The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing (SMM) in 2023

In 2023, the number of people using social media networks will reach 4.89 billion. That equates to nearly 62% of the world’s population. With figures like that, it’s no bit surprising that businesses invest so much in social media marketing.

Social media marketing is not just a fad. It is a tried-and-true channel used successfully by businesses of all sizes. You’ve probably heard at least one story about how a small brand outperformed the competition by implementing a fantastic social media campaign that went viral and thrust the brand into the spotlight.

Let’s delve deeper into social media marketing and learn how to run successful social campaigns.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing entails promoting a business and connecting with current and prospective customers through social media platforms and tools.

The desired outcomes can range from vague (such as brand building) to very specific (such as selling products through social commerce).

At its heart, social media marketing is about establishing relationships with your target audience in places where they already spend time online.

Social media marketing, unlike traditional advertising, enables two-way communication between people and brands. There is also the possibility of fostering a sense of community that encourages brand loyalty.

Social marketers do a lot more than merely watch TikTok videos all day.

Social media marketing activities may include the following:

• Planning and creating content: This activity is the most visible aspect of social media marketing. It involves creating content that is appropriate for each platform to connect with the audience present there.
• Scheduling and publishing content: This is the process of getting your content on the right platforms at the right time.
• Tracking social media analytics: It involves using analytics tools to track the performance of content, document the progress of social media goals, and devise strategies to improve overall response.
• Social listening: This activity involves using social media to keep a virtual ear to the ground and learn what people say about your brand and industry. It is also for researching competitors.
• Managing community: It involves connecting with followers to create an online community, then keeping that community active and engaged by replying to messages and generating opportunities for ongoing engagement.
• Advertising on social media: This activity involves using paid social media tools to bring your content to a wider audience. Collaborating with influencers or external content creators may also be part of this.

Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Successful Digital Marketing Plan in 2023

Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing

As said before, you can determine the specific business results of social media campaigns (for example, sales through social commerce) based on the goals you had established in the first place.

Other general benefits brands that are active on social media can enjoy are:

1. Get discovered easily

You’re more likely to be noticed by new potential customers if you post content on multiple social media channels tailored to your target demographic.

2. Have meaningful conversations with customers

It’s no surprise. Many companies use Twitter for customer support or Instagram Stories for Q&As. Social media marketing can help you get to know your audience in a more personal and informal setting.

3. Opportunities for employment

Social media marketing makes it quicker than ever to share a company’s culture and the people who run it with the rest of the world. Not only does this boost customer loyalty, but the hiring of brilliant new employees too!

4. Creating a community

Whatever your industry, social media marketing can help you connect with your target audience and other businesses.

With each app update, there are more creative ways to improve your social media marketing and meet your KPIs.

The advantages are numerous, and the more you learn about which social platforms and content work best for your goals, the more you’ll benefit from social media marketing!

Popular Social Media Platforms

There is a social network for every audience out there. According to a report from Hootsuite, these are our top choices, sorted by user count.

1. Facebook

With 2.934 billion global active users, Facebook remains the world’s most popular social platform. It is also the favourite platform of most social media users.

2. Instagram

With 1.386 billion active users, Instagram is the second most popular social network. Due to its frequent updates and algorithm changes, it is occasionally a source of dissatisfaction for social media marketers.

3. TikTok

TikTok has seemingly emerged from nowhere to become a highly significant social network for advertising in the past few years. It has 1 billion active users.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the only social network on this list dedicated to business. It means that its 875 million members are ready for business discussions and product research. It’s an essential platform for everyone working in B2B or any company that hires anyone at any time.

Business-to-consumer brands can also thrive on LinkedIn.

5. Snapchat

Snapchat may receive less attention than TikTok, but it is still an important platform with 576 million active users. It is far from being forgotten, as the platform is still expanding. Snapchat is especially useful for brands looking to reach an audience aged 18 to 24.

6. Twitter

Twitter has been in flux since Elon Musk purchased it in October 2022. However, social marketers continue to monitor the network’s 544 million active users, and its worth as a promotional tool remains strong heading into 2023.

Twitter is especially effective for brands that want to participate in real-time trends and conversations.

