| Did you know?
“As of February 2025, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 141 minutes per day, down from 143 minutes in the previous year.” (Statista) |
Over the past few years, the use of social media has become quite common. From teenagers to older citizens, everyone is using it. In addition to this, due to its increased use, many businesses have started using it for marketing their brands, and surprisingly, social media marketing has become quite popular around the world. Moreover, due to the increased use of social media for marketing purposes, the demand for social media marketers has also increased. For this reason, many peers are pursuing Social Media Marketing as their careers. However, some people still use traditional marketing to drive sales, but fail to do so. Before starting your marketing, it is better to be aware of the difference between the two and know which one would be better for your brand on the basis of your budget, service, and target audience.
Do you also want to pursue social media marketing as your long-term career? No worries! We’ve got your back.
In this blog, we will discuss social media marketing and guide you on everything you need to know about it, including its brief overview, benefits, challenges, strategies, and how to start your career as a social media marketer. In addition to this, we will also talk about the differences between social media marketing and traditional marketing.
So, what are we waiting for? Let’s dive into it!
What is Social Media Marketing?
Firstly, let’s begin our blog by understanding what social media marketing actually is.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the use of social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc, to boost your brand awareness and build social connections. Whether you want to promote your products, services, or ideas, choosing social media marketing might be the best option for you. In addition to this, it is used to generate leads, make connections, and drive traffic to your websites. Besides that, SMM is used to build credibility for your business by allowing new customers to interact with previous customers. It also helps them understand your capabilities by analysing your brand’s followers, reviews, comments, and likes on social media.
SMM allows social media marketers to track the progress of their brands by analysing data, including followers, messages, likes, and more. Apart from that, these social media platforms offer real-time insights to help marketers identify effective strategies. It also allows marketers to assess their marketing strategies and choose the most effective one. In addition to this, social media marketing also enables you to influence customer behaviour. Social media marketers extract their potential customers’ personal data (name, age, city, etc) to make their messages more personalised.
Now, let’s understand the benefits of SMM.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
The benefits of social media marketing go beyond likes and comments; it is more than that. It is one of the most powerful tools that helps your brand grow. According to Landingi, “More than 70% of businesses use social media for marketing.”
The following are some advantages of social media marketing:
● Enhanced brand visibility and engagement:
Firstly, SMM helps you enhance your brand visibility. You can achieve incredible reach by using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. These platforms allow your brand to reach millions of potential customers in seconds. In addition to this, you can easily interact with your audience via comments and polls and build a community, creating brand loyalty.
● Cost-effective:
Moreover, social media marketing is a cost-effective marketing method. When you run a campaign with paid social media advertising, your ad reaches a wider audience at an affordable rate. This helps you target more people with minimum investment.
● Manage insights:
Additionally, many social media platforms provide you with built-in data analytics tools to track your brand’s progress and measure its return on investment (ROI). They also help you test various strategies to choose the best one. Along with this, you can also create customer personas by collecting data about them through social media platforms. Moreover, it also helps you to keep an eye on your competitors and remain updated with real-time trends.
● Higher conversion rates:
Besides that, SMM provides you with higher conversion rates. However, to increase the conversion rates, it is vital to build effective strategies. Moreover, many people only trust a brand when they see others reviewing it. SMM also involves User-generated content (UGC), which allows users to share their reviews online. UGC plays a vital role in boosting conversion rates.
● Fast feedback:
Furthermore, it allows you to receive quick feedback from your customers. Your customers might message you or leave comments on your post to provide their feedback. However, it is crucial to handle negative feedback with grace and professionalism. On the other hand, some customers also provide positive feedback in the comment section, which helps to build trust among new customers.
Challenges of Social Media Marketing
Indeed, social media marketing is highly beneficial for your brand; however, it also has some potential drawbacks. These challenges can hinder your brand growth; thus, it is essential to be aware of them.
