Knowing the best social media marketing strategies as a business owner will not only be a game changer for your business but it will also skyrocket the growth of your business in no time.
According to sprout’s social 2021 index, 9 out of 10 consumers will buy from brands that they find on social, 86% will choose that brand over their competitors, and 85% will buy from that brand more often.
After knowing these stats, it’s only natural that you master the best social media marketing strategies. But before we dive right in, I would love to explain what social medial marketing is.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is a branch of digital marketing that allows brands, businesses, or companies to build and maintain a personal relationship with their customers or audience using social media platforms.
However, it’s one thing to dive into social media marketing and it’s another to actually maintain the best strategies to keep it going.
Social media marketing also creates room for businesses to see a spike in sales, website traffic, brand awareness and a lot more. And for you to be able to achieve all of these results, you have to know what you are doing.
Are your contents engaging? Is your facebook, instagram, linkedin, or tiktok page worth it?
Are these pages useful to your audience? Are your audience always wanting to visit your page because of the great content you publish on there?
Now, these are the questions you should be asking yourself when you are first starting out.
Knowing your target audience is paramount for your business if you wish to succeed in the social media marketing industry.
Types Of Social Media Marketing
1. content promotion/content creation: being able to create and share valuable posts or content on your social media pages will increase your engagement.
And when this happens, you’ll know for sure if the kind of audience you have has a high purchasing power.
There are some brands that hire some supposed Social media marketing specialist to grow their accounts for them, but unknowing to them, these people buys bots as followers.
I don’t know if you get the point? if you are a brand and your are purchasing facebook or instagram followers, just know your business will get hurt in the long run. That brings us back to content marketing.
If as a brand you share useful posts on your pages and there are little or no engagements, then know you have more bots as followers.
2. Paid advertisement/sponsorship: By paid advertisement, I mean you paying facebook, twitter or any other social media platform to run Ads.
If you are familiar with facebook or instagram, you must have seen certain posts labeled as sponsored.
Whenever you see such posts, just know that that brand or business is running ads.
How is this a type of social media marketing? It’s a type of social media marketing as it does not only increase your brand’s awareness but it also leads to an increase in sales and followers.
Below is an example of a popular brand running ads on facebook. And of course, you definitely would recognize this brand. It’s google!
3. Influencer marketing: If you’ve been following social media trends, you would notice that there are a lot of social media influencers promoting brands.
Just in case you don’t know who a social media influencer is, I will be giving you a brief definition of who they are.
A social media influencer is anyone with a huge following on any social media platform.
If you have a lot of followers on facebook, you can be a social media influencer. If you have huge followers on instagram, you can also be a social media influencer. The same applies to other social media platforms like Tiktok and Twitter.
They call people with large followers social media influencers because, for a lot of people to be following them, it means they are loved by these people and for the fact that they are loved by these people, it means anything, be it products or services that they promote on their page, there is a huge chance that their followers will buy from the company sponsoring the Ads or promotion.
4. Social media management/community management: Proper management of your social media handles is really important for your business. The more you engage with your audience, the more your brand sticks in their hearts; and the more helpful posts you make, the more likely they are to share your posts with friends and stick to your page for life.
5. Building your following: Building your following on various social media platforms is considered a type of social media marketing as it gives room for your brand or product to be promoted without you having to pay a third party for advertisement.
The more niched-down followers you have, the more sales you are likely to make.
6. Contributing to forums or groups: Contributing to forums and groups will help build your social media following but how can you achieve that?
To get more niched-down followers, you have to answer a lot of questions in your niche.
Take quora for example. If you are in the relationship niche, you want to make sure to give answers to relationship-related questions only, and when you do this, make sure to leave your social media handles at the bottom of your answers.
By doing this, people that are interested in your kind of posts will follow you. You want to also replicate this process in facebook groups or any other social media platform you can think of.
While carrying this out on quora or any other forum, try to give value first.
Do not just go on there and start spamming your answers with your social media handles. You can give answers to questions for a month without adding your handles, then when quora see you as an authority, you can go ahead and start adding links to your social media pages.
And of course, quora would already have recognized you as an authority in your niche before one month runs out. So they wouldn’t see it like you are trying to spam the platform.
7. Reviews: Getting your customers to leave reviews on your social media pages is very paramount for your business and is also considered a type of social media marketing.
This is so because the more your audience get to see these reviews on your social media pages, the more likely they are to convert to paying customers.
Types Of Social Media Marketing Platforms
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- LinkedIn.
- Instagram.
- YouTube.
- Pinterest.
- Reddit.
- Snapchat
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important For Your Business?
Social media marketing is important for businesses because:
1. It prepares you to dominate your niche: being online alone as a business owner is already a plus. Compare yourself to your competitor that depends only on physical stores or traditional ads; you will realize that you’ve achieved so much more than your competitor.
