Increasing the efficiency of SMM promotion: marketing strategies and tools
The article content
- Why is it important to use smm marketing
- What tasks will be included in the scope of work of an smm specialist
- Goals set for smm
- Which social networks to choose for smm promotion: getting acquainted with the main solutions
- Tools at your disposal for social marketing
- Methods of promotion that modern social marketing uses
- Checking the effectiveness of social marketing
- Let's sum it up
Today, social networks are experiencing a boom in popularity. It is difficult, of course, to name the total number of users that these platforms have collected on their pages, but it is calculated not even in millions, but in billions. And it is noteworthy that each of these users can be your target audience, partner, buyer. The only thing left is to tell about your product or service, and also make sure that people see your personal pages, highly appreciate them and go to get to know them in more detail. And here such a tool as social media marketing comes to the aid of business, that is, marketing in social networks or as it is usually called today - SMM.
This technology is very actively used in practice today when working with various social networks, be it Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. It will include regular publications on the brand's personal pages, attracting new subscribers who may well become your regular customers, Ensuring effective communication with the audience. Also SMM - this is launching advertising campaigns through social networks, analyzing the effectiveness of work, improving loyalty from the audience and forming the image of a reliable and responsible supplier of goods or services.
Within the framework of today's review, we will become more detailed on the purposes for which it is worth using SMM in practice, what advantages and difficulties are inherent in this technology. We will tell you who an SMM specialist is and what business goals he can solve with his work. We will talk about which social networks should be chosen to promote your goods and services and what audience this or that platform is focused on. We will highlight the main tools of social marketing and promotion methods that give good results in practice and tell you how to evaluate the effectiveness of work. The information provided will allow you to deeply understand such a question as SMM and launch this technology for the development of your own business as easily and correctly as possible.
Why is it important to use SMM marketing
A modern social network is what attracts a huge number of users. People come here to learn something interesting, useful for themselves. They study publications, leave comments under them, send interesting materials to their friends, order goods or services. And here they also make new acquaintances, study competitors, establish business connections, select potential partners. But it is impossible to implement business tasks on such platforms without marketing.
And this will be relevant not only for small stores, but also for fairly large retail chains, local brands. With the help of social marketing, you can attract people not only to online stores, but also to classic retail outlets. But in any case, it is very important here to do so that all the work is carried out as correctly and professionally as possible. This is the only way to count on high efficiency of your ideas and effective promotion of a brand or a particular product.
But SMM is a rather multifaceted sphere, which requires fairly deep knowledge and practical skills, the use of diverse tools. And before starting work, you need to understand what and how to do in order to achieve the desired effect. Unfortunately, in practice today there are quite often situations when an ill-considered strategy can simply ruin a brand's reputation, alienate even a loyal audience. To prevent this from happening, you need to understand what you have to work with, what tools to use, including for checking the effectiveness.
If we talk about the strengths of SMM promotion, then here it is worth highlighting the following points:
- Building trust in the brand among the audience. This is what can rightfully be called the basis for trusting relationships with the target audience. Your presence as a business on social networks is a unique opportunity to talk about yourself, your products or services, and establish direct interaction. For the audience, your activity on a social network means that the business is working, developing, and trying to offer the market some interesting solutions. In addition, modern buyers are gradually moving away from live communication. In order to find out the necessary information, it is much easier to write than to call or even go to the store. That is, your constant presence on the network and quick response to requests is what will contribute to the formation of trusting relationships.
- Quick and convenient informing customers about new products, services, special offers, discounts, news of your company, etc. People will be able to follow all this from the screens of their smartphones. In addition, it will be convenient to forward information to friends, ask you questions, save posts with products you like. That is, a modern social network is a kind of huge notebook with useful contacts, which you can look at at any time.
- Increasing brand awareness in the market. This is what, among other things, will also contribute to improving loyalty from the target audience. Your online presence is not even a shelf with goods. Here you can talk about your goals and desires, share your successes, show that there is a living person with their own emotions and feelings behind the logo. As a result, you will be able to create a name for yourself that will be associated with certain values, high-quality goods, and services by customers. Social networks have everything that will ensure the closest interaction between a business and a client. And you can be sure that if a person needs to buy a certain product, he will choose your product among similar ones.
- Ensuring constant availability for customers, simplifying communication. To find out the answers to their questions, your customers will not have to run to the store, wait for the managers to come to work. They will be able to ask their questions via social networks and receive answers to them literally in real time. But if you go to the comments under your posts, you will be able to find out what exactly the audience thinks about you, what comments or wishes they have. This is what will allow you to adjust your own strategy to these wishes and requests.
That is, we can say with confidence that social marketing solves the key problems facing modern business. But there are also a number of nuances that should be taken into account in advance and be prepared for them.
