Social Media Marketing for Business: The Definitive Guide (2022)

This guide on social media marketing is important for two types of people. First, if your social media marketing strategy has kickstarted on a positive note and you are looking for more ways to increase your followers, engagement and leads. Second, if your social media performance is drowning and you are looking for expert guidance to help you stay afloat. 

In this guide, I’ll talk about the essentials of social media marketing for businesses to help you successfully plan and execute your social media strategy. 

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing uses platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to promote a brand’s products or services, reach new customers, interact with existing customers, drive engagement and generate sales for businesses.

Why Is Social Media Marketing Important for Your Business or Brand?

Most businesses thrive on customer engagement and relationship building. Social media has long been used to foster this relationship growth. However, many businesses were yet to realize the power of social media until the pandemic struck and people were forced to confine themselves inside their homes. 

Since early 2020, many new changes have come into our way of life. For example, companies started offering work from home policies to employees, physical interactions were cut short, traveling in and out of cities or countries was restricted, and people were completely homebound. 

The pandemic has also affected businesses by forcing them to shut their physical operations down to prevent the spread of Covid and start selling online. Luckily, it has boosted online sales as people started spending more time on social media, discovering more brands and their offerings, thus increasing their online purchases.

Consequently, many businesses that were not active on social media finally realized its importance for boosting brand visibility and sales. However, the benefit of social media extends beyond this. Here are some ways in which social media can help your businesses.

1. Reach and connect with people

Social media helps businesses reach and connect with existing and potential customers and build their online presence. Connecting with more people on social media builds the opportunity to generate leads for your business. 

Additionally, since social media marketing is primarily free, you can save on the marketing budget you otherwise have to spend on capturing leads through paid marketing.

2. Implement Social Listening

Social media allows you to monitor what people say about your brands. It gives you a chance to understand what people think or expect from your business and the scope to work on these areas to offer a better service in the future.

3. Drive Thought Leadership 

Businesses can utilize social media platforms to establish their authority in their niche markets. As a business owner, you can share your valuable knowledge on social media through guides, webinars and other resources to educate people and build their trust in your brand. 

If you can position yourself as a problem-solver in your target market and answer the queries people may have about your industry, they will consider you as a thought leader and follow your advice very closely.

4. Increase Brand Loyalty

When you have a social media presence, your customers can connect with you closely and stay updated with news and information about your brand. Analyze what your customers like to read or hear and customize your social media posts accordingly. 

If your customers love engaging with your brand videos, try posting more video-based content on your social channels. Focus more on interactive content creation if your customers enjoy participating in giveaways and quizzes. Reply to every customer’s comments on your social posts and reshare their content about your brand. 

When you create and share content your audience loves to see; they are more likely to follow you closely for regular updates and share your content within their network. It can make them feel valued and improve their loyalty to your brand.

5. Boost Customer Engagement & Support

Social media allows you to connect with your customers directly and interact with them. Social media promotes two-way communication that allows businesses to understand customer pain points and resolve them at the earliest.

Listen to what your customers say about your products and services, answer their queries on your social media posts and reply to their messages in your inboxes. Prioritize replies to customers looking for immediate resolution and keep following up with them until they are satisfied.

6. Increase Sales

Social media plays a vital role in your sales funnel. With more people becoming active on social media, it is a great channel to capture more leads for your business and nurture and convert them into customers.

7. Stay Top of Mind

As social media gets flooded with several brands, it is easy to lose your visibility to other brands. As people log in to social media multiple times a day, it is important to keep posting on social media consistently so that people can find your content on their feed every time they are on social media. You also need to make your posts creative, engaging and informative so that people don’t overlook them.

8. Boost Website Traffic

When you promote your products and services on social media, people who are likely to purchase will click on your website links. It will lead to more incoming traffic to your website from social media and boost engagement.

9. Promote Content 

Social media is not just about sharing social posts; you can also promote long-form content on these channels. You can share links to your blog posts and articles on social media and get your followers to read and share them.

10. Analytics Measurement 

With social media tracking tools and built-in analytics, you can easily analyze the performance of your social media posts, the impact of your social media activities and the overall performance of your social channels. In addition, it will help you track the ROI of your organic and paid social media campaigns.

