Social Media Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide For Business Owners

Social Media Marketing is a great way your business can connect with customers, build your brand, drive website traffic, and increase sales.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media is one of the largest avenues of communication today. It connects people through intimate conversations, fun memes, and short tweets about their lives. While that’s the way it started, it’s also grown into one of the most impactful forms of marketing available today. Social media marketing, then, is the marketing strategy that focuses on using social media to build brand recognition, website traffic, and customer engagement. What’s all of that mean?
network of people connected through social media

Consider a Few Key Statistics

Why does social media marketing matter and, perhaps most importantly, why has it become a key component of any marketing strategy for small to large companies?

  • There are 3.2 billion people around the world using social media – that’s 42 percent of the globe’s population, according to a study from Emarsys.
  • 54 percent of people using social media are researching products before they buy them, according to GlobalWebIndex
  • All age groups are using it (that means all of your customers are using it). A study from eMarketer found 90.4 percent of all millennials using it, 48.2 percent of all baby boomers using it, and 77.5 percent of Generation X use it.
Considering this, it’s clear to see that this is where your customer base is. If you don’t advertise here – in the right manner – you’re missing opportunities to connect with your customers. It’s that simple.
It seems complex. It may even seem like you’re too far behind to get the attention away from your competitors. That’s not the case, and it’s one of the best reasons to use social media marketing itself. Any company of any size and often with even a moderate budget can see significant returns from their investments in social media. It’s that good.

What Makes Up Social Media Marketing?

There are several components that make up social media marketing. Its ultimate goal is to use social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with would-be or current customers. You are doing this to sell, but not just in the traditional manner. You’re also using these platforms to help people get to know your business and to build your brand. In social media marketing, there’s much more to the process than just placing a few posts on these sites and waiting for visitors. There’s a whole realm of aspects of this method of marketing that makes it successful. This centers on a few key areas.

#1: Developing a Strategy

Any good marketing campaign has a strategy. It lays out the details of what you hope to accomplish through the marketing campaign and how you plan to do that. This means establishing goals for engagement – or connections with your customers – as well as building brand awareness. You’ll also need to define who your target customers are, which platforms they use, and what type of content is most interesting to them.

#2: Publishing Content

After creating a plan for what you want to publish on these social media sites, the next step is to get it written and published. It’s important to have visual components to this process, too, such as video and photos, but you’ll need to create content that’s very interesting. Aim to create content that’s so good they have to stop and read it – and then they want to share it with others. You’ll need to publish content on a consistent basis to remain connected and “in the mind’s eye” of the customer. That means creating a schedule that allows for publishing frequently enough to reach a large customer base.

#3: Listen and Then Engage

The key is that you have to keep going after publishing to do well in social media marketing. There are two aspects to this step.
Listen: When you post your content on social media, you’ll want to watch what happens. Listen to what people are telling you and find out what they really want and need. Listening is not just about your content, but also the reviews people leave for you online and the connections they make with you on social media.
Engage: Engagement is the interaction with people through these platforms. Sometimes, people will come to you with problems and concerns. Other times, they are downright angry. Social media marketing gives you a tool to engage with them, fix the problems, and wow them with service. It also allows you to talk to them about topics that matter that may influence your business decisions later.

#4: Dive in to the
Data

Did that last live video work for your social media strategy? What about that fun post you put up on Facebook? To know how you are doing, so you can tweak and improve, you need to gather and analyze data. There are many times when your company is going to be mentioned on social media that has nothing to do with your pages. You want to learn about that and what it means. There are tools that make this easier, but analytics are critical to knowing where to go.

#5: Advertise, Too

There are components of social media marketing that involve advertising. You’ll want to be on these pages where your customers are going. After all, those are prime areas for advertising to your customers. There are ways to do that, too. You’ll be able to use the sites’ tools to create well-defined target audiences and then develop strategies for communicating with and interacting with those customers. There’s no doubt that social media marketing ads actually get traffic to websites and results to bottom lines

Overwhelmed by the Process?

Social media marketing starts very simply. You just need to put your time in to build pages that are effective, and that connect with your audience. You also want to ensure you’re working closely with professionals who may be able to help you to build a platform and develop the proper content.

Recognize the Results

Why do all of this? To rehash, consider the following:

  • Your customers use social media. You want to be where they are.
  • Social media marketing is what your competitors are using.
  • It’s not overwhelmingly expensive. You can tailor campaigns for just about any price point.
  • It’s a proven method of increasing brand awareness.
  • It’s one of the most effective methods for building sales and securing new leads.

Because of the way it works, every investment you make into social media is going to produce results for months or years to come. That’s because social media marketing allows people to interact, share, and tell others about you. It also gives them the ability to find answers to their problems faster and more efficiently. Quite often, companies without a lack of social media presence find it hard to compete for those leads.

Are you intrigued by social media? Even if you’re not getting the results you want from the efforts you’ve put into it, there’s a goldmine of opportunity here when it is done well.

Learn More About Social Media Marketing

Are you still wondering if social media marketing is right for your business?  The short answer is – it’s a must. Once you learn the ins and outs of how social media marketing works, and why it’s helping so many businesses like your own, you’ll love the results – they’re Mighty Good! 

Mighty Good Marketing is a digital marketing agency located in Flowery Branch, GA and serving the metro-Atlanta area. Curious about improving your business’s Social Media Strategy? Contact us today at 1-866-935-5699 or fill out our form to schedule a free consultation.

Why Choose Mighty Good Marketing?

Your business is unique; your marketing should promote the advantages of choosing your brand over others. We spend the time to learn what your company delivers and what makes your brand unique. Many other marketing companies deliver a one-size-fits-all marketing solution to a specific industry. They use the same messages for all their customers – customers that may, in fact, be your direct competitors. We deliver custom solutions for your business.