7. Pinterest

Pinterest has the fewest active users on this list, with 433 million. However, because of the time people spend on it, it is an effective platform for social media marketing.

People use Pinterest primarily to follow or research products and brands. The most important reason is that there is a crucial distinction from most other platforms, where people tend to prioritise connections with people over brands.

Key KPIs to Measure the Success of Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Any good social media strategy is data-driven. To track your progress towards your objectives, you’ll need to set some KPIs (key performance indicators), i.e., metrics that indicate how well you’re doing.

Your objectives should dictate which specific KPIs you should monitor. For example, if your end goal is to increase social media conversions by 25%, you’ll probably want to track KPIs like reach, CTR, and conversion rates.

Here are some other KPIs you might want to monitor based on your goals:

• Impressions / Reach:  Indicates the number of unique visitors to your posts.
• Engagement rate: Indicates how a particular social content is performing in terms of engagement. You can calculate this by dividing the total number of engagements (likes, comments, etc.) by the total number of impressions.
• Likes, comments, shares, etc.: Tracking individual engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.
• CTR or click-through rate:  If you use social media to boost traffic to your landing pages, you should probably track the click-through rate. It tells you how many people clicked on your links as a percentage of total impressions.
• Brand mentions: Indicates the number of times your brand got mentioned on social media. It can help you gain a better understanding of brand awareness.
• Brand sentiment: Indicates how people feel about your brand by analysing the context of brand mentions and whether people discuss you in a positive, neutral, or negative context.
• Response Rate: Indicates how many social comments your team responds to and how quickly they respond. It could be a useful KPI to monitor if your goals revolve around customer service.
• Share of voice: Indicates how much of the social media landscape your brand controls compared to your competitors.

Also Read: Ultimate Guide to Building a Sales Funnel in 2023

How to Develop an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy?

There are five basic steps to developing a successful social media marketing strategy to help your business grow online. Let’s go over them in depth.

1. Research

The first step is to research your buyer persona and target audience.

The goal is to learn everything you can about your target audience, including their requirements and interests.

For example, if you own a toy store for children under five years old, your customers will be children. However, the target audience will be new parents with young children. Or someone whose friend’s or close relative’s child’s birthday is approaching.

First, you will need to research what type of content your target audience consumes after identifying them.

The second thing you should research is what your industry competitors are doing.

The findings of these research projects will assist you in developing engaging content that your target audience can relate to and consume regularly.

2. Decide

Before you begin creating content, you must choose your social media platforms. As previously stated, each social platform emphasises a distinct way of creating content and is geared toward a different audience.

Take note that you do not have to be everywhere at all times. Nobody goes on LinkedIn to buy candy or shoes unless they are looking for a job at that company.

Select and commit to the platform(s) that are most effective for your brand.

3. Create

Now that you’ve identified your target audience, key social media platforms, and the content your competitors are posting, you’re ready to work your magic.

It’s time to be inspired by others, discover your audience’s interests, and create engaging content that motivates people to react.

4. Organise

When social media content is concerned, you need to be organised.

The very first step is to organise things while creating content. Create a proper social media content calendar that includes dates, content types, platforms, and other important information. I’ve written a comprehensive guide on how to make a social media content calendar. If you need assistance, you can use this one. All you have to do is choose a template and stick to it every week or month.

The next step in organising your content is to publish it in an organised manner. You’ll need a schedule to post your content on social media once you’ve completed your content calendar. There are many social media scheduling tools available to help you write captions, design posts, and schedule them across multiple platforms.

5. Analyse

The final and most crucial step in any social media marketing strategy is to analyse campaign performance.

Your work is not done after you’ve published the content. You can’t just sit back and hope to become a social media celebrity.

The final step is to monitor your posts and track their performance. Examine which types of content are performing the best. Ascertain that your efforts contribute to the achievement of your social media objectives. Of course, you can use several tools to track your progress and generate reports for analysis and course correction.

How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign?

Companies that excel at social media marketing use social media as intended and strive to have the best accounts in each channel—period.

• The best companies on Twitter initiate and participate in trending or humorous conversations with their followers (and even other brands).
• The best companies on Instagram publish content that encourages and excites their followers.

