Social Media Marketing Bible 2022: Ultimate Guide and Strategy
Written by Crescencio Zhao
We will walk you through everything about social media marketing from definition to strategies in this ultimate guide.
Introduction
With the increasing reach, social media has become the largest marketplace nowadays. Social media marketing has grown immensely over the past few years. After all, nearly 4.9 billion people use social media per Statista’s forecast.
Whether you have a small audience or a large one, these platforms are an opportunity for you to grow your business. Engaging with and reaching an audience on social media has been an effective marketing tactic to acquire business growth.
Whereas, with new platforms popping up constantly, staying on top of social media trends and what works best for your brand can be difficult.
However, with the right knowledge and strategy, your business can make a hit on social media. If you’re ready to take your social media presence to the next level and leverage it for your business’s growth, read on for everything you need to know about SMM.
Definition: What is Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is a strategic marketing approach that uses social media to acquire customers for your business.
With the goal of promoting products or services, SSM is to engage with audience on social media to build a brand reputation in multiple ways, such as paid content, and organic content. It helps businesses increase their visibility and serves as a way to build relationships with potential and current customers.
Basically, it’s the promotion of a brand or product on social media, like YouTube or Instagram. SSM has several different dimensions or aspects to take into account for every marketer, including marketing content to post, platforms to choose from, and marketing campaign type to take.
1. SSM Content
There are several different formats of social media marketing content to engage with your audience on social media.
Regarding content formats, images, videos, and posts on various topics, such as product updates, industry news, and even fun trivia facts, are just a few ways you can use social media for marketing. Since the pandemic in 2020, live-streaming events have sprung up as the most popular content format on social media to do marketing.
Different types of content can generate different marketing results. Based on your marketing goals and business model, whether using videos or posts as your main marketing content entails marketers’ premeditation.
2. SSM Platforms
In addition to content formats, choosing which platforms to roll out your marketing campaigns has also to be aligned with your general marketing strategy.
There are a variety of different platforms you can use for social media marketing. The most popular social media marketing platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Different platforms gather groups of audiences with different demographical profiles, such as interests, gender, and age, among others. Plus, different platforms support different formats of content to post. Therefore, marketing content and platform are two factors that should be considered together. Choosing the right platform is the key to success of your social media marketing campaigns.
3. SSM Campaign Types
Social media marketing campaign types decide everything about your overall marketing strategy. Marketing goals and budget will affect your decision of which type to choose. We will dive deeper into the following section regarding social media marketing type.
Organic content marketing, social influencer marketing, social media advertising are three major types. Moreover, live-streaming, as a new format of SSM content, can also be defined as a new campaign type, which is more preferred by eCommerce brands when doing social commerce.
Each of them has a unique strategy to implement for every brand. Some brands adopt only one of them that mostly fits them, while some run all three marketing campaigns to maximize marketing results.
State: 2022 Social Media Marketing Key Statistics
92.1%: Social Media Marketing Usage Rate
According to a survey conducted by Statista, it was indicated that over 92% of US companies use social media to do marketing in 2022, through organic and paid content. Nearly 10 years ago, the share stood at only 86.2% in 2013.
$230 Billion Spent in Social Media Advertising Worldwide
As one of type of social media marketing tactics, advertising spending accounts the bulk of all social media marketing budget. Compared in 2021, the global social media advertising market was estimated to increase from 2021’s 181.19 billion U.S dollars to 229.56 billion in 2022. By 2026, the total value of the market is expected to increase to 358 billion U.S. dollars.
97% of B2C Marketers Use Facebook
Regarding the choice of platform, as business type varies, Facebook becomes the primary option for 97% of B2C companies
94% of B2B Marketers Use Linkedin
Featured by job seeking and business social, Linkedin become a major marketplace for B2B companies. In the US, 94% of B2B marketers choose Linkedin as the main platform to do social media marketing.
71% of Consumers Make Purchase Decision by Social Media
71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family
Benefits: Why does Social Media Marketing Matter?
Brands do marketing where people’s attention gathers. As discussed in the last section, several stats indicate that people are paying most of their attention and spending ever-increasing time on social media apps and content on it.
Social media marketing has been an indispensable part of brands’ marketing strategies. There is a variety of reasons for social media marketing’s necessity.
But how does SMM benefit brands and why it is important? In this section, we will dig out SSM’s benefits and tell you how each of them works to reach your marketing goals.
1. User Acquisition Shortcut
At the top of the marketing funnel, user acquisition is the cold start for all businesses. It is usually the hardest step and always cost-consuming. However, for those brands who succeed in their social media marketing campaigns, SMM becomes the shortcut to acquiring customers.