Who doesn’t want to have an account on all of these social media platforms that have millions and millions of users?
If you are taking social media for granted, then you are definitely leaving a lot of money on the table.
2. It increases brand awareness: Bringing your business online on various social media platforms already sends the message that you are available for business.
Take the below brand for example. They took their business online, that is why their customers could easily find them. Gone are the days when everything had to be delayed before a particular goal could be achieved. Technology has made the whole process easier.
Imagine this brand not having a social media handle. How would their lovers have been able to interact with them?
Just this post they made garnered about 1000+ comments, 48000+ likes; and oh, I also forgot to mention that they have about 1000000+ followers. Isn’t that amazing?
What could be more of an achievement than this as a business owner?
It is every business’s dream that they always have a close relationship with their customers.
3. It increases sale: Of course, social media marketing increases sales. You can’t practice all of the types of social media marketing and not see a spike in sales.
Running ads alone using these social media platforms will not only yield good result but would also maintain them if you know what you are doing.
By what you are doing, I mean building email list from the insane traffic you are getting from running ads.
4. It increases social media following: It is only right that you get a huge following after doing the right thing. The more people see your brand, the more they are likely to follow you And the more you put the component of social media marketing into practice, the more you are likely to achieve this result.
5. It builds relationships and trust: Putting valuable contents before your audience every day does not only build relationships, It also builds trust and loyalty.
6. It builds and increases social proof: Of course, the more you make sales from running social media ads, the more people are likely to use your products and the more people are likely to use your products, the more possible it is for them to leave good reviews.
You can’t expect to get reviews from people when they are yet to use your product.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are other means of promoting your products that can also land you in getting reviews from your customers, but it doesn’t change the fact that social media marketing has a role to play in it too.
7. It leads to returning customers: This is actually a no-brainer as it is self-explanatory. The more you show ads to people, the more likely they are to turn to paying or returning customers.
The takeaway here is, consistency is key. A lot of people do not make a buying decision upon seeing an Ad once.
It takes them about 2 -4 times of seeing an Ad to make a decision whether or not to buy that product, most especially if they are just seeing or hearing of the brand for the first time.
8. It attracts investors: Of course, who doesn’t want to be a part of a company with a promising future. Trust me, investors will come knocking at your door if they realize you know what you are doing.
From following your ad, to tracing you to your social media handles, then monitoring you to know if the brand actually would make a hit in the nearest future, then begging to be an investor in your company.
Isn’t that amazing? You definitely don’t want to take these social media marketing strategies for granted.
11 Most Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategies Your Competitors Are Using In 2022
1. instagram stories: 500 million people use instagram stories every day and 51% of brands are taking advantage of this feature to keep their business top of mind and their audiences engaged.
Now is finally the time when brands need to get in and consistently be putting out multiple instagram stories a day. It’s a great way to get attention and totally worth it.
2. Short form video: Instagram reels and tiktok videos have proven to be highly engaging video formats getting tons and tons of reach, hundreds of thousands millions of views in some cases.
Short videos can be in the five to thirty second range, and they’re really what consumers are craving right now especially as tiktok is now the number one website for such content.
So, you need to make sure that short form video is part of your marketing strategy.
3. Audio apps: Audio apps had a really big rise in 2021 and that’s going to continue in 2022 on some level.
Apps like clubhouse are a unique way to connect with your audience. Industry leaders have the opportunity to make a name for themselves, build connections with their followers, and engage with others on a more personal level.
These audio experiences are now available on twitter, they’re available on facebook. I recommend you take a look at them and give them a shot but don’t waste all your time on them.
It might have been a little bit more of a fad in 2021 and it will normalize a bit in 2022.
4. Augmented reality filters on social media: So, this computer- generated-effects can be created and applied directly within apps like snapchat, instagram.
You know, even amazon now has augmented reality filters for the products that they sell so that you can super impose them at your house.
Also, facebook has them directly within their feed and directly within whatsapp. Although they’re not for every brand; the way that you can take advantage of it is for example: if I would like to create an ignite visibility, augmented reality experience, I could do that.
5. social shopping: This is huge and is only going to expand this year.
According to pinterest, 95 % of top searches don’t reference a specific brand. This means that social media shoppers are searching really for products, and this is leveling the playing field for companies everywhere.
Social commerce is exploding and if you are in retail, you’re selling anything online, obviously, this needs to be a big part of your strategy.
6. Now we talked about short-form video; but video in general needs to be part of your strategy.
You should be looking to pump out anywhere between one and five videos a week. This is what’s getting served much more in google now.
youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world that’s only growing, and in addition to that, you can take that content marketing and you can use that to turn into your video ads.
