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What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)? | A Comprehensive Guide

 

By Admiles Nov 11, 2024

 

Social media marketing (SMM) involves the use of various marketing strategies to capture consumer attention on social media platforms.

 

With over 62.3% of the world's population being social media users, these digital platforms serve as high-value consumer hubs, for businesses looking to connect with prospects or immediate buyers.

 

 

 

Understanding Social Media Marketing 

 

As a branch of digital marketing, social media marketing involves the use of digital social hubs like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, Reddit, etc., to promote products and services and engage existing consumers or prospects.

 

The growing number of social media users serves as the biggest motivation for businesses to spend their marketing budgets on social media campaigns. 

 

According to data from smartinsights, over 62.3% currently use social media, averaging 2 hours 20 minutes daily. 

 

Interestingly, this figure accounts for 94.2% of internet users having social media accounts, making these digital platforms rich in high consumer attention. 

 

To put this in raw numbers, 5.07 billion people use social media platforms, freely giving off, in excess, valuable data that enables businesses to easily target and attract them.

 

As such, well-planned out social media marketing campaigns often result in high sales and consumer or user onboarding. 

 

How Does Social Media Marketing Work? 

 

With marketers reporting an average ROI of $5.20 for every $1 spent on social media marketing, it begs the question: how does social media marketing actually work? 

 

At the fundamentals, social media marketing works through varying marketing strategies, unique to social media platforms, to capture consumer attention and drive engagement or action. 

 

To fully grasp how social media marketing works and enables businesses to increase sales, it's essential to understand the application of various top strategies often employed by marketers and brands to guide their marketing campaigns to a success. 

 

Top Social Media Marketing Strategies:

 

● Organic Marketing

 

In social media marketing, organic marketing refers to strategies involving the use of content to promote brand awareness without paid advertising. 

 

Organic marketing relies on engaging the audience through posts, stories, comments, and shares to build a loyal follower base and drive engagement. 

 

This social media marketing strategy focuses on content quality, fostering community, and using platforms' native tools like hashtags, trends, or collaborations to increase reach.

 

With organic marketing, every content put out by a brand or business is a potential advertisement, this strategic use of every day content or product or service updates to drive visibility and engagement enables businesses to cut down on broader marketing spend, while engineering social trends to attract prospects. 

 

● Native Advertising 

 

Native advertising, in relation to social media marketing, refers to paid ads that blend seamlessly with the platform’s organic content, making them appear as part of the regular user experience. Native ads are designed to match the look, feel, and function of the platform on which they appear, so they feel less intrusive and more engaging compared to traditional ads.

 

Popular examples of native advertising include sponsored posts, In-feed video ads, story ads and promoted listings.

 

● Influencer Marketing

 

Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy where brands collaborate with influencers—people with a strong, loyal following on social media platforms—to promote products or services. 

 

Influencers use their reputation, expertise, or popularity to sway the purchasing decisions of their followers. These social campaigns can take any form including sponsored posts, product reviews, tutorials, giveaways, and contests. 

 

● Ambassador Marketing

 

In social media marketing, ambassador marketing is a strategy where brands partner with ambassadors—typically long-term, loyal customers or dedicated fans of the brand—to promote their products or services consistently over time via their social media accounts.

 

Ambassadors often have a genuine connection to the brand, using and endorsing products regularly, which creates authentic advocacy and word-of-mouth promotion. Unlike influencers, ambassadors tend to have an ongoing relationship with the brand rather than a single campaign collaboration.

 

● KOL Marketing (New)

 

KOL marketing (Key Opinion Leader marketing) in social media is a strategy where brands collaborate with trusted, influential figures—known as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)—to promote their products or services to a targeted audience. 

 

KOLs are individuals who have deep expertise and respect within a specific industry or niche, and they typically hold significant authority and credibility. They differ from typical influencers by focusing more on subject-matter expertise and less on sheer follower count.

 

KOL marketing is popular in fields where specialized knowledge is important, such as beauty, fitness, technology, or finance because followers are more likely to trust expert opinions in these areas.

 

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing 

 

Social media marketing offers various advantages that can help businesses grow and connect with their audience more effectively than traditional marketing. Here are 9 key benefits to social media marketing:

 

1. Greater Brand Awareness

 

Social media marketing equips companies with the opportunities to connect with a wide range of people and accelerate their brand recognition.

 

Social media platforms serve as a “discovery portal” for most of its users. This means that in addition to keeping in-touch with friends and family, the average social media user looks forward to discovering different things when they log into their social media accounts. 

 

This consumer demand for “fresh ideas and things” creates a room for businesses of varying sizes and offerings to get “discovered” by prospects through their promotions campaigns on social platforms. 

 

2. Cost-Effective Advertising

 

Compared to traditional advertising, social media marketing can be more affordable, enabling companies to reach target audiences without incurring significant expenses.

 

From native advertising to organic marketing, social media marketing offers diverse cost-effective opportunities for businesses or brands to market their products and services to prospects without breaking the bank. 

 

3. Targeted Advertising

 

One of social media marketing's biggest advantages over traditional marketing strategies is that it allows for effective targeting.

 

Businesses can reach particular audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors thanks to social media platforms' sophisticated targeting options.

 

It is essential to note that this benefit is irrespective of what strategy is being deployed. For most traditional marketers, the concept of “targeting” with social media could feel limited to “native advertising” but that is simply not the case. 

 

Social media platforms are generally designed to target and match-make content with specific audiences or markets. This means that even with organic marketing, social media in-built machine learning algorithms will push specific content to specific target markets provided the content is well optimized for said market segment. 

 

4. Insightful Analytics

 

Modern social media platforms offer content analytics tools to enable creators and users to track their activities on the network. 

 

These insightful analytics are valuable for businesses to track the performance of their campaigns, monitoring consumer behavior and determining effective strategies for future marketing efforts. 

 

5. Increased Brand Loyalty

 

Consistent, interesting content and frequent interactions can help cultivate a devoted clientele that is more likely to recommend and return.

 

As such, leveraging social media marketing is among the best marketing investments any company or business can make. 

 

6. Competitive Advantage

 

Through the development of a distinctive brand identity and the ability to engage with a devoted audience, social media marketing enables smaller companies to compete with larger brands.

 

7. Humanizes Brands

 

Social media marketing enables businesses to show off a more personal, relatable side, building trust with customers through authentic content and interactions.

 

8. User-Generated Content

 

Interacting with consumers on social media inspires them to produce brand-related content (such as reviews, images, and testimonials), which can be utilized to draw in new prospects.

 

9. Global Reach

 

Social media marketing puts business in front of a global market, unlocking far larger business opportunities and potentials. 

 

As a network of global users actively seeking to discover the next best of things, social media platforms are an asset for businesses to tap into a global market of consumers or prospects. 

 

The Bottom Line

 

Social media marketing goes beyond running a Facebook or X ad, it spans through various social engineering strategies, all tailored to help brands connect more deeply with its target market.

As a branch of digital marketing, it enjoys the cost-effectiveness of digital advertising, and the immediate access to a global network of target prospects and tools for maximum results.