11. Cost-Effectiveness

Finally, social media marketing is a cost-effective way to market your brand and its products or services. Posting content on social media is free, making it an ideal marketing tactic for small businesses. Once your social media strategy starts showing results, you can slowly invest in paid promotions through social media advertising. The best news is that such promotions will cost much less than other paid marketing tactics. 

9 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

By now, you should have realized how social media marketing is important for your business. Besides helping your brand grow and prosper, it helps increase your business’s ROI. However, social media marketing is not easy, you might be actively posting content, yet the engagement rate could be low to nil. 

So, how do you boost your brand engagement on social media? First, you need to brainstorm a strategy that focuses on increasing engagement, interaction, visibility and conversions. Since social media gives you a huge opportunity to influence more people, take note of these tips to make your social media followers loyal to your brand and ultimately convert them into customers.

1. Use Social Media Marketing Tools

The first step towards boosting your social media marketing efforts is to automate certain tasks using social media marketing tools.

These tools can help you create, edit and schedule posts for different social media platforms, manage customer relationships, track and monitor social media performance, get audience insights, and capture leads for your business. 

2. Identify the Right Social Media Channels

Finding a suitable social media platform is necessary to reach the right audience and elicit a response that aligns with your social media goals. Several social media platforms are available today, each serving a specific purpose. Depending on your goals, you might choose a channel that gives you the best results. 

For example, if your target is to gain more leads for your business, then Facebook is a suitable platform to connect with your potential customers, whereas if you are looking for networking opportunities with influencers and industry leaders, be more active on Linkedin and Twitter. 

3. Post More Live Videos 

Live videos are gaining popularity lately as the audience loves interacting with brands in real-time. Video content is more appealing and easy to follow than written content. So if you want to boost your social media marketing efforts, including live videos in your social content strategy could be fruitful. 

You could live-stream your day-to-day business operations, get an influencer on board for a live interactive session, show how your products are manufactured or packed for delivery, etc. Due to the interactive nature of live video content, people tend to stick around such posts longer to watch how the session unfolds. 

4. Create Brand Stories 

Brand storytelling is essential to shape customer perception of your brand. You can use this strategy to your advantage and involve your employees, customers and other stakeholders to create positive impressions about your brand. Use your social media platforms to share customer stories and testimonials, employee work experiences, investors’ vision and expectations, etc. 

5. Leverage User-Generated Content 

User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful tool to promote your brand and its products or services. Prospective customers are more likely to trust reviews and feedback about a product or service from existing customers or influencers.

You can partner with influencers in your niche or team up with your customers and ask them to share their shopping experiences on social media. They can showcase your products and discuss what they liked about the purchase in their social media posts. 

If you offer services, you can ask customers to record and share their experiences. In addition, you can repost such user-generated content on your business’s social media platforms for others to see them and build trust in your brand.

6. Use Creative Images 

Brands are making efforts to add a unique identity to their social posts. Many brands follow only a specific color scheme for their social media posts, while others like to add their brand logos to every image or video they post on social media.

For small businesses who don’t have enough budget to hire a designer, there are many free tools available, like Canva, that can be used to create stunning visuals. Another important thing to remember while posting images on social media is to consider the different image sizes for different social media platforms. 

7. Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are an excellent way to discover new brands and improve brand visibility. Many social media tools can help you with hashtag research for your posts. However, you have to be careful to ensure that the hashtags you use are relevant to your niche, content and the audience you are targeting. You can also research hashtags in your niche that are currently trending and create quality content around them to go viral. 

8. Utilize Employee Advocacy

Utilizing employee advocacy to your advantage can boost your brand awareness. Your employees will have their own social media handles with friends and followers, so when you ask them to share their experiences working for your brand and its products, it will come across as more genuine than getting any influencer or celebrity on board to endorse your products. 

Employees can also share their personal life stories made possible by working for your brand, such as buying their first car or a house, enrolling in a professional course, going on their first international trip, etc.

9. Find the Right Time to Post

The secret to many social media posts going viral is the time of publishing them. Time is a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of certain social media posts. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the time your social media followers are most active on each platform and schedule your posts to be published accordingly. 

It will ensure that they get maximum visibility and user engagement. Many social media tools available today can ease up the task of creating and scheduling multiple posts on different social media platforms throughout the day. So, utilize these tools to your advantage and post your content at the right time.

