only help you with this daunting task but can also help you manage your expectations to a reasonable scope. While going viral may seem easy, there is no surefire hack to make that happen. There are strategies but even the best social media experts can’t completely manufacture viral content because of the nature of each platform and the trends of users and consumers.  If you have smaller goals and are looking to find some new leads via social media while continuing to engage with previous customers to keep your business at the forefront of their attention, a social media marketing professional will be very beneficial. Even if you aren’t looking to create viral content, from start to finish content creation is a time-consuming process that involves a fair amount of research. Even though you are presumably an expert in your field and have a wealth of knowledge to share, content needs to be designed with engagement and aesthetics in mind. This is why it’s beneficial to let a professional do the leg work so you can spend your time using your expertise to run your business. 

 

If you’re ready to take the next step for your business and work with social media marketing professionals, Blackbear Media can help! Get in contact with us so we can discuss what your business needs and how we can help get you there!