For instance, if one of your brand videos goes viral on social media, or one of your hashtag campaigns garners explosive likes or shares, you are doing free advertising on social media, saving millions of dollars that are supposed to invest into Google ads or Meta Business.
Users are grouped into different niche audiences, based on topic hashtags they engage with, channels they follow, and tags they are given by recommendation algorithm. If you impress the right audience on social media, limitless users are waiting for your to acquire.
2. Brand Value Delivery and Awareness Building
Social media networks provide opportunities for everyone to create content, express opinions in public, and connect with everyone else on this planet. So does for brands.
When standing at the viewpoint of brands, social media’s functionalities exactly meet the brand’s expectation of marketing, posting brand copies, and news, communicating brand values and missions and interacting with potential customers and acquired users.
With an official profile on social media, brands can publish anything at any time, as long as legitimately. A solid social presence for brands means having another strong speaking mouth than websites.
Growth on social media can take your business growth to the next level.
3. Increase Customer Engagement
As the next step after user acquisition on the marketing funnel, activating users and increasing user retention are two key tasks for businesses to gain conversion from acquired customers. A social network is exactly such a place to engage with potential customers.
When your social content reaches the right audience and influences them with the right content, you have successfully acquired some customers for your brand, at least for your profile on social.
The rest you should do is continually create content to interest them, activate them, and convey brand value to them to let them know who you are, what you do, and what you can bring to them. When successfully inspiring them, they will engage with your content. Engagements equal leads!
A professional social media marketer will make their social account a customer community, such as through Facebook group, where brands can inform new and old customers of newly released features, and membership events, and deal with user feedback.
A social media customer community brings the brand closer to customers and helps increase brand value perception for customers.
Types: Social Media Marketing Types
Introduced briefly in the first section, social handle influence building, social influencer marketing, and advertising are the three main social media marketing types adopted by most marketers. In this section, let’s discuss them one by one.
1. Organic Content Marketing
This type of marketing is the most cost-effective but hardest one, compared with the other two. Same as SEO for websites, organic content creation on social media brings organic traffic to your social accounts for free.
The successfully organic content building saves millions of dollars which are used in advertising spending. To gain expected organic followers through content, you must devote huge creativity to it, constantly do A/B tests for posts, improving and optimize tirelessly.
Whereas this type of marketing entails marketers’ huge patience due to its slow, steady, but positive results.
2. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been a proven social media marketing tactic for most marketers. As one of the main types of digital marketing, running social media marketing campaigns has been adopted by more brands, especially by e-commercers and APP dealers.
For startups or brands without a large social presence, influencer marketing is a quicker way to lift brand awareness on social media. Sponsoring influencers with a large following to post content to promote your products or services can also effectively impress your target customers.
This type of marketing is more of word-of-mouth marketing. Sometimes, paying influencers with authority in your niche to speak for your brands is stronger than speaking through your own mouth.
Featured Resource: Influencer Marketing Bible: Ultimate Guide and Strategy
3. Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is another paid way to do SSM. In essence, social media advertising is when you pay to have your brand content appear in the feed of users who haven’t followed your brand channel on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
The goal is to get as many people to see and share your content as possible. You can advertise on social media to reach the broadest group of people possible. You can also target certain groups with specific features or information about your product or service.
Usually, brands are allowed to run ad campaigns on social media when registering a business account on corresponding platforms, such as TikTok for Business, Meta Business, Twitter Ads, etc. When having a business account, brands can launch independent campaigns or directly promote your posts as ad content.
Social media ads can be targeted based on location, gender, interests, age, and other factors. It’s a great way to test the waters before making a big investment. Before you decide whether or not social media advertising is right for you, take some time to evaluate your goals and your budget.
Platforms: Social Media Platforms for Marketing
It’s important to choose social media platforms that are most relevant to your particular business. It can be decided by which kind of audience you are going to target.
Before choosing which social platform to do marketing on, you should conduct deep research over platforms’ user demographic, content format supported, user scale, and countries allowed to operate, among others.
YouTube
YouTube is a popular social media platform that allows you to host videos, and create videos. With 2.6 billion active users each month.
Facebook has been one of the most popular social networks for some time now. With 2.93 billion active users as of 2022, it’s no surprise it’s still one of the top places to promote your business.
TikTok
TikTok is one of the latest social media platforms to go viral, with an estimated MAU of 1.8 billion.
Instagram is a visual-first social network, which means it’s the perfect place for marketing your business if you sell products that are visually appealing. MAU: 2 billion
LinkedIn is often overlooked as a social network, but it still boasts 830 million members. Famous people like Michelle Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are all active on this social network.