How to Create a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2022?

Venturing into social media is relatively easy. How you strategize to stay in the game and impact your audience’s mind matters. Posting your content on social media requires proper planning and execution. Posting content just to keep your social media account active will not help your business grow.

So, here is an 8-step foolproof method to create a successful social media strategy that will help you post consistently, impress your audience, convert them into loyal customers and measure the success of your social media activities. 

1. Set SMART Goals

The beginning of any social media strategy is to set your business objectives. Without setting clear goals, it will be challenging to measure success and calculate the ROI. This is why your goals should be SMART. It stands for:

• Specific: Ensure that your goals are focused on meeting desired outcomes. Decide what goals you want to achieve for a specific month or quarter. Do you want to gain more followers on your social media platforms or convert more leads for your business? Defining your goals will also help you identify the tools and resources needed to meet them.
• Measurable: Whatever goal you set for your social media strategy should be measurable because unless you can measure your goals, it would not be easy to gauge the success of your social media strategy. 
• Attainable: Your social media goals should be attainable and realistic. This step is vital to ensure that the goals and the timeline you have decided to achieve are achievable.
• Relevant: The goals you set for your social media strategy should be relevant to your overall business goals. 
• Time-bound: Unless you set a time limit to achieve your goals, you won’t be able to delegate tasks to the social media team members and give them a performance deadline; neither you’ll be able to measure the success of your social media strategy.

2. Research and Define Your Audience 

The next step is to determine your target audience and define buyer personas based on audience age, gender, interests, etc. Classifying audiences based on buyer personas allows you to target them with personalized social media content. It will also help you plan what type of content and topics you should focus on for your social media posts and avoid arbitrarily posting anything. The better you understand your social media audience, the better quality content you’ll be able to create. 

3. Select the Right Social Media Channels For Your Audience

The next step is to choose the proper social channels to interact with customers. For this, you must understand which social media platforms your customers use most and then build a content strategy to connect with them. 

4. Set Up Your Social Media Accounts

Once you’ve selected the ideal social media platforms to post your business content, create your social media profiles on these platforms and maintain a consistent visual identity across all of them so that people can easily recognize you. For example, you can use your brand logo as the profile picture on your social media accounts. 

You must also update all information related to your business on each social media profile, including your location, contact information, hours of operation and website details.

5. Analyze Your Competitors

Before posting content on social media, you must scrutinize your competitors and see how they perform. By analyzing their performance, you’ll get a lot of insights about shaping your content strategies. Look out for the audience they are targeting, the keyword they are focusing on, the hashtags they are using and the frequency of posting. 

6. Create Original and Engaging Content

Now that you’re aware of the buyer personas, identified the right social media channels to post your content and analyze what your competitors are up to, it’s time to plan and create the social media posts for your business. 

You have to focus on creating content that is original as well as engaging. You should also try to add variety to your content theme and type. For example, do not solely focus on creating promotional posts and videos; throw in a mix of live videos, user-generated content, testimonials, interviews and more.

7. Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Once you create a few social media posts, you have to schedule them for publishing. To make the task easier, it is recommended to create a social media content calendar where you can schedule your posts ahead of time and decide when to post them on your social platforms. 

Having a social media content calendar also allows you to plan your social media content for the upcoming weeks or months, create seasonal and time-sensitive content in advance, minimize the chances of missing important posts to publish and adjust your current content strategy according to past performance.

8. Evaluate and Optimize Your Strategy

Once you start posting consistently on social media platforms, you need to analyze your content performance on each platform and compare them weekly or monthly to see if your current strategy is helping you achieve your goals. 

You will usually consider the engagement metrics like the number of likes, reshares, views and comments on your social media posts and find out which content is performing better than others. For content that doesn’t perform well, you need to run A/B testing and see whether adjusting the content format or writing style increases the engagement rate. 

Content optimization on social media is dynamic, so you must keep experimenting until you get the desired results. If your social media metrics are not improving after several adjustments, it might be time to invest in paid social media ads to boost visibility and attract more customers.

Content Formats for Social Media Marketing in 2022

Many businesses find it challenging to understand what type of social media content they can focus on to bring variety and freshness to their posts. Social media is saturated with many businesses trying to woo their customers with exciting content. If you follow suit and replicate what others are doing, you may not be performing up to your potential. 