Here are a few disadvantages of SMM:
● Constant change of algorithm:
One of the most common issues in social media marketing is the constant change of the algorithm. Some social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, face algorithm changes frequently, due to which social media marketers have to adapt various engaging methods and strategies. This badly affects the organic reach as well.
● High competition:
Apart from this, with millions of competitors, standing out from the crowd can be very hard. In addition, marketers must apply various strategies to be distinct from their competitors. Moreover, to remain competitive, you need to stay updated with the trends and ensure your brand follows them.
● Maintaining engagement:
Furthermore, maintaining consistent engagement on these platforms can also be quite challenging. With the same content style, your audience might get bored, leading to reduced engagement. However, to avoid this, you need to produce captivating content for your brand so that your audience is not bored.
● Time-consuming:
Additionally, managing various social media platforms can be time-consuming and tiring. Social media marketers often have to spend long hours crafting strategies and then checking if they are effective for the brand or not. Besides that, different platforms have different audiences; thus, they require different strategies. Juggling between these platforms and strategies can be frustrating for a marketer.
● Measuring ROI:
Besides that, measuring the return on investment (ROI) of social media can be difficult as it requires you to track multiple metrics and data sets and make assumptions on why the customer has reacted in a particular way.
How to use Social Media Marketing for business: effective strategies?
Are you still with us? Great job! Now, let’s discuss some effective social media marketing strategies for your business.
Many people are aware of the usefulness of social media platforms for the marketing of their businesses. However, they are often unaware of the social media marketing strategies to achieve their marketing goals. For this reason, they usually fail to achieve their desired goals. Whether you want to enhance your brand’s visibility, generate leads, increase followers, or drive sales, you need to be aware of the effective social media marketing strategies and how to use them for your brand.
To help you with your marketing, we will provide some basic social media marketing strategies:
● Identify your target audience:
One of the most important strategies is to identify your target audience. To know your target audience, you need to conduct thorough research. Take a look at your competitors’ brands and examine their followers. This will give you a clear idea of your potential audience. After getting this information, you need to make a customer persona. In this document, you will add the basic but relevant information about your ideal customers. In your customer persona, add the following things:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Job
- Average income
- Hobbies
- Which social media platform do they use the most
Creating a customer persona is crucial for building an effective SMM strategy. Additionally, it helps you understand your potential audience and choose the most effective strategy for them.
● Set SMART goals:
Besides that, you need to set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals.
Let’s learn how to set SMART goals:
Specific: Choose a clear and concise goal.
Measurable: Ensure it is measurable
Attainable: Make sure your goal is realistic
Relevant: It must be relevant to your long-term objectives
Time-bound: Set a time limit to achieve your goal
For instance, “Increasing the Instagram followers by 20% over the next four months by posting 4 times per week.”
Note that this goal is specific: increasing Instagram followers, measurable: 20%, attainable: increasing Instagram followers in the time span of four months is feasible and realistic, relevant: increasing followers will lead to more engagement and conversions, making it relevant to the long-term objective, and time-bound: you have to achieve the desired outcome in four months.
● Choose the right social media platform:
In addition to this, you need to choose the right social media platform to implement our strategies. One of the major issues faced by social media marketers is that they apply the same SMM strategy on every social media platform. Due to this, their goals are achieved on one platform, but the other platforms show no success.
This table will help you select the best social media platform according to your ideal audience:
| TikTok | ||||
| Audience(age) | 25-45 | 18-35 | 30-55 | 10-19 |
| Marketing strategies | Advertising
Local marketing |
Advertising
Organic Influencer marketing |
Organic
B2B |
Influencer marketing |
| Suitable industries | Jobs & Education
Healthcare Beauty & Fitness |
Higher education
Consumer goods Technology |
IT
Hospital Construction |
Salons
Restaurants Concerts |
| Drawbacks | Less organic reach | Costly adds | Small audience | Least popular for marketing |
You can use this table to select your potential social media platform based on the niche of your brand. You can also use 3-4 social media platforms to achieve your marketing goals. However, it is vital to be aware of the different marketing strategies for each platform.