Negative aspects of SMM promotion
But, as everywhere, along with the advantages there are also disadvantages, or, as it would be more correct to say in our case - points that should be taken into account before proceeding directly to the work. In particular, we are talking about:
- The need to devote enough time to SMM promotion. All work with social networks should be carried out constantly in order to give in practice the results you expect. You will have to constantly prepare new content, post it, communicate with the audience, respond to their comments, launch advertising, monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments to the strategy, solve emerging problems. That is, resources are needed here, both time and material if you decide to involve third-party specialists.
- There is always a risk of getting negative reviews, comments. Even if you offer the market a really high-quality and advanced product, there will always be those who are not satisfied with something. And they can express their negativity in the comments to your posts. In addition, often it is negative reviews that are written much more often than positive ones. If a person is satisfied with a product or service, he will not always share his opinion. But if he did not like some little thing, he will definitely speak out about it. Such is the human nature. But the main thing here is not to panic, but to professionally sort out each such situation. You need to find out what the person didn’t like and find ways to smooth out the problem. Your communication should be as concise and respectful as possible, showing that you really regret the buyer’s negative experience and would like to somehow smooth out the situation. In addition, negative reviews are what will allow you to look at your company with outside eyes, identify existing problems. That is, each negative comment is your chance to improve your business.
- SMM does not give instant results. This is where work is done for the future. Even if you invite an experienced marketer to collaborate, pay a professional designer to prepare your posts, you will not have a queue of clients tomorrow. The main thing here is to follow the trends. Even if you add one new subscriber or customer every day, if people start to speak more positively about your company, are more willing to make contact - these are all indicators of effective SMM promotion. Over time, it will provide the desired coverage, improve brand recognition, ensure a stable influx of clients and, along with this, good income.
That is, these points cannot be called disadvantages. You just need to understand what to expect and constantly monitor the effectiveness of your work in social networks in order to instantly respond to changes and avoid serious mistakes and waste of budget.
What tasks will be included in the scope of work of an SMM specialist
If you think about it, is the work of an SMM specialist difficult? Big deal, just post from time to time and get an influx of audience. But if you delve into this issue more deeply, it becomes clear how complex and voluminous the work that will be assigned to this person should be. Here you cannot do without certain knowledge of skills, a professional and comprehensive approach. You can’t get by with banal photos and texts. Here it will be necessary to study the target audience and draw up its profile, get to know your closest competitors and the solutions they use in practice, prepare a full-fledged content plan and systematically implement it step by step, while monitoring the effectiveness and making all the necessary adjustments. And one of the most serious difficulties here is that all this must be prepared individually for each project. There is no single template that would be relevant for absolutely all business categories.
That is, the work of an SMM specialist is something that needs to be learned. You must understand that the formation of the image of your brand will be in the hands of such a person, so their choice is always approached very responsibly. If you find a competent contractor, you can delegate the following tasks to them:
- Creating content for publication on the site. Here it is important to prepare materials taking into account the interests of the target audience, select the most suitable formats and topics that will appeal to your potential clients.
- Regularly publish materials in your business profiles, combining text, photo and video content. It is also important from time to time to launch creatives that can attract the attention of as many users as possible, to help people decide to interact with your business.
- Independently or in collaboration with designers, photographers, think over the visual component of the profile. Here it is important to ensure the harmony of color combinations, the aesthetics of the materials, and compliance with the main brand palette.
- Monitor user comments, respond to them, both positive and negative, answer user questions, and simply maintain lively active communication, which will help improve the audience's loyalty to the brand.
- Think over a strategy for promoting the brand in social networks, write down the main points, and systematically implement all this in practice. Here it is important to describe not only the main work, but also set goals, indicate the time frame within which they can be achieved and the material costs that will be required at each stage. Subsequently, by comparing the actual figures with the planned ones, you will see whether your strategy has worked in practice or whether it requires improvement.
- Launch paid advertising, look for bloggers for cooperation, select other ways to attract an audience to your brand pages and put all this into action.
- Monitor the results of the work, including with the help of special services. That is, it is important to understand how many clients you managed to attract to the business, which interactive activities or materials gave good results, and which, on the contrary, did not work. This is what will allow you to make adjustments to the strategy itself and direct material resources where they will be more useful.
As you can see, the responsibilities of an SMM specialist will include all those works that involve promoting your business on social networks. This is really very large-scale, quite difficult, but at the same time necessary for maximum coverage of the user audience.
Goals set for SMM
Any work should have a goal. This is what will allow you to evaluate the results of actions, identify the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy, and force you to reconsider the original developments. SMM promotion begins with setting a goal. So, today you can set the following goals for social marketing:
- Increasing sales. Social networks are the platforms where you can tell a huge number of potential customers about your products and services in as much detail as possible. This is the goal that most modern businesses set when launching SMM.