You get the idea. To develop a world-class social media strategy, follow this simple framework:

• Recognise and address the three aspects of social media marketing: monitoring, engagement, and conversion.
• Select the appropriate channels to participate in and learn the fundamentals of each channel.
• Create world-class social media content that drives engagement and action.
• Distributing social content effectively

Let us now go over each of these.

1. Three aspects of social media marketing

A thorough social media marketing strategy consists of three parts.

1.1 Monitoring

People will use their social accounts to talk about you whether or not you participate in social media.

In some cases, users will express their enthusiasm for your products, which you can use to your benefit and build social proof around your brand.

Potential customers will have queries about your product or service, which you can answer and eliminate purchasing objections.

Other users may have queries, complaints, support requests, or simply feedback; responding to these quickly will help you maintain a high level of contentment with your product or service.

Each of these discussions will take place whether or not you are present. They will happen without you unless you have a monitoring strategy in place.

The goal here should be to respond to all mentions of your brand or related terms (e.g., specific products) in a manner that those discussing your brand feel heard and cared for.

To begin, you must:

• Track and consolidate every brand mention and related terms. It is called social listening.
• Create a process for categorising mentions by type (praise, product queries, and support requests), as well as the steps to take for each brand mention type (for example, whether a mention needs to be shared, directed to a support page, forwarded to the sales team, etc.).

1.2 Engagement

Engagement is the most obvious use of social media, but it is also the one that most businesses get wrong.

You’ll only be able to build an audience on social media by sharing interesting and relevant content.

It does not imply that you should constantly extol the virtues of your product.

That is not what anyone wants.

Social media participation depends on your content marketing strategy.

Rather than thinking like an advertiser (only pushing your product), think like a publisher or media company, i.e., your engagement goal should be to create and distribute content that people enjoy and want to consume.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and you should disregard anyone who claims to have this cool trick or hack for creating compelling social media content.

To figure out what is best for your business, you must:

• Determine your target persona.
• Determine the primary role of each social media channel in your sales funnel.
• Tailor your message as per the social media channels in which you participate.

To prepare your engagement strategy, you must first work on your content marketing strategy, which you can learn more about by visiting this blog.

1.3 Conversion

Conversion sets a social media influencer apart from a social media marketer.

Having thousands of followers on your accounts will not benefit your business unless you can convert some of them into customers.

Social media is great for growing audiences but has a significant disadvantage for businesses.

Even if you own a social media profile, the channel on which you have built your profile still owns your followers.

Most social media platforms are designed to keep users from leaving the platform, which is why:

• There is no simple way to transfer all of your followers from one platform to another
• You have no contact information with which to contact them directly
• Your content’s visibility is determined by the algorithms of the social channels
• You must compete for attention with every other connection each of your followers has

As a result, your ultimate goal should be to convert your social audience into site visitors, leads, and customers.

You can turn social media audiences directly or indirectly.

Direct conversions occur when you ask your followers to carry out a task that will convert them into prospects or customers.

Indirect conversions, on the other hand, are merely getting your social audience to visit your site without requiring them to make a purchase or provide contact information.

Instead, you simply want them to visit so that they can be added to your remarketing audience, allowing you to target them with ads in the future.

Remember that conversion is not the only objective of your social channel, and attempting to convert your social audience too quickly can be detrimental to your overall strategy. As a result, you must balance this with monitoring and engagement, or you will come across as too sales-focused.

After you’ve developed a strategy for each component of your social media strategy, it’s time to choose the channels you’ll use to implement it.

2. Selecting a social media channel

More than anything else, this step is about self-control.

New social channels keep popping up now and then and gain millions of users overnight. That just doesn’t imply you should dive in.

Instead, you must be deliberate in your choice of social media channels.

You can use three simple criteria:

1. Does your target persona use this channel?

This one is self-explanatory. Ensure that the people you would like to reach are active users of the social channel in which you intend to participate.

2. What role will you play in the channel? Will you use it for tracking, engagement, or conversion?

For example, regardless of whether or not you intend to support people via Twitter, its users expect companies to provide some support. So if you decide to use Twitter, monitoring should be part of your channel strategy.

3. What kind of content do users consume, and how do they consume it? Do you have the necessary skills and time to create this content?

Each social channel is centred on a keystone format.