I highly recommend you crack the code and invest in video marketing this year. It’s going to put you ahead of your competition and it’s only a matter of time before this space becomes saturated as well.
7. Influencer marketing: For a few hundred dollars now, you can go and get an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers to promote your brand.
For thousands of dollars you can get an influencer with millions of followers to promote your brand; really powerful, take advantage of it.
8. Another big thing that’s going to be happening is regulations on social media.
So, in the coming years, there will be more regulations placed on these sites. And that’s going to have to deal with the time that users are actually spending on the site, filtering what people see, and there’s going to be more regulations in general on social media.
They’re going to be regulating where things are posted, and things like that. So you got to be really careful what you put out there.
9. Paid campaigns. What do I mean by that? Well, businesses are going to bring in more outside audiences and database to improve their targeting with paid social media ads.
What is all the data you have? What’s all your past customers? Who are all the people who went to your last event? Who are all the people who bought a specific product?
You need to map that to your paid social campaigns. These same people are on social networks. You can serve them whatever ads you want. You just need to know what your goal is, and what you’re trying to sell them, and how they interacted with your business before.
It’s so powerful, and now, with audience targeting going away a little bit, plus cookies going away on google, and then on social media sites like facebook, the apple ios update, now is a more important time than ever to bring in your outside data and leverage it for your paid social campaigns.
10. Consistency: Being consistent on your most-well-performed social media pages/platform is something you don’t want to take for granted.
Carrying out all of the above strategies without being consistent is just like a farmer going to a farm without his tools. So, you definitely want to take this part seriously.
11. Engagement with your followers: Engaging with your customers or followers on your social media pages will not only strengthen your relationship with them, it will also let you in on their wants and needs.
Create polls, answer questions, and address their pain points by posting relevant updates. Don’t just go on there and start posting things that you feel are okay.
Get to know your audience, be interactive and open-minded. Host a webinar if you can.
This will, however, give you more insights into what content they are likely to engage with more.
Knowing your customer’s pain point is important in social media marketing or any business at all.
FAQ
What Role Does Social Media Marketing Play In Stimulating Supply
Social media influences customer behavior and purchase intentions, which helps to stimulate supply.
Social media is where most people spend a significant portion of their time interacting with friends and keeping up with local events. As a result, it greatly affects customer trends.
For instance, businesses will reach a large number of people by posting about their goods and services on social media. They may be able to drive demand and subsequently supply by raising their visibility.
What happened in 2020 is a huge example that really went all in to do justice to this question.
Because of the lockdown in 2020, everyone was on their phone, joining every social media platform they could think of so as not to get bored or depressed.
This, however, increased the number of companies or businesses wanting to run ads. Why do you think they are interested in running ads?
That’s because they believe in the power of social media marketing, and believe me, you don’t want to know how many companies or businesses cashed out big time during this era.
Since everyone is on their phone almost 24 hours every day, it’s only right that these companies seize the opportunity.
These days, a lot of people prefer to shop online than to visit a physical store; which is an added advantage to businesses that have a strong presence online.
Read Also: 4 Best Free Tools To Create Facebook Frames 2022
What Are The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing?
1. It increases brand awareness
2. It increases sales
3. It increases traffic to your website or social media pages
4. It increases followers on your social media pages
What’s Your Best Social Media Marketing Tip?
- Join the top 7 social media platform
- Find a Niche
- Join groups relevant to your niche
- Answer questions in these groups
- Engage with your audience
- Be consistent
- Run ads if you have the resources to do so.
Does Social Media Marketing Really Work?
Yes, it does work; otherwise, you won’t find popular brands on all of these social media platforms.
Being present online is already a practice of social media marketing. You are letting people know you are available for business.
How Do I Improve My Social Media Presence?
You can improve your social media presence by:
- Knowing your target audience
- Addressing their pain points
- Following brands that are in the same niche as you
- Commenting on your competitors post
- Helping answer questions in the comment section of your competitor.
- Using social media marketing tools like hootsuite
- Joining groups relevant to your niche
- Helping solve problems in these groups by giving answers to their burning questions
- Being consistent
What Is The Most Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy?
This question has already been answered here.
Which Is The Best Social Media Website For Marketing?
Instagram is the best social media website for marketing.
What Is Online And Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is under the umbrella of online marketing.
That said, online marketing has to do with various internet marketing which ranges from google ads, pinterest ad, facebbook ads, instagram ads, etc.
Any ads that take place online is known as online marketing or internet marketing.
Conclusion
Properly carrying out all of the recommended social media marketing strategies will go a long way in increasing the growth of your business which is why you shouldn’t neglect any of them at all.
If you have any questions please feel to leave them in the comments below and I will reply as soon as I can.