According to HubSpot Blog Research for 2021, marketers' top social media goals are advertising their products/services and increasing their brand awareness.
Many brands, however, have trouble creating engaging content and reaching their target audiences. Social media plays a crucial role at the top of the funnel, so let's take a look at how to build a social media marketing strategy that works for your company.
What is social media marketing?
The goal of social media marketing is to create content that promotes your products and/or services, builds relationships with your target audience, and drives traffic to your website. A new platform or feature emerges every day, which makes social media marketing a constantly evolving field.
Marketing on social media is all about connecting with your target audience and customers where they are and how they interact with one another.
Although social media marketing as a whole is extremely valuable and beneficial to your business (as you'll see in the following section), your strategy will differ depending on which social networks your target audience uses.
Let's segment social media marketing by platform before going deeper:
- - Users: 1.9 billion daily active users worldwide
- - Audience: An even spread of Generation X and Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2C
- - Best for: Brand awareness; advertising
Facebook is the largest and most established social media platform. Offering both organic and advanced advertising tools, Facebook has become an invaluable tool for B2C businesses.
TikTok
- - Users: 1 billion active monthly global users
- - Audience: Primarily Gen Z followed by Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- - Best for: Short-form, creative video content; user-generated content; brand awareness
The first thing that comes to mind when you think of short-form video is probably TikTok. With no signs of slowing down, the platform's popularity has risen steadily since 2020. It's one of the best platforms for community building, with marketers ranking it in second place behind YouTube.
Instagram
- - Users: 1 billion monthly active users
- - Audience: Primarily Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2C
- - Best for: High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising
It has only been 12 years since Instagram launched, but the platform has already taken the world by storm. In terms of sharing visually compelling content, Instagram is where brands go. Its advanced ecommerce tools are another feature that makes the platform stand out.
Today, users can discover brands, browse their products, and complete a purchase all without ever leaving the Instagram app.
Twitter
- - Users: 211 million daily active users worldwide
- - Audience: Primarily Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- - Best for: Public relations; customer service; community building
While Instagram focuses on visuals, Twitter focuses on words. It began with 140-character Tweets, but has since expanded to include an audio tool called Twitter Spaces, a community-building tool called Twitter Communities, and Twitter Moments to share interesting content.
LinkedIn
- - Users: 774 million active users worldwide
- - Audience: Baby boomers, Generation X, and Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2B
- - Best for: B2B relationships, business development, and social selling
LinkedIn is Facebook's professional cousin. It may be the only platform with a clear audience definition: working professionals seeking new opportunities and networking.
B2B companies can build a community around key decision-makers and key decision-makers in their industry using this platform.
YouTube
- - Users: Over 315 million daily active users worldwide
- - Audience: Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
- - Industry impact: B2C and B2B
- - Best for: Brand awareness; long-form entertainment, and how-to videos
According to HootSuite, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world. In addition, marketers name it the best platform to build community.
Aside from being incredibly popular, its users also tend to stay on the platform for longer as it features mostly long-form content, making it the perfect platform for educational content sharing.
Snapchat
- - Users: 306 million daily active users worldwide
- - Audience: Primarily Generation Z
- - Industry impact: B2C
- - Best for: Brand awareness; advertising
Snapchat was one of the first services to provide ephemeral content in 2011. You could share content with your friends and it would expire after 24 hours.
The platform peaked in 2015 and has held strong since then. When Instagram introduced Stories, a similar feature with a different name, many thought the brand would disappear. Young adults, however, continue to use Snapchat.
Pinterest
- - Users: 444 million monthly active users worldwide
- - Audience: Primarily Millennials with a solid audience in Gen Z, Gen X and Baby Boomers
- - Industry impact: B2C
- - Best for: Visual advertising; inspiration
Think of Pinterest like a visual storyboard that allows users to get inspiration for everything from fashion to home decor.
85% of Pinners say that the first place they go when starting a new project is Pinterest. Furthermore, 80% of weekly Pinners report discovering a new brand or product on the site. Not only is it a great discovery tool, but brands can also use it to tell their stories visually.