Instagram, for example, focuses heavily on high-quality photography and video. So if you decide to start an Instagram account, you won’t be able to use stock images with text overlays. You’ll need to invest time and resources in creating professional-looking content.

Furthermore, different channels exhibit distinct consumption behaviours: active vs. passive.

2.1 Active channels

Active channels are those where users have the intent to engage. They know what they want to see and actively seek it out, typically on Pinterest and YouTube.

For such channels, you can create content, optimise it for the channel’s search engine, and gradually increase views and engagement.

It means you don’t have to constantly publish new content. You could create it once and get views, engagement, and conversions for years to come.

However, this does not make inactive channels any easier to manage. You’ll have to devote a significant amount of time to optimising and getting your content to the top of those searches.

2.2 Passive channels

Passive channels are those where users simply browse and do not have a specific intent.

For example, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter seem to be mostly inactive channels.

To participate in inactive channels, you must constantly push new content into people’s feeds to maintain views, engagement, and conversions.

Content creation for passive channels necessitates staying on top of relevant conversations in the social channel and maintaining a never-ending content calendar.

Channel selection necessitates an understanding of each channel. Below is a cheat sheet we have prepared for the most popular social channels to make things easier for you.

Social Media Channel Cheat Sheet

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3. Creating social content

Forget about the text + image + hashtag + link combo. That is not the case.

There is no magic formula for creating great social media content.

For your audience to like, share, and discuss your content, you must first understand how a modern user consumes content online.

You, fortunately, are one of them.

What was the last time you watched an Instagram video without scrolling away halfway through? Do you look at your phone while watching Netflix?

You get the idea.

The attention spans of online audiences are shorter than ever, and there is no shortage of competition for their attention.

Creating world-class social media content is similar to creating a world-class content marketing strategy in that you must:

• Develop a thorough understanding of your target customers (including their desires, wants, and needs). It is known as creating target personas.
• Create single-minded value propositions (SMVP) by crafting simple messaging for each of your target personas at each stage of the funnel.
• Choose your content types by adapting your message to the appropriate format for each social channel.
• Create attention-grabbing content by creating content that people want to consume and that helps you achieve your business goals.

Also Read: An Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics in 2023

4. Distributing social content

You only have one step left, but it’s a big one:

You must ensure to reach your intended audience.

There are three main distribution methods: owned, paid, and earned.

Owned distribution entails sending your content to your current audience.

You can’t rely solely on owned distribution unless you have a large existing fan base.

Paid distribution is exactly what it sounds like: you pay to have your content seen by your intended audience.

You could, for example, use a social channel’s advertising platform.

You could also pay someone who already has your target audience to promote your message.

Finally, earned distribution entails convincing others to share your content without payment.

The first step is to create content that is so good that people want to share it.

After that, you must encourage people to share. You can, for example, contact influencers mentioned in your content to let them know they’ve been included.

You can also ask your audience to share with their network.

A comprehensive social media marketing strategy should include distribution via owned, paid, and earned channels.

Social Media Marketing: Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. How to involve and engage your customers?

To get your customer to be truly involved, you must engage them. For many people, engagement—defined as the sum of reshares, likes, comments, and clicks—is a strong indicator of social success. How do you increase the number of people talking about and engaging with your brand on social media?

a. Pose questions
b. Share behind-the-scenes footage
c. Hold a contest or a chat

Q2. How does social media marketing work?

Social media marketing entails promoting your content and interacting with your target audience on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Social media is used by digital marketers to raise brand awareness, generate leads, and enhance consumer engagement.

Q3. Who is social media marketing for?

SMM is for everyone. Every business requires a social media presence.  It makes no difference whether you operate a tiny mom-and-pop store or a big corporation. Social media is a vital component of your company’s marketing strategy.

Social media platforms enable you to interact with consumers, raise brand awareness, and increase leads and sales. With over three billion people using social media every month, the number of users and engagement on major platforms is only growing.

On a Concluding Note

Developing a successful social media strategy isn’t easy. However, by addressing the points in this article and assembling the ideal social media tool stack, you should be able to develop a foolproof social media strategy and accomplish your objectives, whatever they may be.

If you want to keep improving your digital marketing strategy even more, read our blogs in the ‘Knowledge Base‘ category.

Get in touch with us, today!