- Improving your reputation in the market. This solution will be especially relevant for a business that works for a regular audience. Here it is important to understand what your customers like and what they are dissatisfied with. That is, it is important to analyze the user experience and use the knowledge gained to improve it. This goal is aimed not so much at attracting a new audience, but at people who have already managed to use your products or services. That is, this is exactly how the audience will describe your brand, what to associate it with, how much to trust it.
- Increasing brand awareness in the market. Unlike the previous point, here the focus is on new customers. Here it is important to tell the market what your company is, what services or products it supplies, to form an image of experts in your niche. This is the goal that businesses should set for themselves that are just planning to enter the market or are expanding their scope of activity, including social networks, and those who are introducing a new product.
- Increasing website traffic. Here we are not talking about direct sales, but simply about attracting the audience's attention to goods, services, or business in general. That is, it is important to make sure that a potential buyer visits your website, and then it's a matter of technique. If your resource is good, and the products or services presented on it are of high quality and affordable, then there is a high probability that orders will follow the visit.
- Formation of a community for communication. If you are betting on this goal, then you want your audience to leave likes and comments under publications on social networks, ask clarifying questions, find like-minded people, and make new acquaintances. Here, the emphasis should be more on entertaining content, regional creatives. You can safely use memes, funny pictures, special offers, and everything that will promote closer communication between the business and the target audience.
That is, the goals here can be completely different, moreover, they can change throughout the world of promoting your business. The main thing is not to set any lofty goals for yourself, otherwise you simply will not be able to achieve them. That is, the goals you face at the SMM promotion stage should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant to your business. But it is also important that all decisions are timely. It is based on this that you should build your own strategy.
Which social networks to choose for SMM promotion: getting acquainted with the main solutions
How effective SMM promotion will be in practice directly depends on which social networks you will use to interact with the audience. Grabbing all the platforms here is not the best strategy. In addition, when preparing material for publication, it is important to take into account the specifics of a particular social network, as well as the audience that will be represented on it. Now we will give a number of features characteristic of popular platforms today, which will allow you to choose the one where your target audience is mostly represented:
- Facebook. Here the target market is These are people aged approximately 25 to 50 years. Facebook can rightfully be called a universal social network for communicating with an audience. Here you can talk about products and services, add photos, videos, text descriptions, news. Moreover, you can create stores and meetings right inside the platform for selling goods.
- X (Twitter). The audience age group is 25-40 years. We would like to draw attention to the fact that the length of each post is limited to 280 characters. Here you can find the most popular memes, trends. The platform has its own niche culture. You will not be able to use it for direct sales, since it is not intended for these purposes. But you will definitely be able to form the image of a successful brand here.
- Instagram. This platform is worth paying attention to for businesses that target people aged 18-35. Here you can post materials in the feed, prepare stories, reels. The emphasis here is on visuals, that is, pictures and videos work great. Text here is only an addition and is often transferred to the picture itself.
- TikTok. A platform that attracts the most young people. It features children, teenagers, young people under 25, and older users. The main content is entertaining, so you need to think through your SMM promotion strategy so that it looks as native as possible and does not contain direct advertising.
- YouTube. A video hosting site that features a very wide age category. Here you can find any content formats, from classic shows to professional blogs and educational materials. The only thing you need to understand is that the entry threshold here is quite high. If you want to focus on video materials, you will have to invest in good equipment, find a professional screenwriter, editor.
- LinkedIn. Attracts an audience aged 21-45. It was originally created to find work and personnel, as well as exchange information on professional topics. But here you can also find all the opportunities to promote your brand, communicate with potential clients, business partners.
- Telegram. This platform has long gone beyond the classic messenger. Today you can post news, advertisements, posts on any topic, share information with your audience, respond to comments and form a loyal community around your brand.
That is, when choosing a platform, first of all, you should proceed from who your target audience will be and on which platform you can find it in maximum volume. It is also important to evaluate what content is most popular, as well as related aspects.
Tools at your disposal for social marketing
Various tools, techniques and solutions can be used to implement effective SMM promotion. Here are just the most common of them:
- Content management. Depending on the platform you choose, the basis of any strategy should be content: interesting, relevant, informative, designed as attractively as possible. There should be no overt advertising. You need to think about how to integrate your products or services into the material so that everything looks as natural and concise as possible.
- Interactives. Modern users are no longer interested in the usual presentation of information. They expect something bright and unusual from social networks and the communities that are presented on them. Moreover, the audience is not against receiving gifts, bonuses. Therefore, you can safely launch various contests, quizzes, challenges, encourage people to write comments or reviews, offering a certain reward for this. This is where you can fully demonstrate your imagination, experiment with different directions in order to hold the audience's attention as long as possible.
