What is social media marketing? Why should you implement social media marketing?

Let's explore what social media marketing is and why you should apply this method for marketing.

Bùi Phương Thảo

13.6.2024

Are you looking for an effective marketing method to reach potential customers, increase brand awareness, and boost sales? Social media marketing is the answer for you! Social media marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing today. It helps businesses of all sizes easily and cost-effectively reach their potential customers. So, what exactly is social media marketing, and why should businesses adopt this method? In this article, SO9 will provide the answers.

I. What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing, a term familiar in the field of digital marketing, is the key to helping businesses break through and lead the market. So, what is Social Media Marketing, and what benefits does it bring to businesses?

Social Media Marketing involves using social media platforms and tools such as Facebook, Instagram, Zalo, TikTok, and others to promote a brand, products, and services to potential customers. This effective marketing method helps businesses to:

Connect Directly with Customers: Interact, answer questions, and build strong relationships with customers.
Increase Brand Awareness: Introduce the brand and products to a wide audience on social media.
Attract Potential Customers: Target the right audience, capture their attention, and convert them into potential customers.
Boost Sales: Encourage direct purchases on social media platforms or websites.
Save on Marketing Costs: Compared to traditional advertising methods, Social Media Marketing is more cost-effective while delivering higher results.

II. Why Should You Adopt Social Media Marketing?

One might ask why social media marketing is so effective. Social media marketing is effective because over half of the global population currently uses social media. Additionally, statistics show that 76% of social media users have made a purchase after seeing a product on these platforms.

Here's a quick analysis by platform:

Snapchat users have a global spending power of up to $4.4 trillion.
68% of YouTube viewers seek information through videos before deciding to buy.
50% of Instagram users say they visited a brand's website after viewing Stories.
Brands find product discovery frequency on TikTok is 1.7 times higher compared to other platforms.
50% of Pinterest users consider the platform a shopping destination.

Before social media, businesses relied on traditional advertising channels like TV ads, radio, billboards, flyers, and magazine ads to deliver their messages to customers. But with the development of social media, businesses no longer have to wait for users to watch TV or read magazines.

Today, the average person spends 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media, accounting for 35.8% of total online activity. This is a golden opportunity for businesses to leverage social media marketing and attract potential customers.

Source: Data Reportal

Social media marketing brings your message directly to consumers and allows you to precisely measure the effectiveness of each post. This is a significant advantage of social media marketing over traditional marketing channels, as these analytical metrics are not available on traditional platforms. Moreover, with the large number of social media users today, this presents an opportunity for businesses to attract many potential customers.

III. Successful Social Media Marketing Case Studies

1. "Barbie" Movie Promotion Campaign

A prime example of successful social media marketing is the promotional campaign for the Barbie movie by Warner Bros. and Mattel. To promote the movie, they created the hashtag #BarbietheMovie, which garnered 18 million interactions across social media platforms. Notably, the marketing team launched the "Barbie Selfie Generator" tool, creating a global sensation as numerous celebrities and fans participated in the trend. This selfie tool brought an additional 1 million interactions with the brand. As a result, the Barbie movie broke multiple box office records, demonstrating the powerful effectiveness of this social media marketing campaign.

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2. Spotify Wrapped Campaign

Another example of successful social media marketing is the Spotify Wrapped campaign. Every year, Spotify introduces the Wrapped feature, which allows users to review all the songs, playlists, genres, and albums they've listened to the most throughout the year. This feature not only creates a frenzy of users sharing their results on social media but also significantly increases app downloads.

Specifically, the Spotify Wrapped campaign in 2020 increased app downloads by 21% in just one week. By 2021, the number of tweets about Spotify Wrapped surged by 461%, with nearly 60 million Wrapped images shared on social media. In 2022, more than 156 million users participated in Wrapped, demonstrating the resounding success of the campaign.

Although Spotify hasn't released performance data for Wrapped since then, the campaign's widespread popularity and enthusiastic user participation each year clearly show its ongoing remarkable success.