Instead, you can use many formats to create content for your business’s social media accounts and keep your customers engaged. For example, you can check out these 15 types of social media content formats below.

1. Instructographics

Instructographics are infographics with instructions. It is an easy format to explain how-to’s using stunning visuals instead of boring instruction manuals. Instructographics can also be used to share DIY activity instructions and is an ideal format for social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

2. Short Videos

Short videos are trending on most social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and more. If you have a long video to post, you can edit them into multiple parts and share them as short videos for people to see.

3. Temporary Posts

Temporary posts are better identified as Facebook/Instagram stories that remain available 24 hours after posting. This content format is excellent for posting teasers of any upcoming event, product launch, special service offers, etc.

4. Shoppable Posts

Shoppable posts are popular on Instagram and Facebook. Users can click on these posts to find links to different products and shop them directly from social media platforms. 

5. Ask Me Anything

Ask Me Anything is an exciting content format where you get some celebrity, influencer, or any important person from your business to answer questions the common public asks. AMA can be done either online or offline. For online AMAs, the person answering usually comes in a live video and answers questions as they come. For offline AMAs, people are asked to send their questions in advance, and the speaker can choose to answer them in the form of stories, pre-recorded videos or regular posts. 

6. Data-Rich Posts

Data-rich posts contain many data related to your niche industry, compiled together as a single post. Data-rich posts are helpful to other entrepreneurs in your niche or investors who may invest in your company or your audience in general to give them an idea about your business scenario.

7. Polls

Polls are a popular content format because they are interactive and only take seconds for people to give their opinion. You can create a poll to ask people about the packaging of your new product, guess the price of a new service that you will launch, select what type of posts they want to read more, know which influencer they want you to collaborate with, etc.

8. Sneak Peeks

Sneak peeks are a great way to create buzz around a new product or service launch. You can start posting sneak peeks a few months or weeks before your scheduled launch and make them interesting enough to get your followers talking about it. 

9. Giveaways

Giveaways are ideal for getting new followers on social media and encouraging existing followers to follow your brand closely. You can host giveaways monthly or weekly and give your own products as giveaway gifts to the winners. 

10. Contests

If you want to spice up the participation of your audience, then give them some brain work. For example, instead of hosting only giveaways, hold contests where you ask them questions to answer about your company or the products and operations. Ensure that the gifts you decide for such contests are worthy enough for people to participate. 

11. Special Offers

Social media is the best way to inform your customers about special offers and promotions. When you run seasonal discounts and offers, create a dedicated post for it and share it across all the social media accounts. Repost the offer one to two times a week until it is valid.

12. Shoutouts

Shoutouts are a great way to build relationships with other brands. If you think your competitors have done something good, appreciate them on social media with a shoutout. You can do the same to appreciate an employee or an intern at work. This will bring out the human side of your business, and the chances of other businesses giving you a shout-out also improve. 

13. Memes

No social media content strategy is complete without memes. Adding a bit of humor to your social media content can really boost your engagement rate.

14. Personal Stories

Sharing personal stories allows customers to connect with your brand personally. It also improves your relationship with your employees. As a business owner, you should take the initiative to know how your employees feel about working with you and what positive changes it has brought to their lives. Once they share their stories, you can share them on social media with their pictures.

15. Behind the Scenes

Everybody gets excited about behind the scene stories. If you run a business, you can post behind-the-scenes clips and videos to show your business’s day-to-day operations and how your employees manage to do them. 

Conclusion 

Social media is a very competitive space to thrive. Yet, businesses must adapt to social media platforms to reach out to more people and build close relationships with them. In addition, social media facilitates two-way communication, which is critical to ensure that your products and services align with your customer’s expectations.

It is essential to stay updated with new social media trends to keep the audience entertained and informed. It is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to grow your customer base and increase your online presence. Any business not on social media is losing out on a significant opportunity to attract new customers and improve conversions. 

With the tips and strategies shared in this post, you can build your social media strategy from scratch or revamp your existing strategy for a better outcome. You can also reach out to professional social media marketing agencies for help. How important do you think social media is for businesses? Let us know in the comments.