- Contests. This is a separate type of creative, aimed not at a regular, but at a new audience. The main thing here is not to give very difficult tasks, otherwise people will simply not take part in your contest. It is also important to specify the terms of your interactive activity, its start and end dates. Don't forget to specify how you will determine the winner and be sure to tell us later who won. Contests are the type of content that is literally passed along the chain, covering the maximum audience.
- Active communication with the audience. This is what will show people that you are sincerely interested in them, take into account their opinions and wishes. Only here it is very important to develop your own style, the so-called voice of the brand and constantly follow it in your publications. Focus on a calm and friendly tone, smooth over any conflicts, respond to all comments, even negative ones. And all this needs to be done as quickly as possible, so that the person doesn’t get the impression that you don’t care about his comments.
As you can see, there aren’t that many tools, but you can use them all in practice, combining them or choosing those that will appeal to the audience the most.
Methods of promotion that modern social marketing uses
Modern social networks are so filled with content that it is very, very difficult to stand out among all this diversity. Therefore, relying on the algorithms of the platforms themselves during SMM promotion is clearly not worth it. In order to attract an audience to your account, you can use paid advertising. And here there are several options:
- Targeted advertising. It relies on certain interests and characteristics of the target consumer. The social network can find out this information simply by tracking the activity of a particular person. That is, as soon as you become interested in some cosmetics, you will immediately be offered publications with viewed products, and from different online stores. Now, when users are too tired of classic advertising, have stopped responding to it, targeting is gaining popularity, unobtrusively offering relevant goods or services.
- Thematic advertising in communities. This is what will allow the target market to learn more about your business and its products. The secret to successful influence is the right selection of communities. Here, you should focus on those that match the specifics of your business and where the audience is represented in sufficient numbers.
- Affiliate marketing. It involves mutually beneficial cooperation between different brands that supply the market with the same or related product categories. It turns out that you will advertise your partner's products, and they will advertise yours. In most cases, no additional payment is required here. The main secret to success here is to find a good company for mutual cooperation.
- Influencer marketing. It is based on attracting an opinion leader to work with the brand. Here you need to find a blogger who, for a fee or for your products, will advertise the products in a native form to their subscribers. The advantage of this solution is that advertising will be targeted at an audience that completely trusts its idol, which increases its effectiveness many times over.
Here you can also combine different methods, but it is imperative to track their effectiveness. Remember that most of these methods are paid and it is not in your interests to waste money without receiving a response from the consumer market.
Checking the effectiveness of social marketing
SMM promotion is a fairly long and complex work, which involves not only the implementation of the main stages prescribed in the strategy, but also strict control over the effectiveness. This is the only way to understand how effective all your actions are in practice, eliminate wasted budget, increase audience reach and, as a result, benefit the business. In order not to miss key points, it is important to track a number of mandatory parameters, the so-called key performance indicators, KPI. This includes:
- increasing the number of users who subscribed to your profile;
- audience reach, which is measured by the number of people who responded to your publication with a comment, like, repost;
- the number of unsubscribes, that is, people who decided to no longer follow your profile and publications;
- engagement level, which will also manifest itself in an increase in the number of subscribers, an increase in the number of certain reactions;
- the number of views of a particular publication, which will allow you to highlight those post formats that are most popular with the audience;
- the level of account attractiveness, which is assessed by the ratio of the number of likes to the total number of subscribers and is measured as a percentage;
- the cost per click on an advertisement.
In practice, not all of these parameters can be used. Here, everything depends on what goal you set for yourself at this stage. Today, there are specialized services to collect all this data. Most popular social networks have their own software products adapted to their specific work, but you can also use third-party services. Setting up will require a minimum of time and effort from you, but at the end you will have all the information that will clearly show the effectiveness of your work, help identify weak points in the strategy and find ways to eliminate them, which will lead to increased loyalty from the consumer audience, optimize advertising costs.
Let's sum it up
Regardless of what goals you set for SMM promotion, it is important to understand that we are talking about constant work and strict discipline. You will have to regularly select interesting topics and create relevant content based on them, monitor its effectiveness by analyzing key metrics. Every week you need to develop a content plan for the next 7 days, check the effectiveness and, based on the data obtained, make adjustments to publications or an advertising strategy. It is optimal to perform a large-scale analysis of statistical data every month and compare them with the previous period to understand how effective your work is on a global scale. It is not possible for a business owner to implement all this on his own, since it is also necessary to deal with direct sales and other primary tasks of the company.
Therefore, a more reliable solution would be to engage the services of an SMM specialist. You can delegate all the work related to promotion in social networks to him. Here it is important to find a good specialist and provide him with access to all the necessary tools for data collection and analytics. In particular, one of the indispensable solutions for anyone who specializes in social marketing will be mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service. You can find out more about this product, its functionality, and purpose at the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy.
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