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3. "You Rule" Campaign by Burger King

In 2023, Burger King aimed to elevate its status against major competitors like McDonald's and Taco Bell through a new campaign called "You Rule." This campaign encouraged fans to share images of themselves wearing the iconic paper crown and launched an exciting Whopper EP for fans to create and remix on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

The "You Rule" campaign achieved impressive results right from the start. The Whopper EP attracted 50,000 listens in just the first weekend, and the entire campaign reached a 99% brand recall rate. This campaign not only enhanced customer engagement but also helped Burger King solidify its position in the highly competitive fast food market.

IV. 9 Steps to Building an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

After understanding what social media marketing is and why it should be applied in your business, let's explore 9 steps to creating an effective social media marketing strategy with SO9.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

The first step in building a social media marketing strategy is to clearly define the purpose of your presence on these platforms. Your goals should closely align with your overall business objectives. You might aim to:

Increase sales within a specific customer segment
Enhance brand awareness in international markets
Boost website traffic
Drive revenue from direct social media shopping features

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is essential for any marketing plan. However, remember that your social media audience may differ slightly from your traditional marketing audience. Key factors to understand your customers include: Age, Gender, Income, Occupation, Interests. To delve deeper, consider:

The social media platforms they use most
Their social media shopping habits
Where they usually seek information
Who makes purchasing decisions in their household

Step 3: Monitor and Research Competitors

Once you have defined your goals and understood your customers, spend time researching your competitors. Observe which platforms they are active on and the type of content they post. Studying and monitoring competitors helps you grasp effective trends they are using, learn from their mistakes to avoid repeating them, and develop a more effective strategy.

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Step 4: Assess Current Campaign Effectiveness

Take time to comprehensively evaluate your current social media efforts to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Focus on the following factors:

Posts that attract the highest/lowest engagement
Engagement rates and follower growth
Engagement levels compared to competitors
Effectiveness on each platform

This will give you an overall view of the current strategy's effectiveness and help you make necessary adjustments.

Step 5: Set Up Your Accounts

The next step is to set up your accounts properly and professionally to make a strong impression and attract customers from the start. To effectively set up your accounts, you need to:

Choose a clear, correctly formatted profile picture
Write an engaging bio with appropriate keywords
Follow potential accounts and customers
Set up a business account (if applicable)

Optimizing these elements will help you create a professional, impactful first impression, thereby attracting attention and engagement from your target customers.

Step 6: Prepare Your Resources

After setting up, the next step is to prepare resources for posting, which include:

Photos and videos
Logos
Text content
Captions and responses to audience comments
Competitors' posts for reference and inspiration

Organizing and arranging these resources neatly and scientifically from the beginning will help new employees easily access and utilize them for social media tasks. Moreover, choose a diverse combination of advertising content and high-quality, educational, entertaining content to keep things fresh and avoid boring your audience. SO9 recommends following the 80:20 rule, meaning 80% of the content should be informative and useful, and 20% should be for advertising.

Step 7: Build a Content Calendar

With the resources prepared, you can start building a content calendar. A content calendar clearly defines what you will post, on which day, and at what time. This helps you easily manage and track the progress of posts, avoiding content duplication or missed posts.

Step 8: Schedule Posts

The next crucial step is scheduling your posts. Tools like SO9 can help you automate scheduling and optimize posting times to maximize engagement. The benefit of scheduling is the ability to manage multiple platforms simultaneously, making it easy to track and assess performance visually.

You can also use integrated tools on platforms, such as Meta Business Manager for Facebook and Instagram, to schedule posts in advance. However, this feature can be time-consuming and may not provide a comprehensive overview of campaign performance across social media channels.

Step 9: Analyze and Monitor Effectiveness

After posting, take the time to analyze and monitor effectiveness to adjust and optimize future posts. You can change content formats, such as transitioning from static posts to video formats like Reels. Additionally, consider adjusting posting times to align with audience activity. Utilize SO9's content analytics feature to optimize your campaigns.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is an incredibly effective marketing method for business growth in today's digital age. By implementing effective Social Media Marketing strategies, you can reach millions of potential customers and drive sales. We hope the information in this article proves helpful. Don't forget to visit the SO9.VN website for the latest updates on business operation knowledge! Wishing you success!