Social Media Marketing

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of using text, image, audio, and video content to promote your business, products/services, or personal brand on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Other social media platforms include video and audio streaming platforms (YouTube, Clubhouse, Facebook Live, and Vimeo), and blogging sites (Medium, Quora, Reddit, and WordPress). The primary goal of social media marketing is to expand your reach, humanize your brand, and engage your audience with delightful, personalized content.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Social media marketing can help your company in several ways — directly and indirectly:

Enhanced Reach

Broadcasting on social media allows you to reach — and engage — new audiences outside of your geography and niche. You can further amplify the reach by partnering with influencers and thought leaders in your industry to produce authentic content for your brand channels. If you are a beginner, it's important to know social media terms.

Improved brand engagement

Social media marketing provides a way for brands to engage with audiences where they already are — and have 1:1 conversations with them. Through customer relationship and customer community building efforts, brands can use these one-off engagements to turn their audiences into brand advocates.

Increased traffic, leads, and conversions

Social media marketing can help to not only build advocates, but drive conversions that impact a company’s bottom line, simply by adding links and directing traffic from social to websites, apps, and other owned touchpoints. With the inception of social commerce platforms and functionality, brands can also produce direct sales right from social platforms.

Types of social media marketing

Social media marketing can be categorized into five broad types. Your company may use one or more of these tactics to get the right reach, engagement, and ROI from social media marketing.

1. Organic marketing

Building a 1:1 connection with audiences through posting organically on social channels, without paid support.

2. Paid marketing

Supporting organic efforts with paid media spend, either through boosting organic content, or developing targeted ads on social media platforms to drive campaign goals.

3. User-generated marketing

The content you gain from your followers or advocates in the form of replies, brand mentions, appreciation posts, and product placements.

4. Influencer marketing

Leveraging the credible voice of influencers or celebrities to further amplify brand messaging.

5. Affiliate marketing

The process of incentivizing social media users to try your products and review or promote them.

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Key components of social media marketing

There are six key components of social media marketing.

Strategy

Sound planning is the key to successful social media marketing. Your plan should define clear goals — at a campaign and overall level, target channels, content assets, and stakeholders for each campaign. It’s a good idea to centralize all this information in a unified brief to ensure alignment before content gets scheduled.

Content Planning

To execute your social media marketing strategy in a timely manner, you need to create a content plan. A typical content plan is made up of five core elements — workflows, editorial calendar, onboarding/training, communication, and optimization. A solid content plan helps you allocate resources to campaigns efficiently and overcome operational challenges before they impact your performance.

Publishing

It’s vital to maintain a regular posting frequency to get a top-of-mind advantage over the competition on cluttered social media networks. You also need to tailor content for each target platform so it ranks high on organic searches and gets more engagement. Last, you need to schedule your posts perfectly so they reach your target audience when they are engagement-ready.

Community Management

To build a true social media presence, community management is an essential part of the approach. By responding to mentions, tags, and comments, you are able to build relationships with audiences, as well as tap into customer feedback and identify quality audiences.

Analytics

By monitoring your social media marketing activities rigorously, you can identify your best-performing channels, content, influencers, advocates, and affiliates. Analytics will also surface discrepancies in your messaging and targeting so you can work on these areas moving forward.

Advertising

If you have the budget, you can leverage social media advertising to boost your visibility, engagement, and revenue. In order to accurately and effectively reach specific audiences with a specific message, it's important to boost posts and develop targeted ads. Without paid support, there's no guarantee that your posts are reaching the right person at the right time.

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Elevate your social media marketing strategy with Sprinklr Marketing.

With disjointed social media marketing point solutions on different channels, enterprises are unable to deliver a consistent brand voice, drive leads from different channels to the site, and tie marketing to sales and support effectively. Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Marketing suite is powered by the world’s only unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform that is purpose-built to help marketing teams orchestrate omnichannel campaigns across 30+ digital channels, including social media.

Our AI-led platform offers your business an unparalleled competitive advantage by enabling you to:

• Plan, collaborate, schedule, and publish with ease across any social media channel from a single, unified dashboard.

• Ensure brand and message consistency with robust governance features like automated approval workflows, stop publishing, and global compliance frameworks.

• Categorize responses automatically by intent and create workflows for identifying and scoring potential leads intelligently.

• Hear customers with advanced social listening to identify selling opportunities and respond faster — with empathy — by understanding the context behind customer comments.

• Monitor brand health by detecting negative customer sentiment using sentiment analysis and competitor analysis with Sprinklr’s powerful AI.

• Align social publishing and campaign management to reduce operating costs while maximizing the impact of your social media marketing campaigns.

• Execute campaigns across 30+ modern channels including social media so you never miss a publishing deadline or let a user comment go unanswered.

• Analyze and report campaign performance — overall and post-wise — to help you benchmark your performance, build accountability, and identify improvement areas.

Sprinklr lets you strategize and implement your campaigns end to end with an intuitive, AI-powered social media marketing platform with enterprise-grade infrastructure, security, and compliance.