Why is it important to write marketing and sales messages for social media?

With the right social media strategy, you can gain brand awareness, increase traffic, and generate leads.

Learning how to market on social media can help you increase sales while promoting your brand. Social media marketing is an inexpensive yet effective way to reach more people across different platforms. You can attract a wider audience through social media by developing quality content.

Having a social media presence is necessary. Not only do your customers expect it, but it’s a great tool for learning more about your target audience and connecting with individuals online. With the use of organic social media marketing, you can get to know your followers and find better ways to promote your products and services.

However, you can also learn how to advertise a small business on social media with a limited budget to help your content reach more potential customers. Social media platforms have many options for reaching more customers; it’s just up to you to create engaging content that makes prospective customers want to learn more about your business and brand.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing involves using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok to effectively reach a wider audience and communicate with customers. Social media marketing is necessary for any business that wants to stand out. Your competition is using social media to reach new customers, so it’s time for you to enhance your efforts. Mailchimp makes it easy to market on social media by offering content creation tools to help you build targeted ads. You can also use our social media management tools to schedule posts and publish at the right time.

With over 80% of consumers reporting that social media—especially influencer content—significantly impacts buying decisions, marketers across industries are driving the evolution of social media marketing (SMM) from a stand-alone tool to a multipronged source of marketing intelligence on an increasingly important—and growing—audience.

Within 18 years, from 2004 (when MySpace became the first social media site to reach one million users) to 2022, the dramatic growth of interactive digital channels took social media to levels that challenge even the reach of television and radio. By Q1 of 2022, there were 4.6 billion social media users globally—over 58% of the world’s population—an increase of over 10% in one year alone.

As the use of social media trends upward, marketers are perfecting strategies to capture the significant competitive advantage that engagement with this key audience can deliver even more rapidly and more effectively than traditional marketing.

Key Takeaways

  • Social media marketing (SMM) uses social media and social networks—like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—to market products and services, engage with existing customers, and reach new ones.
  • The power of social media marketing comes from the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
  • Social media marketing has transformed the way businesses are able to influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting personal data that makes messaging resonate with users.
  • Because social media today is so ubiquitous, marketing techniques using these platforms are extremely important for businesses.

What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

Social media marketing (SMM) (also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company's brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, social media marketing (SMM) has purpose-built data analytics that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.

Why Is Social Media Marketing So Powerful?

The power of social media marketing (SMM) is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.

Connection: Not only does social media enable businesses to connect with customers in ways that were previously impossible, but there is also an extraordinary range of avenues to connect with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social sites (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).

Interaction: The dynamic nature of the interaction on social media—whether direct communication or passive “liking”—enables businesses to leverage free advertising opportunities from eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) recommendations between existing and potential customers. Not only is the positive contagion effect from eWOM a valuable driver of consumer decisions, but the fact that these interactions happen on the social network makes them measurable. For example, businesses can measure their “social equity”—a term for the return on investment (ROI) from their social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.

Customer Data: A well-designed social media marketing (SMM) plan delivers another invaluable resource to boost marketing outcomes: customer data. Rather than being overwhelmed by the 3Vs of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools have the capacity not only to extract customer data but also to turn this gold into actionable market analysis—or even to use the data to crowdsource new strategies.

How Social Media Marketing Works

As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off, social media transformed not only the way we connect with one another but also the way businesses are able to influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.

SMM Action Plan: The more targeted your social media marketing (SMM) strategy is, the more effective it will be. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign that has an execution framework as well as performance metrics:

  • Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
  • Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
  • Conduct a competitive analysis on your competition (successes and failures)
  • Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
  • Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
  • Create best-in-class content
  • Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing has several distinct advantages, including the fact that SMM has two kinds of interaction that enable targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. In other words, while traditional marketing tracks customer value primarily by capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value both directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).

Shareable Content: Businesses can also convert the amplified interconnectedness of SMM into the creation of "sticky" content, the marketing term for attractive content that engages customers at first glance, gets them to purchase products, and then makes them want to share the content. This kind of word-of-mouth advertising not only reaches an otherwise inaccessible audience, but also carries the implicit endorsement of someone the recipient knows and trusts—which makes the creation of shareable content one of the most important ways that social media marketing drives growth.

Earned Media: Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media platforms to interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. As social media usage grows around the world, both via computer and mobile devices, the ability to drive sales from certain user populations is a growing business, rife with competition for views and clicks.

Why is marketing on social media important?

Social media allows marketers to connect and engage potential customers where they are at: LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and even some of the younger platforms like TikTok. With a strong social media strategy and the ability to create engaging content, marketers can engage their audience.

What is the main purpose of sales and marketing?

Your Sales and Marketing strategy is your plan for reaching, engaging, and converting target prospects into profitable customers. It's the charter that guides Marketing and Sales in their daily activities, helping them clarify shared objectives and how to achieve them.

Why is social media important for sales?

Social media allows for deeper engagement with customers. Social can also help salespeople capture important information about customers, ranging from their birthdays to important life events, which can lead to more personalized discussions.

Why is it important for business to post on social media?

The business-boosting benefits of social media. Social media is an easy, affordable way to reach a wide audience. Posting on social media can help build your business's brand and drive traffic to your website. You can use social media to engage directly with customers and learn what they want.