MAU: 48 million
Quora
Quora is a Q&A forum where people come to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics. MAU: 100 million
With 433 million monthly active users, Pinterest is a popular social media platform that is often overlooked by many business owners. You can create boards to organize your content, including images, videos, and more.
Strategies: Social Media Marketing Guidance
Like all marketing strategies, your social media marketing efforts need to be well-planned and measured. Before you get started, it’s important to have a goal in mind for your social media strategy. In other words, you need to know what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts.
Once you have goals in place, it’s important to create a strategy and outline for achieving them. Here are a few tips to guide your social media marketing step by step.
Step One: Define your Audience
The first step to creating a successful social media marketing strategy is defining your audience. It’s important to understand who your customers are, what they like, and what they respond to. This will help you choose the appropriate social media platforms to engage with your audience.
If you sell software, your target audience would be company owners or department leaders. If you run a sneaker store, your target audience would be those like jogging or playing balls.
The audience decides which platform to do marketing on and what kind of content to create.
Step Two: Choose Platform
It’s important to choose social media platforms that are most relevant to your particular business. And users on different social platforms represent different audiences.
For B2B companies, Linkedin will be the most appropriate marketplace for marketers. For makeup brands, Instagram and TikTok, which Gen Z use mostly, are platforms that fit their brand style.
And social media platforms differ in content format to post. Pinterest and Instagram feature in image posting. YouTube is for long videos and TikTok is for short videos. Quora and Reddit are knowledge and expertise-sharing communities, while LinkedIn is more of a community for career development and relationship building.
Step Three: Set Up Goals
Next, you’ll want to create a strategy for achieving your social media goals. It’s important to set realistic goals you can actually achieve and then measure your efforts as you go.
For startups, increasing following to lift their social presence is the primary task, then driving more followers for their social channels is the essential goal. For some mature businesses with goal of increasing revenue, leads generating and sale conversion would be their goal.
Different goals can be reached through different marketing content. So, when goals are set up, marketers should start to draft content plans to post on social media.
Step Four: Plan your content
After you’ve created a strategy for achieving your social media goals, you’ll want to think about what types of content you’ll be posting to social media. It’s important to mix up your content and post on a consistent basis.
Content creation should be as engaging as possible to stand out and provides viewers with a reason to click that “Follow” button and interact with your brand.
Step Five: Establish Metric Measurement and KPIs
Regardless of what you want to accomplish or where you work, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Your social media metrics should focus on the right ones. Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, examine data that connects to your goals directly. Which metrics are we referring to? Please see the list below:
- Impressions/Reaches: Content impressions or reaches how many unique social accounts see your content in their feed.
- Engagement: Engagement consists of likes, shares, dislikes, video plays, comments, and other actions users take to interact with your account.
- Clicks(and Rate): Clicks refer to how many times the links in your posts are clicked by the audience. And clicks through rate can be used to measure your post attractiveness.
Tools: Social Media Marketing Tools
There is a variety of types of tools to support every aspect of your SSM, ranging from social media management tools, social listening tools, social media analytics tools, and social media marketing tools.
– NoxInfluencer – NoxInfluencer is comprehensive marketing software for Influencer Discovery and Outreach, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Running, and Social Media Analytics.
– Hootsuite – Hootsuite allows you to manage all of your social media accounts from one place. This makes it easy to schedule content and track your progress across multiple platforms.
– Sprout Social – Sprout Social is a social media management tool that allows you to streamline your social media efforts. This tool is helpful if you have a large social media presence since it allows you to manage several accounts at once.
– Buffer – Buffer allows you to schedule posts on your social media accounts. This tool also includes analytics, making it easy to track your progress.
– Ahrefs – Ahrefs is a social media monitoring tool that allows you to track your brand’s mentions on social media. You can use this tool to track your progress and see what’s working best for your brand.
– Google Trends – Google Trends allows you to track the popularity of various social media terms. This makes it easy to see what is and isn’t working for your brand.
Bottom line
Social media marketing is a strategic approach that uses social media to acquire and engage with a company’s audience and build a reputation. It helps businesses increase their visibility and serves as a way to build relationships with potential and current customers.
There are several different aspects of social media that you can use to engage with your audience. There are a variety of different platforms you can use for social media marketing. The most popular social media marketing platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
With so many social media platforms out there, each with a unique user base, it can be challenging to determine which ones are most relevant for your brand’s social media marketing efforts.
It’s important to choose platforms that are most relevant to your business and understand how they work. Additionally, you’ll want to create a strategy for your social media marketing efforts. With the right strategy in place, you can be sure your social media efforts are successful.
