Growth of Social Media Marketing: Concept and Process

The growth of social media marketing is almost limitless. Within recent years, social media marketing has skyrocketed in popularity, with many people experiencing the benefits of it firsthand.

From creating a strong brand identity to developing a customer-base, social media marketing has a lot to offer, so it’s important that you learn the process before diving in head-first.

As social network members grow and platforms such as Instagram and TikTok increasingly affect consumer purchasing behavior, marketers are leveraging these networks’ pulling power for marketing.

Social media ad spending was roughly 132 billion US dollars in 2020, predicted to exceed 200 billion USD by 2024. While the United States continues to be the world’s largest social media ad market, marketers from other countries are increasingly hopping on board.

Let’s dive into the concept, process and everything you need to know about social media marketing and its growth.

What Exactly Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is selling or promoting a brand, product, or service through social media networks.

Businesses benefit from social media marketing through boosting brand awareness, creation of active communities, the offer of products and services for sale, promotion of products and services to specific audiences etc.

Social media marketing (SMM) is using social media—the platforms on which users create social networks and share information—to grow a company’s brand, improve sales, and drive website traffic.

It features purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the performance of their efforts and uncover even more opportunities to engage, and provide companies with a tool to communicate with existing consumers and reach new ones.

What Is the Definition of a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a document that outlines your social media goals, techniques for achieving them, and metrics for measuring progress.

Your social media marketing strategy should also include a list of your existing and planned social media accounts and goals for each platform on which you are involved. These objectives should be consistent with your company’s overall digital marketing strategy.

Finally, a strong social media plan should clarify your team’s roles and duties and your reporting cadence.

More than 80% of consumers report that social media, particularly influencer content, significantly impacts purchasing decisions. Marketers across industries are thus, driving the evolution of social media marketing (SMM) from a standalone tool to a multifaceted source of marketing intelligence on an increasingly important—and growing—audience. Statistics reveal:

• That by 2023, there will be 5.6 billion social media users worldwide—more than 58 percent of the world’s population.
• As the use of social media grows, marketers will improve tactics to capitalize on the considerable competitive advantage that engagement with target audience can provide even more quickly and efficiently than traditional marketing.

What Makes Social Media Marketing Effective?

The power of social media marketing (SMM) runs on social media’s unrivaled capacity in three main marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.

Social media allow businesses to interact with customers in unimaginable ways. It also provides an astonishing number of paths to engage with target audiences—from content platforms (like YouTube) and social networks (like Facebook) to microblogging services (like Twitter).

A well-designed social media marketing (SMM) strategy provides another vital resource for improving marketing results via customer data.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the three Vs of data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM solutions can harvest customer data and turn it into useful market analysis—or even crowdsource new tactics.

What Is the Process of Social Media Marketing?

As social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram grew in popularity, they transformed how we connect and how businesses can influence consumer behavior.

We can now promote content that drives engagement and extract geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.

1. Action Plan for SMM

The Social media marketing (SMM) approach is effective if you hit the target. Align SMM aims with specific business objectives such as:

• Discovering your ideal customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
• Performing a competitive analysis of your competitors (successes and failures) and examining your present SMM successes and failures
• Making an SMM content delivery calendar and creating world-class content
• Monitoring performance and tweaking your SMM strategy as appropriate.

2. Customer Relationship Management

Social media marketing offers several distinct advantages over traditional marketing. Whereas traditional marketing typically tracks customer value through purchase activity, SMM can follow customer value directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).

3. Shareable Material

Businesses can use the increased interconnection of SMM to create “sticky” content, which is a marketing phrase for appealing content that attracts customers at first glance, convinces them to buy things, and then makes them want to share the content.

This type of word-of-mouth advertising reaches a previously untapped audience and carries the implicit endorsement of someone the recipient knows and trusts. Shareable content is one of the most essential ways social media marketing promotes growth.

4. Earned Media

Customer-created product reviews and recommendations are the most efficient way for a firm to reap the benefits of another type of earned media (a word for brand exposure from any manner other than paid advertising).

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing, a sales tactic that aims to drive the rapid spread of word-of-mouth product information, is another SMM strategy that relies on the audience to generate the message.

When a marketing message spreads well beyond the initial intended audience, it is considered viral.

To Wrap Up

The growth of social media marketing has been exponential, and there is no looking back at this point. With the tools that social media marketing has to offer, it has become a free resource, making the marketing process so much easier.

Whether you are looking to plan a social media marketing strategy, create shareable material, or execute a viral marketing campaign, you will have a better chance of being successful with the help of social media marketing tools.