● Create a content calendar:
After all these things, the most vital task is to create a content strategy (content calendar). A content calendar helps you stay on track throughout your social media marketing journey. In addition to this, it allows you to make a monthly schedule to know when you will post (date), at what time you will post (10:00 am), what type of content you will post (reel), and on which platform you will post (Instagram).
Try to upload high-quality and captivating content 3 to 5 times a week to maintain engagement. However, it is crucial to post only top-quality content. Avoid spamming your followers’ feeds, as it may result in a decline in followers.
● Measure the results:
Finally, start posting your content and measure its results. You can measure your results by examining likes, comments, shares, saves and other built-in social media insights. For marketing purposes, you also need to calculate the return on investment (ROI), which can be a bit difficult. However, using the right methods and applying string analytical skills will provide you with the best results. Additionally, you can use other advanced websites, such as Meta Business Suite, Instagram Analytics, Hootsuite, Buffer, etc, to measure the results more easily for you.
Social Media Marketing vs Traditional Marketing: Which Is Better
Many businesses remain unsure about whether to opt for social media marketing or traditional marketing to drive sales. However, the decision to choose between the two solely depends on your personal preference. To help you make a better decision, we will distinguish between the two.
How Social Media Marketing differs from Traditional marketing:
You have learned enough about social media marketing in this blog, so let’s just get a brief overview of it.
Social Media Marketing:
Social media marketing is basically the use of social media platforms to drive sales, generate leads, and increase website traffic. It includes marketing through social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Traditional Marketing:
On the other hand, Traditional marketing is the use of online channels to promote theri products and services. These channels include:
- Television
- Newspapers
- Billboards
- Magazines
- Radios
| Social media marketing | Traditional marketing |
| Use of social media, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. | Use of traditional media, including magazines, billboards, and newspapers. |
| Less permanent | More permanent |
| Immediate feedback | Delayed feedback |
| Cost-effective | High cost |
| Wider audience | Limited audience |
| High ROI | Low ROI |
How to get started?
Do you also want to become a social media marketer, but don’t know where to start? No worries! We are here to guide you.
1. Develop core skills:
First and foremost, the most vital thing to start your career as a social media marketer is to develop core SMM skills. You can take online courses if your studies are disrupted. However, if you prefer offline learning and don’t want to compromise on your grades, then you can seek Assignment Help Canada from professionals. These experts will help you with your assignments, so that you can focus on developing your skills.
2. Gain hands-on experience:
After developing core skills, gain hands-on experience in social media marketing by doing internships. Once you have completed your internships, pursue entry-level roles in SMM. During this period, it would be better not to make money your priority; instead, gaining experience must be your top priority. In addition to this, you can take certificates from online websites to enhance your CV.
3. Build your portfolio:
Finally, build our portfolio and add all the projects you have completed so far. You can also offer free services to local shop owners to create a compelling and satisfactory portfolio. Once your portfolio is built, you can enter senior-level positions. Besides that, you can also work as a freelancer and serve foreign clients. This will help you enhance your earning potential.
In a nutshell!
All in all, social media marketing has become one of the most pursued careers over the past few years. This is due to the increased use of social media by both businesses and customers. However, utilising social media platforms for marketing can be a bit hard; therefore, it is vital to use effective social media marketing strategies. These strategies include:
- Identifying your audience
- Setting SMART goals
- Choosing the right social media platform
- Creating a content cluster
- Measuring the results
In addition to this, to start your career as a social media marketer, you need to learn essential SMM skills through online or offline courses. Moreover, gain practical experience through an internship. Then start your career as an entry-level social media marketer. Once you have gained sufficient experience, build your portfolio and finally, start working as a freelancer to target international clients.
This brings us to the end of our blog!
We hope that this blog will help you get an overview of social media marketing, its benefits and challenges, its strategies, how it is different from traditional marketing, and how you can kick-start your career as a social media marketer. Best of luck with your social media marketing journey!