Clubhouse
- - Users: 10 million weekly active users worldwide
- - Audience: Primarily Millennials
- - Industry impact: B2B and B2C
- - Best for: Visual advertising; inspiration
As soon as Clubhouse entered social media in 2020, it made a strong impression. Audio-only platforms allow users to build communities by starting interesting conversations with followers and strangers.
While it was still in beta testing, the platform gained some buzz for its invitation-only setup. Today, the platform is available on both IOS and Android devices globally. In addition, this platform works well for B2B and B2C businesses and leverages audio, which has made a huge comeback in recent years.
Having explained the basics of each social network, let's discuss why social media marketing is beneficial for businesses.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
What makes social media marketing so important? And how do you actually craft a social media marketing strategy that's right for your business?
Use of social media marketing is beneficial for your company for a number of reasons. Listed below are the most important reasons to take into account.
1. Increase your brand awareness
If you do not have a presence on social media, you are missing out on the potential to reach thousands, if not millions of people.
As a matter of fact, social media has been proven to improve brand awareness by increasing engagement. Engaged social media users leave comments, like, share, repost, and save their posts.
You can also increase brand awareness by driving traffic directly to your site. The easiest way to do this is to include links to your website in your profile, bio, and posts.
2. Generate leads and boost conversions
Sharing and promoting your products on social media can help increase conversions, lead generation, and sales since you're promoting to people who have already chosen to interact with you.
These are some examples of how you can generate more leads with social media.
- - Hold contests for your visitors and followers to participate in across your social media profiles.
- - Attach links to your website and offers in the bio section of your various profiles.
- - Host live streams to make announcements about products, updates or details about events happening in your company.
- - Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.
- - Sell your products through your social channels. You can, for instance, enable Facebook's Shop Section or Instagram's Shopping feature. These features allow your visitors and followers to view product information, such as price, material, and size. The platform will then allow visitors to purchase the product directly from you.
3. Foster relationships with your customers
You can build lasting relationships with your social media followers by connecting and engaging with them. This can be accomplished by post interactions, responding to their questions, and providing them with any assistance they may need.
To build trust and show your followers that you value their input and support, you can ask them questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways.
4. Learn from your competitors
Keep tabs on your competitors through social media - whether it's their social media tactics, the products they're promoting, the campaigns they're running, or their level of interaction.
By observing what is and isn't working for your competition, you can decide what should or shouldn't be changed in your company's approach.
Last but not least, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique.
What is the best way to create a social media marketing strategy?
Even though social media is constantly evolving, most foundational steps remain the same. It's basically the same process as developing a marketing strategy and narrowing it down to a specific channel.
1. Research your buyer personas and audience
Social media marketing strategies begin by identifying your buyer personas and target audience, so that you can target their interests and needs.
To do this, think about the people you're trying to reach and why, and how you would classify them as a group. A company that sells cigars and premium lighters might classify its target audience as wealthy men aged 40 - 65.
By considering your buyer personas and audience, you can determine what content will attract the type of followers and customers you hope to attract. Plus, discover how to engage your followers with engaging content.
2. Determine the social platform to market on
Social media marketers must decide wisely on which platforms to use to share their content.
It doesn't necessarily matter which social media channels your business should use - it's more about what your target audience needs and where they spend their time.
"It's important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow," said Andrew Delaney, former social media marketing manager at HubSpot. "It's better to be ahead of the curve than behind."
For example, if you are going for that target audience of wealthy men aged 40 - 65, you may want to focus the majority of your social media efforts on Facebook — because this particular age group covers the largest portion of users on the platform.
3. Establish your main metrics and KPIs
Your social media strategy should be data-driven, regardless of your goals or industry.
The key is to focus on the metrics that matter in social media. Take a closer look at data that directly relates to your goals rather than vanity metrics.
What are the metrics we are referring to? The breakdown is as follows:
- - Reach. Reach refers to how many unique users saw your post. What percentage of your content actually reaches users' feeds?
- - Clicks. The number of clicks on your content or account. To understand what drives curiosity and encourages purchases, tracking clicks per campaign is essential.
- - Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. It gives you an idea of how your audience perceives you and how willing they are to interact with you.
