How to Do Social Media Marketing? – Complete Guide with FAQs, Tips, Advice, & More   

In the digital age, online marketing methods are far more effective than traditional marketing methods of the past. 

Not only are they much easier to execute and easier to monitor but they’re also a lot more cost-efficient. 

Social media marketing is one of the most effective and popular online marketing methods out there for businesses. 

What is Social Media Marketing? 

Social media marketing is a technique through which you utilize different social media platforms to achieve goals for your business. Some examples of these goals are audience growth, improving conversion rates, customer service, and more. 

It involves many different aspects such as creating and publishing engaging content, interacting with commenters, as well as running paid advertisements. 

Some common social media platforms used by brands for marketing include: 

• Facebook 
• Twitter
• Instagram 
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• TikTok 

Youtube technically isn’t a social media platform but it certainly can be used in a similar way to increase your reach as a brand. This would obviously be through long-form video content related to your brand’s niche. 

With new features being added to platforms as well as new platforms popping up, the world of social media marketing is constantly changing. Hence, as a social media marketer, it’s very important for you to keep up with trends in order to keep your brand relevant. 

When social media marketing first started out, it merely consisted of brands publishing engaging content to try and grab the attention of their target audience. This would allow them to generate traffic on their website and hopefully increase their sales. 

The basic concept is still the same but after many years of innovation, social media marketing has grown to become so much more. 

In the past, social media platforms could only be used to publish content in hopes that people would respond and engage with the brand. However, it can be used for many different purposes now. 

What can a brand do with social media?

A brand that wants to understand what it’s perceived as by the general public can scour through public conversations on social media. This can give them an idea of what people think of their brand. It can often give them clues on what needs to be improved. 

Similarly, a brand that wants to check whether or not its social media marketing campaigns are working or not can analyze insights and metrics. These help them understand whether the growth they’re seeing is according to their expectations or not. 

If they seem to be off-course, the brand can make changes to their campaign(s) as well as their content to try and get back on the right track in terms of growth. 

You can even run targeted ads on social media now. This means that people from a certain demographic will be shown the ads that you pay for as a brand. 

If you’ve done the proper research and know who your ideal target audience is, this can be extremely helpful. This is because you can introduce your brand to people who are most likely to be responsive to your content. As a result, you may see an improvement in sales. 

Check out more marketing strategies for your website, HERE.

Why Should I Consider Social Media Marketing for My Business? 

Over 4.62 billion people are on some type of social media platform. That’s more than half of the world’s population. 

Honestly, we feel that one statement should be more than enough to convince you that social media marketing is a good idea. If you don’t use it, it’s a huge missed opportunity to reach out to an audience that could be interested in what your brand has to offer. 

Additionally, social media marketing has tons of other benefits that other forms of marketing do not. It’s especially useful for any business that is just starting out since it doesn’t cost too much. 

Here are some of the major benefits of social media marketing: 

It Increases Brand Awareness and Recognition 

As mentioned above, over half the population in the world is on some type of social media platform. If you do not capitalize on this market, you’re missing out on potentially hundreds or even thousands of customers for your brand. 

When you constantly use a social media platform to publish posts from your brand page, it’s bound to gain traction at some point. As the community engages with your brand’s content, they’ll start to become more aware of it. 

As a result, you’ll be able to develop and maintain an online presence that keeps your brand fresh in the minds of potential consumers.

Brand recognition can push your brand higher above your competition and really make you stand out. 

As you engage with the people who follow and comment on your posts, people will start to gain respect for your brand. People love it when they get personalized interactions from brands rather than automated messages. 

You can also use social media to direct traffic to your brand website where you could also have an online store. 

Not only will this boost the average traffic that your website gets on a monthly basis but it will also help you boost your conversion rate. 

Since your average traffic will increase, this will then help you climb up the rankings on search engine result pages. As you climb the search engine result pages, your average traffic will start to increase even more. 

As more and more people start to visit your website, you’ll see your conversion rate increase even more. 

If you do it right, you can exponentially scale up your business within a very decent timeframe. 

It’s Great for Lead Generation 

As you can probably imagine, the posts you make through your brand’s social media page are a great way to promote the products and services you have to offer. 

When you create content that highlights the key features of your products and services, it can help boost your conversion rate. 

This is because you are advertising products to people that could very well be interested in them since they follow your brand’s page. If they follow your brand’s page, there’s a higher chance they might make a purchase from you through a product post. 

You can use social media to get people to interact with your content. 

It’s a good idea to create posts in a way that motivates people to engage with it. You can choose to have incentives for people if they share or comment on your posts as well. 

It’s a win-win since you can set up rewards for the people that engage with your content and in return, you’ll increase your engagement and conversion rates. 

Here are some examples through which you can get people to engage: 

• You can host giveaways through your social media page. For example, you could ask people to comment on the post and the winner would be chosen at random from the comments. This could also be done with post shares. 
• You can include direct links to your online store or the landing page of your brand website within your posts. It’s also a good idea to include these links within the bios of your social media pages. 
• Live streams can be hosted on certain social media platforms. You can conduct live streams to make announcements related to your brand as well as share news about new products and developments. 
• In addition to making announcements, live streams can also be used to just engage with your target audience. You can answer questions and clear any doubts customers may have about your products and services. 
• Planned social media campaigns can also obviously be run. These could be a combination of giveaways, paid advertisements, informational content, and more. 
• Certain social media platforms have shopping and e-commerce implementations you can take advantage of. You can use these features to sell your products or services straight through the social media platform itself. 

It Helps Create and Nurture Customer Relationships 

It’s not just about creating and publishing posts. This is where many businesses falter when it comes to social media marketing. Not only do you have to publish posts but you must also actively engage with the people that interact with them. 

What does that do? 

Well, think of it from a user’s experience: Let’s say you’re scrolling through your social media platform of choice and you see a product that piques your interest. You want to buy it but you’re not entirely sure whether it has a couple of key features or not. 

As a user that’s scrolling through social media, many people don’t want to close their app and do research regarding a product to find certain details about it. We don’t blame them as social media can honestly be very addicting. 

Hence, in order to find certain things about the product, you might comment on the post and ask the question. 

Now, imagine if that question never gets answered. You’ll probably forget about the product entirely, right? That’ll be the end of that. 

On the other hand, let’s imagine that a representative from the brand replies to your comment and you get a notification for it. You’ll go back to the post and receive your answer. Who knows? The product may have the features you want and you may end up buying it. 

Do you see the difference one little reply made? 

It’s the difference between securing a sale and letting it slip through your fingers. Many brands neglect customer interaction which is why they often see their growth stagnate or even decline. 

Furthermore, people are fed up with brands and corporations sounding robotic and calculated. In order to stand out from them, you have to have a warm and organic approach when it comes to customer interaction. 

People love to feel seen and paid attention to. That’s why such interactions can really help you turn first-time visitors to your page into first-time buyers. If they are happy with the product and the interaction they had with your brand, they may turn into loyal customers. 

Loyal customers can help keep your brand alive. 

This is because if you make a customer happy by answering their questions and assisting them, they’ll be sure to remember how helpful you were. As a result, they may recommend your brand to friends, family, and peers. 

Thus, they can help you grow your customer base in this way. 

In addition to replying to posts, you can also create posts that directly invite your followers to share any problems or qualms they may have with your product. 

You may find that your customers may discover a certain flaw or defect with your product that your team did not notice during testing. This could then help you make future batches of your products better and more refined. 

You can also ask people how you can improve through your social media channels. As a customer, just imagine how great it would feel if a suggestion of yours is implemented by a brand. 

We’re sure that that customer would definitely remain loyal to your brand for years to come. 

It’s Great for Competitor Research 

It’s great to focus on your own social media page for the most part but there’s another aspect that can also be very beneficial for your brand. Remember that you’ll have competitors in your niche that will most likely have the same target audience. 

Hence, this can be a great opportunity to study the social media marketing strategies they utilize and whether they’re effective. 

You can check out: 

• The social media strategy a competitor is using 
• What level of engagement do their posts get and what type of interactions do they have with their customers 
• What products or services they’re promoting 
• What types of social media campaigns they’re implementing 

Naturally, when you study competitors, this can give you a lot of ideas for what to do on your own social media channels. 

In one case, you could notice that a competitor is implementing a similar social media tactic that you are but they’re doing it in a better way. You could study this and make some adjustments so that your implementation is as effective as your competitors. 

In other cases, you may notice flaws or imperfections in the way that your competitors conduct certain campaigns or implement certain tactics. You could capitalize on this by doing it better and standing out from the crowd. It’s a great way to gain an edge over your competition. 

Another benefit that this can have is the fact that you want your branding to be unique. You don’t want your visual identity and content to be similar to any of your competitors. 

The reason for this is pretty obvious: You don’t want to be confused with one of your competitors. This can result in people checking out your posts and then, later confusing you with one of your competitors and buying a product from them instead of you. 

If you research and study your competitors’ content on social media, you’ll be informed of what their branding is like. This can help you out and you can create unique branding that stands out from the crowd and is not similar to any of your competition. 

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How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy and Implement it? (Step-by-Step Guide) 

We’ve talked a whole lot about how social media marketing can be great for your brand but it’s not easy to reap all the benefits we have listed above. 

Many people get into social media marketing without any plan and expect to just see growth immediately. 

Naturally, this is something that will very rarely happen, if ever. To actually harness the potential that social media marketing has, you have to develop a comprehensive plan and implement it properly. 

To find out how much your social media marketing will cost click here.

Follow these steps to get started with social media marketing: 

Step 1: Research and Determine Your Target Audience 

Similar to most other digital marketing approaches, social media marketing also starts with tons and tons of research. 

As we’ve mentioned in other posts, research is extremely important if you intend to execute any digital marketing method successfully. However, this is something that many inexperienced marketers tend to skip or not spend enough time on. 

As a result, they don’t have a comprehensive social media marketing strategy laid out, and they just kind of publish posts on the fly. You can probably imagine this isn’t a good idea and we can confirm that it definitely is not. 

Hence, spend a lot of time on your market research. 

When it comes to market research, the first thing you need to find out is who your target audience is. Naturally, the ideal customers that would be interested in your brand will depend on what your niche is. 

For example, if your niche is women’s clothes, naturally, you’d want to target women within a certain age range. The age range will depend on what type of clothes you have to offer. 

It can be a good idea to develop buyer personas to define what your ideal target audience will be. 

A buyer persona is a description of the ideal customer for your brand. It would describe their characteristics and traits so that you can have an easier time developing social media strategies for them. 

When you have a well-defined persona, it can make it much easier for you to create personalized and engaging content that would really resonate with someone like that. 

Try to spend time when you create a buyer persona so that you can add as many details to them as possible. 

Some common traits that people use to define a buyer persona include:

• Age
• Gender
• Geographical location 
• Income 
• Job
• Hobbies 

And more. 

These are just some examples but we encourage you to add even more because the more detailed it is, the more personalized your content can be. The more personalized your content is, the higher the chances that customers will engage and even convert. 

The audience you define at this stage will inform many of your decisions in the next few steps we’re about to explain. Hence, it’s important for you to spend a lot of time on this so that you get it right. 

If you get this part wrong, there’s a chance that any social media marketing strategy that you develop will be unsuccessful. 

You can’t build a house without a solid foundation. 

Step 2: Determine Your Social Media Platform(s)  

Of course, you have to determine which social media platforms you will utilize to promote your brand’s content. 

There’s no right or wrong choice when it comes to which social media platform you choose. We can’t objectively tell you that one platform is better than the other because it depends on your brand and your target audience. 

We mentioned above how if you choose the wrong target audience, it will mess everything else up as well. 

This is where that statement begins to make sense. 

When you have to choose which social media platform to use, you’ll have to look toward the habits of your ideal buyer. Which platforms are most popular amongst that audience segment? Which ones would they use regularly? 

These are the questions you must ask yourself in order to determine what the ideal social media platform would be for your brand. 

This isn’t the only factor that defines this decision but it’s definitely the most important factor. 

You don’t want to be stuck on a platform that does not have many of the people that would be interested in what your brand has to offer. 

For example, if you have a brand that sells a product that’d be very popular among teenage girls. Then, it’d be a much better idea to use platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. 

If you chose Facebook, your brand would definitely not see many conversions since Facebook is not very popular with the youth these days. 

Other factors you can consider when you have to choose a platform are: 

• The social media analytics that a platform has to offer 
• The type of content that is most popular on a particular platform 
• The ease with which automated and paid ads can be run on a platform 
• The cost of running paid ads on a platform 

Here’s a complete rundown of popular social media platforms and the type of audiences that dominate them: 

Facebook 

While Facebook is losing popularity currently, it’s still the most popular social media platform out there and still a worthy marketing option for your brand. 

Naturally, you have to consider the niche of your brand and whether or not that audience uses Facebook regularly or not. 

Facebook has over 1.9 billion users actively using it daily. That’s a ton of people and there’s a chance that you can definitely find an audience for your brand if it’s an appropriate niche. 

While Facebook used to be popular with young people in the past, today, it’s mostly used by Baby Boomers, Generation X as well as a smaller portion of millennials. 

Facebook is not popular at all with Generation Z. 

Hence, if your niche is something that can pique the interest of middle-aged and older people, Facebook can definitely be a great option. 

Other than that, it’s also a platform that has tons of resources for B2C (Business-to-Consumer) businesses. The analytics can provide you with as well as the management tools it offers certainly make the job much easier for you. 

Not only that but the paid advertisements and targeted ads you can run through Facebook are also invaluable to any brand out there. 

Targeted ads can be an extremely powerful way to improve conversions and increase traffic because, well, they’re targeted. That means that you can define the audience segment that those ads get shown to. 

You can use this to show it to individuals that would most likely be interested in your brand.

Twitter

Twitter can be a great platform where you can interact with customers on a very intimate level and really nurture relationships. 

It’s a platform that is primarily dominated by millennials so if you have a product or service that could appeal to them, Twitter is definitely a great choice. 

While Facebook is a platform that primarily specializes in visual content (e.g., photos, live streams, and videos), Twitter focuses on text. 

If you have talented content writers within your team, Twitter is something you should definitely consider. 

One thing to keep in mind when it comes to Twitter is that every tweet has a character limit of 280 characters. That means you really have to keep your tweets snappy, concise, and to the point. 

It can become difficult to add links to your brand website or online store on Twitter, especially if the links are quite long. They can take up a lot of characters and not leave enough room for your brand’s message. 

To solve this issue, you can take the help of URL shorteners that are available online. 

To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account on the website and log in. 

Step 1: After you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard page for Pixelfy. This is where you can access all the features offered to you by Pixelfy. 

Primarily, you’ll see analytics and insights from any previous links that you shortened. 

You can use these analytics later on when you’re actually actively conducting social media campaigns using these shortened links. 

If you’d like to shorten a link, you can do it through the fast shortener box located at the top of the dashboard page. 

Step 2: To shorten a link that you’d like to share within a tweet, simply copy the link and paste it into the fast shortener box. Once you paste it in, you should be automatically redirected to the next page. 

If you are not redirected to the next page, click on the Shorten button to go to the next page manually.

Step 3: On the next page, you’ll receive the shortened URL for your landing page, online store, or whatever else it was that you wanted to shorten. 

Simply copy the shortened link and you can now use it within your tweet(s). 

As mentioned earlier, you can come back to the dashboard page at any time to check on how the shortened link is performing.

Instagram

Instagram is extremely popular with over 1 billion active users daily.

It’s a platform that has people from many different demographics but it’s most popular among millennials as well as Generation Z. 

Hence, if your product or service is something that appeals to the younger generations, Instagram should definitely be near the top of your list. 

As you may already know, Instagram is a very visual platform. Hence, this is something you should go for if you have a talented team of visual artists and graphic designers. They can help you develop engaging photos as well as videos to share on your brand page. 

Another great thing about Instagram is that it has great e-commerce features. If you’d like, you can set up an online store for your brand right there on Instagram. 

This allows your customers to browse through your products and make a purchase without ever leaving Instagram. From a user experience standpoint, this can be extremely effective. 

People get discouraged when they have to leave a social media platform and go to a website they’ve never seen before to make a purchase. Instead, it’s much preferable for them to make the purchase on a platform they’re familiar with. 

Youtube 

While it’s technically not a social media platform, it’s still a great option that can be utilized in a similar way as the platforms discussed above. 

A survey conducted by Hootsuite suggests that Youtube is the second most-visited website in the world. As a result, it has a healthy distribution of people across many different age groups and gender demographics. 

Not only that but it’s a platform that specializes in long-form video content. This makes it the ideal platform for brands that’d like to create informational and educational content for their customers. 

As a brand, your customers will highly appreciate such content because it implies that you care about your customers. 

You could have how-to videos related to how to properly use your product(s). You could also have tutorials on how to solve certain problems that your customers may face. 

It’s the ideal platform to develop a community by providing informational content and helping your customers out.

Step 3: Conduct Competitor Research 

Before we get into competitor research, we’d like you to notice how we’re at step 3 and we’re still at research. 

This should give you an idea of how important research is and how you should spend a decent amount of time conducting it for social media advertising. Do not rush through research. 

Now that you know which platform you want to use, it’s time to study the competitors within your niche on that platform. 

Study the discussions they’re having with their customers, the type of posts they’re publishing, and what their branding is like. 

• How do they motivate their customers to interact with their posts? 
• What are their visual identities like? 
• Do they share links in every post? Or do they only have it in their bios? 
• How often do they respond to customer questions and feedback? 

These are all observations you can make and take note of in order to gain an edge over your competition. 

You can adapt the good ideas they have and you can also identify flaws and attempt to correct them in your social media advertising. 

Furthermore, you can also determine whether or not it’s possible for you to gain an edge over your competition on a certain platform or not. 

Step 4: Decide Important Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

No matter what type of social media marketing strategy you want to run, it’s important that you use data and metrics to guide your approach. 

A data-driven approach is something that has a much higher chance of success when it comes to social media advertising. 

It’s important that you identify what the goals of each social media marketing strategy are and how you can track these goals through metrics. 

The metrics that you choose to keep track of are known as key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Some common metrics that are used for tracking your social media presence are: 

• Reach: Your reach defines how many total users on the platform actually saw your post. It basically means how many users’ feeds your post was able to reach. 
• Clicks: As the name suggests, this is the number of clicks that people made on your content or your posts. This is an essential metric if you want to keep track of what type of content boosts engagement and what does not. 
• Organic likes and paid likes: The best social media marketing strategies are ones that utilize both organic as well as paid approaches. Studying the organic and paid likes you have can help you balance your ad spend and time invested in content creation.
• Engagement: This is the total number of people that interacted with your content divided by the total number of people that saw your content. Hence, it’s a measure of how willing people are to engage with your content once they see it. 
• Hashtag performance: How many people used your hashtag? What types of hashtags are typically associated with your brand? Studying this can help you identify the perception of your brand in the eyes of your customers. 
• Sentiment: This is another metric that helps you understand how your brand is perceived by customers. It’s important to keep track of this so you can plan future social media marketing efforts accordingly.

Step 5: Create a Content Plan and Then, Create Engaging Content 

It should be obvious at this point that the primary aspect that drives traffic and engagement on social media networks is content. 

Yes, paid advertisements are a thing and you can definitely drive traffic through them but that alone will never be enough for any brand. 

In order to drive organic traffic and actually have people respect and engage with your brand actively, your content has to be engaging and compelling. 

Not only that but you also have to post your content consistently. It’s a good idea to develop a content plan first before you actually start to develop content for your social media brand page. 

This content plan could have details of what type of content you can create, what the topics for different posts will be as well when it will be published. 

Since you’re a brand that is offering products related to a certain niche, there’s a high chance that the people browsing through your posts may have seen your competitors’ content too. 

As a result, you have to ensure that the content you create is not only different from your competitors but also better. This will help you stand out from the crowd and provide value to your customers which they will appreciate you for. 

Do you see how all that research helps you with actual execution? 

If you hadn’t done the proper competitor research, you’d have little to no idea of what to include in order to gain an edge over them. However, if you studied them carefully, you’ll know exactly the type of content that your target audience likes and dislikes. 

In addition to competitor research helping you develop content, it’s also a good idea to delve into the features that the social media platform has to offer. 

For example, you can conduct live streams on Instagram to share news about your latest product. You can also share stories to highlight certain key elements or features of your new products as well. 

Another thing you can do is encourage your customers to create content for you. You can do this by asking them to use a hashtag that represents your brand and share their experiences with your products. 

Keep in mind, however, that this can seriously backfire if you have a product that is mediocre. Ensure that the product itself is high-quality and that the majority of the customers will be happy with it. That’s the only way this tactic can work in your brand’s favor. 

Lastly, be wary of any trends or fads that may emerge on the social media platform of your choice. Don’t be afraid to create content that capitalizes on these trends. 

However, you have to be careful to ensure you don’t come off as inauthentic or as a brand that is just trying to capitalize on a trend. Genuinely have fun with it and try to create something that is genuinely captivating for your audiences. 

We’ve seen countless times where brands are dragged through the dirt when they try to capitalize on a viral meme and do it extremely poorly. An even worse example of this is when brands try to post memes that went out of style years ago. 

Want to create your own social media marketing agency? Check out the complete guide HERE.

Basically, don’t be like Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock: 

Step 6: Upload and Schedule Posts According to Your Plan 

Once the content has been created according to the plan that you composed in the last step, it’s time to post it up.

The best approach for social media marketing at this point is to upload all the content but not publish anything just yet. What you must do now is schedule every post according to the schedule you defined within your content plan. 

This makes the process much easier rather than you or someone from your team having to manually publish the post according to the schedule. 

It eliminates the margin for human error and ensures that all of your posts get published consistently and at a regular time. 

Many social media platforms have built-in social media management tools that enable you to schedule posts. If it’s not built-in, you can definitely opt for a third-party tool that helps you schedule and manage posts. 

It’s important that you stick to your social media marketing plan so that all of your user-generated content gets published on a regular basis. 

As your traffic grows, if your content is good enough, your followers may start to anxiously wait for your posts and thus, your engagement may grow. 

Find the best techniques to market and brand your business on our blog HERE.

How to Do Social Media Marketing? – Conclusion

The world of social media marketing is vast and ever-evolving. It’s something that you constantly have to keep track of as new features and tactics get created on a regular basis. 

It’s important for you to stay on top of these social media marketing trends to ensure that your brand stays relevant for a long time. 

If you have any more questions, please ask us in the comments section below.