What is SSM?

 Social media marketing involves using social platforms as channels for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales. Social platforms are the center of SMM.

 

Below you can see the number of monthly users of the most popular social platforms.

 

Social networks	Active users, monthly
Facebook	2.47 billion
Instagram	over 1.8 billion
Twitter	326 million
LinkedIn	303 million
Pinterest	300 million

 

Why is social media marketing important for every business?

SMM is the easiest way to reach an enormous audience — nowadays a half-third of the global population, 3.9 billion people, and use social media. Moreover, this number is constantly growing — since 2020, social media use has grown by 9.8%.

Social media is extremely useful for increasing brand awareness. According to Hoot suite, 80% of online brand discovery happens in public social feeds. In other words, the majority of people learn about new brands on social networks.

In 2020, people spent an average of up to 4 hours every day. And this indicator has also grown — time spent on social media increased by 6.4%. That makes social media a great way to not only reach your audience but also to interact with them for a long time.

Every year, social networks become more and more significant in terms of boosting sales. For instance, in 2020, 45% of internet users used social media when researching products before making a purchase. Although only 10% of people are ready to click a “buy” button on Facebook or Instagram, social networks are highly significant in the early stages of the buyer's journey.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

ü  Increase brand awareness

ü  Boost website traffic

ü  Faster and easier content distribution

ü  Regular interaction with the target audience

ü  Industry, marketplace and competitor insights

In addition to access to a broad audience and close interaction with customers, SMM has other advantages. Here are several benefits of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy.

 

Increase brand awareness

67% of users research products through social media. So, a brand should have high-quality accounts on different social networks to take advantage of the users’ social media interests. In this case, potential customers can reach a brand on their favourite platform. Furthermore, excellent service through social media is also crucial. People expect companies to help them, and, if the assistance was excellent, they are happy to recommend the brand to others — 80% of users will recommend a company if they had a positive experience with a company on social media.

Boost website traffic

Although many social media platforms allow brands to sell their products without going to an external website or landing page, social media is still a great way to increase the traffic. For instance, 30% of all mobile website traffic originates from social media.

Faster and easier content distribution

If you promote your business via content marketing, you can distribute your content more effectively with SMM. People always share useful, exciting, and entertaining information with their friends on social networks. It often moves beyond one network and its members and facilitating the growth of your target audience.

SMM is a great way to inform your customers about special offers. Social networks help deliver information about sales or giveaway swiftly and cheaply, although the majority of users prefer to receive promotional messages by email. To meet their preference, give Vampka a try and launch an email campaign.

Regular interaction with the target audience

Because half-third of the world’s population uses social networks for almost four hours each day, SMM is the best way to interact with the audience. This way, your brand is already in the place your customers prefer to spend their time, so it helps you stay close and be more trustworthy.

Moreover, SMM — more than any other marketing channel — helps you get feedback from customers. In any possible way — through reviews, likes, comments, etc. If your clients have had a bad experience with your product, they would rather inform you about it through social networks, than through email or telephone call. It creates the opportunity to react properly, and retain this particular client and attract others.

Industry, marketplace and competitor insights

Social media gives you a great opportunity to monitor not only your customer satisfaction but also the latest industry trends and your competitors’ activities. With the last industry news, you get the additional content — you can use them as topics to discuss with your followers.

By obtaining data from your competitors, you get the inspiration to improve your product or your approach to SMM — never stop learning from those around you.

Social Media Marketing Goals

You can pursue a huge variety of goals with social media marketing — it depends on your overall marketing strategy. Here are some examples of popular goals for SMM:

• community engagement increase;
• sales and lead generation;
• customer retention;
• website traffic growth;
• audience growth;
• handling negative feedback;
• feedback search;
• competitors and trends monitoring;
• increasing brand awareness;
• Consumer demand research.

No matter what your goals are, you have to define them precisely — it will help create your SMM strategy and content.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Ten years ago, social networks were a small field, and it was easy for marketers to manage them manually. Today promoting your brand via social media is a tough job, which demands a lot of additional tools to make everything work.

Implements for social media marketing can be used for these purposes:

• mentions monitoring;
• posts creation and scheduling;
• brand-user communication;
• Performance analytics.

To find more info about useful SMM instruments, their implementation, key features, and pricing, check out our list of 10+ Best Social Media Marketing Tools for 2020.

How can I create a social media marketing strategy?

It’s impossible to do effective marketing on social networks without a well-produced social media strategy. We’ve already published a precise guide on how to create a content marketing strategy to promote your brand. Here we’ll just sum up the main points:

1. Determine your goals for social media. Align your SMM goals with the overall goals of your business.
2. Analyze the target audience of your brand. You have to define your customer persona to reach their hearts. Learn how to work with your target audience on social media.
3. Choose key social media platforms. Not all of them may suit your business, use platforms that are popular with your target demographic.
4. Choose your brand’s tone of voice. The way that you interact with customers defines how they perceive your business.
5. Create an SMM content plan. Include several types of content, namely promotional, entertaining, and informative.
6. Define KPIs to measure your success. They should strongly correlate with the initial goals of your social media marketing efforts.