- - Hashtag performance. Which hashtags did you use most often? What were the most commonly used hashtags for your brand? Your future content can be shaped by these answers.
- - Organic and paid likes. In addition to the standard "Like" count, these interactions are attributed to organic or paid content. Due to the difficulty of gaining organic engagement, many brands turn to ads. Budgeting your ad spend and time can be easier when you understand the differences between different formats.
- - Sentiment. Measuring how your content, brand, or hashtag is received by your audience. Did your recent campaign offend your customers? Is your campaign hashtag associated with any particular sentiment? You should always dig deeper and find out how people feel about your brand.
4. Know your competition
By conducting a competitive analysis, you can determine who your competitors are and what they are doing well (and not so well). Getting an understanding of what's expected in your industry will help you set your own social media targets.
You will also be able to spot opportunities as a result.
Perhaps one of your competitors dominates Facebook, but has little interest in Twitter or Instagram. Rather than trying to wrest fans from a dominant player, you might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved.
Have a further reading about competitor analysis in this article from our knowledge center
5. Create unique and engaging content
In a world where there are billions of social media users, there's no doubt that some of your followers have also seen your competitors' or other businesses' content.
Therefore, you should create engaging social media content that allows viewers to interact with your brand and click the "Follow" button.
Not sure what constitutes engaging content?
Think about what your competitors are sharing and how you can promote your products in a unique way. Take advantage of the features offered by the platform you are using as well.
You can also use your current customers and promoters to help you generate content. Repost their content or encourage them to use a hashtag for sharing their experiences and pictures with your products.
Last but not least, leverage trends. Social media trends are always changing, especially on short-form video platforms like TikTok. It's okay to participate, but you still need to be intentional about your participation.
How often should you post on social media?
Your next question might be how often you should post content on your social media channels.
The rule of thumb is to share only quality content on social media. Meaning, there's a reason why you're posting. In this way, you'll be able to strike the right balance with your posting frequency.
Common mistake made by brands is focusing on quantity of content instead of the quality of content. Wrongfully thinking you have to post every day will clog your creativity and uniqueness, which then might churn your content.
It is easy to follow social media post frequency standards by industry and platform with the help of studies and resources available. Find what works for your audience, since every business is different.
Then, you can experiment with more or fewer posts as well as other factors such as the time of day you post on social media.
Analyzing your social media marketing results and impact
A social media metric is a measure of how successful your posts are and how they impact your audience and customers. The metrics may include data about your engagement levels, likes, followers, shares, and all other interactions.
The following are 10 metrics you should monitor:
- Engagement: This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your social media posts. Additionally, there are platform-specific engagement types such as "Saved" posts on Instagram and "Pinned" posts on Pinterest.
- Reach: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
- Followers: This is the number of people you have on your profile who have clicked your "Follow" button and see your content in their feeds regularly.
- Impressions: This is the number of times a post from your profile or page is seen, whether or not your audience members click on it. Often, this happens when someone scrolls through their newsfeed without clicking anything.
- Video views: On Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views each gets.
- Profile visits: The number of people who have opened your social media page is your number of profile visits.
- Mentions: This is the number of times your profile has been mentioned by audience members in their posts.
- Tags: This is when your audience adds the name of your company's profile or your hashtag to another post.
- Reposts: This is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.
- Shares: These are the posts your followers and audience take from your profile and share with their network.
How to Measure Social Media Metrics
You can review social media metrics in a variety of ways, For example, you can use the analytics tools built into the various platforms you use. Here are a few examples:
You might also choose to use an analytics and tracking tool such as Google Analytics. This is a great option if you want to track your social media and website metrics. Lastly, many social media scheduling solutions — as we reviewed earlier — have monitoring and tracking features automatically built-in.
All of these metrics tracking tools will give you a better understanding of what your followers and audience respond well to and what you should consider modifying to improve engagement.
Now that we've reviewed the benefits of social media marketing and how to build your strategy, let's talk about the various resources available to help you along the way.
Even though deciding your company's social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by learning about social media marketing trends and utilizing some of the numerous resources available. Now is the time to get started on your business' social media marketing strategy to grow your followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions.